Thirty-Third Report - Underpayments of the State Pension

The response references clear, ambitious targets and a regulatory environment that stimulates competition and investment in the market. It provides information about gigabit coverage and full fibre networks.

The department welcomes the endorsement of action already taken with their proposed recommendation, although rejects the Committee’s conclusion and refers to existing information on Gov.uk.

The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation and has allocated additional resource, both from internal moves, and external recruitment to have over 1400 frontline delivery colleagues working on the exercise and staff who had joined for the exercise on fixed term appointments were made permanent in December 2021.

The Department agrees to provide periodic updates to the Committee and the Parliament on the progress of the State Pension LEAP exercise and the speed of processing the backlog in the new State Pension and has committed to providing a further update at the next fiscal event.

The response outlines milestones for assessing delivery beyond 2025, including market surveys, contract signings, and clarity on premises beyond the programme's scope. It expects to have robust profiles for the period beyond 2025 by Summer 2023.

Greensill Capital marketed its salary advance scheme, Earnd, to NHS trusts from 2019 and charged no fee to employers and employees for using the service. Based on a report by the National Audit Office, the Committee took evidence on Monday 15th November 2021 from the Department of Health and Social Care; Crown Commercial Service; NHS Business Service Authority and NHS Shared Business Services Limited.

The committee took evidence from the Department for Work & Pensions on the issue of underpayments in State Pension based on a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General.

The department has made significant progress to transform customer experiences and replace legacy IT systems through the new Get your State Pension (GySP) service, introduced in 2018. Complex work is now brigaded into specialist areas and revised work instructions have been issued and enhanced checking is undertaken, targeting elements of the new instructions to ensure compliance.

The department has strengthened its assurance methodologies, to ensure that associated sampling is more robust and picks up the widest range of errors possible for correction, using insight to inform organisational learning and continuous improvement plans. It will share its Quality Framework improvements with the Committee.

The Department rejects the Committee's assertion and claims to have been taking action to prevent future errors since Summer 2021 by reviewing its Quality Framework.

The committee concludes that the management information is still lacking in areas such as reporting on State Pension enquiries and complaints and the Department acknowledged that it ‘will not eliminate all official error anywhere across the Department’ despite the exercise it is going through’.

The government states the recommendation is implemented, detailing how it continues to manage demand and allocate additional resources, including recruitment and internal moves, to the LEAP exercise to maintain its delivery and revised completion date.

The committee concludes that the Department redeployed its more experienced caseworkers from its Retirement Services division to the LEAP exercise and backfilled their posts from elsewhere in the Department or through new joiners, which placed additional strain on its normal State Pension operations.

The government states the recommendation is implemented, detailing significant progress in transforming customer experiences and replacing legacy IT systems, enhancing the Customer Account Management system, strengthening quality assurance processes, and implementing IT changes within the LEAP exercise to reduce errors.

The committee concludes the Department has not given people who are worried they have been underpaid enough information to find out what they should do, with the risk that many may still miss out on money they should receive.

The department welcomes the endorsement of action already taken but rejects the Committee’s conclusion and points to information on Gov.uk. It is working to identify those affected and will contact them and is working with registrar's offices to identify next of kin and will provide a more direct route for enquiries about deceased customers by Summer 2022.

The committee concludes the Department prioritizes living pensioners over the deceased, even when their next of kin may be vulnerable, and lacks a plan to trace the next of kin of the deceased.

The Department began exploring the potential for underpayments from April 2020, following a number of complaints by individual pensioners and a campaign by the former pensions minister Sir Steve Webb and Tanya Jefferies of Thisismoney.co.uk from January 2020, who provided the Department with example cases of underpayment.

The government disagrees with the Committee’s recommendation and does not intend to change the current legislative position, asserting it is a long-standing principle of personal responsibility for social care in England.

The government disagrees with the recommendation to establish the full extent of the impact on pensioners of receiving a lump sum of arrears of benefit, particularly for larger sums of arrears, and to seek assurance from local authorities that people are not treated prejudicially compared to how they would have been treated had they received the money over their proper period of entitlement, citing existing regulations and the principle of personal responsibility for social care.

The committee concludes a potential systemic error affecting divorced pensioners. The Department did not find any significant evidence that it had failed to properly process cases where a pensioner had notified it of their divorce.