My wife has lost out on £20k of pension money
Angry husband hits out at‘grossly unfair’treatment by DWP
An 80-year-old Rutherglen grandfather, who estimates his wife has lost out on around £20,000 of unpaid state pension over 15 years, says it’s “grossly unfair” that she and thousands like her have been seriously short changed by the DWP.
It was only after reading a newspaper article by pensions commentator, Sir Steve Webb – a former Minister of State for Pensions – that he realised that his wife was among the thousands of married women born before April 6, 1953 who are entitled to have their state pension topped up by up to 60 per cent of their husband’s state pension on retiral.
Like many women at that time, his wife – who worked in the Hoover plant in Cambuslang in the late 1950s – gave up her job to marry and have children.
Leaving her with a significant gap in her National Insurance ( NI) record, she paid “married women’s stamp” – a lower rate of NI based on the assumption that wives were financially dependent on their husbands.
Because the grandfather retired from his job as a welder before March 17, 2008, he was required to actively claim for this enhanced pension, rather than receive it automatically.
The DWP insists it sent letters about the need to ask for this enhancement – but many claim that they didn’t received any such correspondence.
The DWP now says that it is backdating payments for affected women like the retired welder’s 79-year-old wife.
But because he retired in 2005, his wife is getting backdated payments of only one year, because it is treated as a new claim for the enhanced pension.
The disgruntled grandfather-ofthree told the Reformer: “As far as I am concerned, it is grossly unfair what they are doing with my wife.
“My understanding is that even if the woman is deceased her family can claim the money, even after the lady is gone.
“Legally, the DWP might have a leg to stand on, but morally, women like my wife are being screwed out of tens of thousands.
“In this day and age and with various scams involving older people, she is, understandably a bit cautious.
“But if it was down to me, I would go to Rutherglen Cross with a loud speaker and tell everyone about this, as long as I get the message out to a lot of women who will not know a thing about it.”
Rutherglen MP Margaret Ferrier says that the one-year backdated payment doesn’t go far enough to replace lost pension money over several decades, which could be worth tens of thousands of pounds in some cases. ºNow she is fighting the corner of women like her constituent by seeking full compensation for underpaid state pension.
Ms Ferrier said: “Just like with the WASPI women, the DWP have been caught short-changing women who have contributed so much to our economy and society.
“Yet again, we have a situation where women were not told about major changes that affected their state pension entitlement, only to find later on that they have been chronically undervalued by these changes.
“It is only because of a computer glitch that the scale of underpayment has been uncovered, with many married women not realising that they are due these enhanced pension payments until now.
“There has been a clear failure to communicate with those affected, much like the failure to communicate changes to the state pension age for women born in the 1950s.
“One year’s backdating will not cut it for the many decades of already lost pension payments.
“The DWP must urgently clarify how many women in my constituency are affected and bring forward a plan to fully compensate all the women that have lost thousands over the years in pension payments that are now long overdue.”