A state pensioner is £3,000 worse off a year after the Department for Work and Pensions ( DWP ) failed to tell him about huge change to his state pension for eight years. The DWP failed to tell Adrian Furnival, 82, about a change to his pension that would leave him significantly worse off in retirement.
Adrian, who moved to Brittany with his wife Sheila, 67, in 1994, should have been notified that he was set to no longer receive Adult Dependent Increase payments (ADI) from 2020, leaving him £250 worse off a month.
ADI payments were extra cash worth up to £70 a week that an individual on State Pension could claim if their spouse or partner had no or a very low income of their own. Adrian should have been told about the change in 2010 when other people living in the UK had been.
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But it wasn’t until eight years later in 2018 via an annual statement from the DWP that he was informed. Adrian said: “It came as a shock to me. They sent the leaflet to us every year, so they could have told us at any point from 2010 onwards.
“The key issue for me is why I wasn’t told that my income would be going down by approximately £70 a week sooner. We only have our pensions as income, so we were worried about what we were going to do to make ends meet.”
The 82-year-old added: “That would have given us enough time to do something, my wife or I could have tried to get a job. By 2018 we had no way of replacing that income. This could have been handled much better, and I knew that it could well affect other people in the same situation.
“When I first queried it with DWP, they took nine months to reply and it felt like we just went round and round. Which is why I then raised it with my MP and brought my complaint to the Ombudsman.” Rebecca Hilsenrath, Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, said: “Poor communication from Government departments damages trust in public services.
“DWP has a history of failing to communicate pension policy changes clearly and failing to learn from its mistakes. In Adrian’s case, this meant that, without the right information, he lost the opportunity to prepare for his retirement.
“It also caused him unnecessary financial worry. Anyone who believes they have had a similar experience to Adrian should contact DWP. DWP has complied with our recommendations and will provide a comparable remedy to anyone who approaches them with a similar situation.”