Fight goes on for women's pension rights

By Steve Webb MP - 18/06/2008

Mature Times readers have been supporting my campaign on a range of women’s pensions issues; and whilst some of the battles continue, it is good to able to report some victories – at least in part!

The first issue, is that of “Home Responsibilities Protection” (HRP). This is the scheme that applied from 1978/79 onwards and gave a measure of pension protection to women who were not on the married woman’s stamp and who had spent a full year at home with a child under 16.  

In theory, HRP should have been awarded automatically and there was no need to claim.  However, a great many women reading these pages wrote to me saying they didn’t get the HRP they should have – presumably because their record on the old Child Benefit computer couldn’t be matched to their record on the National Insurance computer.

We raised this with DWP a year ago and they have looked at a series of case studies which we brought to their attention.   They have now accepted that there is a problem and will spend the next year trawling through the National Insurance computer to identify women who are not getting HRP but who should have done.   They won’t find everyone who is missing out, but it is a welcome step forward and I applaud them for it.  

If you think you should get HRP and are not getting it, you don’t have to wait for the DWP – you can fill in a Form CF411 and apply for it, though they are taking about three months to process applications.

A second partial success has come over the issue of filling gaps in your NI record.   Between 1996-97 and 2001-02 the Government failed to send people reminders if they had missed years of NI contributions.   To make up for this, a special scheme was set up to enable people to buy back those missing years on exceptionally favourable terms.  

The scheme is especially generous if you are a woman born between April 1938 and October 1944. In brief, such women can buy back missing years at the Class 3 rate that applied at the time, can have any boost to their pension backdated to when they first claimed their pension and can offset the cost of buying back the missing years against any lump sum back pension. In some cases, women can simply get a cheque for the difference!

The problem is that many women have either never been alerted to this scheme or had a letter years ago on which they took no action.   I have pressed the DWP to contact entitled women, who have agreed to manually assess a further 73,000 women’s records to see if they might be entitled under the scheme.   They have also produced a factsheet about the scheme which may be of interest.

My final ongoing campaign is on the “married woman’s stamp”, and in particular for women who paid the MWS right up to pension age and now get no basic state pension at all.   Many of these woman paid up to nine years of full rate contributions earlier in their working life for which they get no pension at all.  

If they had revoked their MWS shortly before retirement they could at least have got some pension.   I have now taken two cases to the Parliamentary Ombudsman who is currently considering whether to investigate.  

 

The fight goes on!

 

For more information, download the document below.

Attachment	Size
Voluntary conts - receiving State Pension V6.pdf	718.16 KB