The pleas of a widow convinced that she was being underpaid on her state pension went ignored for eight years as she was let down by a system that has left thousands of women out of pocket.
Mary Cunningham* spent hours on the phone trying to get some answers, all to no avail — until the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) finally admitted that she was right and paid her £23,000.
She is one of 700,000 people, mainly women, who have had their pensions reviewed because of a system error.
The DWP has paid out £571.6 million to almost 100,000 pensioners whose payments should have been boosted, either when they turned 80, or because of their husband’s national insurance contributions.
These figures are expected to rise — and Mary’s story should give hope to those still trying to get what they are owed.
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Living on £400 a month
Mary looked after her husband, Harry, from 2013, when he began showing signs of dementia, until his death in 2016. She was getting less than £400 a month from her state pension and relying on money from Harry’s pension to get by.
After he died, Mary, 71, who lives in Surrey, found it even harder to make ends meet and was having to ask her brothers for financial help. So she contacted the DWP to ask if the payment was right. She was told that she was getting the maximum she was entitled to.
“The stress of losing my husband was made worse by the worry of struggling on a low pension and how I would afford to live and this made my health much worse,” said Mary, who had an operation to remove breast cancer in 2013.
Over the next eight years she called the DWP many times to query her low pension, and was denied help every time. But she was right to keep calling, and here’s why.
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The state pension rules
Entitlement to the state pension is usually based on your national insurance contributions. You need 35 full years of contributions to get the new full state pension of £221.20 a week (£11,502 a year). You need ten qualifying years of contributions to get anything at all, although there is pension credit, a benefit for those on low incomes.
But women born before April 6, 1953 and men born before April 6, 1951 get the old basic state pension, which pays less, but offers the chance to boost the amount you get, based on your spouse’s national insurance record, either after your spouse dies, or reaches state pension age — dependent on how you paid national insurance, and how much you paid.
Harry ran a fruit and vegetable wholesaler in Fulham, west London, for 27 years while Mary stayed at home — she had made some national insurance contributions, but did not have a full record and so was not entitled to a full basic state pension. When Harry died, however, her entitlement should have risen, thanks to his full record of contributions.
To get the payment boosts, married, widowed or divorced women used to have to contact the DWP, but this changed in 2008. From that point on, the extra payments should have been made automatically. Sadly, this has not always happened.
The DWP has been trying to correct systematic state pension underpayments since 2021. It said: Our priority is ensuring pensioners get the dignity and security they deserve in retirement and that state pension underpayment rates remain as low as possible. We have completed the majority of cases as planned and expect to complete by the year end.”
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Countdown to a payout
By January Mary was getting £441 a month state pension and she called the DWP in desperation. “I told them I couldn’t survive on so little and they advised me to apply for pension credit. I sent off all the paperwork in February and must have chased eight or nine times on its progress but was told there was a big backlog,” said Mary.
When she called in May an agent told her that the DWP was waiting for a response to a letter sent to her that month, which she said never arrived. The letter confirmed what Mary had suspected for years — her state pension had been underpaid. The government now owed her £23,000.
The money was paid into her bank account, but the DWP has not paid her any interest to reflect the eight years that she has had to wait. Tean Hatt, an independent financial adviser from Vizion Wealth who helped Mary to challenge her case without charging a fee, said: “If a financial services company owed money to a client they would be required to pay interest on it under the City watchdog’s rules.
*Mary and Harry’s names have been changed to protect their privacy
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How to claim
• Tean Hatt from the financial advice firm Vizion Wealth helped Mary Cunningham to challenge her pension and says that thousands of others have a case. “The DWP’s decision to make the process automated clearly isn’t working and lots of married women are missing out. Anyone who thinks they are being underpaid should not wait for the DWP to tell them.”
• Fill out the form at gov.uk and make a claim. Hatt said: “Once that is submitted the DWP has been pretty good at sorting it out.”
• In the past two years Hatt has helped six women whose state pensions were linked to their husband’s to make claims. The biggest was a backdated payout of just under £80,000 for a 73-year-old woman who had not received any state pension at all.
