Thousands are to get back payments up to £11,905 from the Department for Work and Pensions ( DWP ) in a major State Pension boost. The DWP has identified 119,050 pensioners who had been underpaid their state pension due to a fault in the system.
These pensioners received substantial back payments, averaging £11,905 per case. There are three broad categories of State Pension underpayments: cases covered by the State Pension Underpayments (LEAP) exercise, Home Responsibilities Protection (HRP) cases where HRP has not been recorded accurately on National Insurance records and cases where National Insurance credits need to be updated for people who were claiming Universal Credit.
Category BL (Cat BL) is people who are married or in a civil partnership who reached State Pension age before April 6, 2016 and should be entitled to a Category BL uplift based on their partner’s National Insurance contributions. Missed conversions is where people who have been widowed and their State Pension was not increased to include any amounts they are entitled to inherit from their late husband, wife or civil partner.
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And Category D (Cat D) is pople who reach age 80 and who are getting some Basic State Pension but less than the £85.00 (in 2022-23) and may therefore, subject to satisfying the appropriate residency conditions, be entitled to Cat D State Pension of £101.55 a week (2024/25 weekly rate).
The DWP has already completed correction exercises for married women, civil partners, and those over 80 years old. Progress remains on track for widowed cases to be resolved before the new year, according to the DWP’s latest update.
The LEAP exercise, which was launched after the DWP discovered in 2020 that many individuals had not received automatic increases to their State Pension as legally required. It marks the largest correction exercise of its kind.