WE’RE PAYING FOR SOMEONE ELSE’S ERROR

RETIRED medical secretary Kathleen Burns was hit with a demand for £2,600 after the NHS made a mistake with her pension. She thought nothing of it when her final pension was valued at around £30 a month more than previous forecasts, but says she was made to feel like a criminal when the NHS Business Services Authority demanded she pay it back.

Kathleen, 59, who lives near Wigton in Cumbria, worked at Cumberland Infirmary for 13 years. She decided to take early retirement at 57 in October 2017 and was told her pension would pay £3,377 a year after she took a £22,516 lump sum.

This was slightly more than the £3,003 annual income and £20,020 lump sum a recent pension forecast had estimated.

Kathleen, who lives on a farm with her partner of 20 years, Bill Lightfoot, says: ‘When a body of people are paid to work out your pension you think they are going to get it right. I didn’t question it because they had done the figures. And it was not over the top.’

But the NHS wrote to her five months into retirement, to say an error had been made and she had been receiving a pension as if she had retired at 60 not 57, and had contributed more to the scheme. The NHS asked for £2,600 back.

This included £2,450 of her lump sum and around £ 150 for extra monthly payments. Her pension income was also slashed by around £30 a month before she could respond.

Kathleen says: ‘I am not experienced in pensions. It was an innocent mistake. But it is like I have committed a crime and it is me that made the error. There was an insinuation that I should have known something was wrong. It was questioning my integrity, and I am an honest person.’

Kathleen, who won’t get her state pension until she is 66, complained to the Pensions Ombudsman. It ruled in her favour and ordered the NHS Business Services Authority to pay her £500 for the ‘significant distress and inconvenience’ she suffered due to the error.

But the ombudsman said she should pay back the money she was overpaid. Kathleen has now agreed to pay back £25 a month.

Chris Dawson, head of service for NHS Pensions, says Kathleen’s employer had submitted a pension claim for those reaching retirement age.

He says the NHS Pension Scheme queried this with the employer, but the application was processed in error and the pension paid.

He says: ‘As the application was processed as an age retirement an immediate overpayment occurred, which amounted to £2,604.69. NHS Pensions sought recovery for this amount.’