The Department for Work and Pensions said it has corrected state pension underpayments amounting to £209.3m between 11 January 2021 and 31 October 2022, out of an estimated £1.46bn of underpayments.

 

The checking process identified 31,817 underpayments for this period. The DWP previously estimated that it had underpaid 237,000 pensioners more than £1.46bn, with some of the errors dating as far back as 1985. 

 

The DWP has not said when it expects to finish the correction exercise. It was originally due to be completed in a year’s time but the department later estimated it to be delayed until the end of 2024. Even this timeline now seems unlikely given the pace so far. In March this year, after over a year of corrections, the government had paid £94.3m to pensioners, a fraction of the outstanding sum. The new figure means an additional £115m has been paid out since. 

 

A DWP spokesperson said: "We have set up a dedicated team and devoted significant resources towards completing this, with further resources being allocated throughout 2023 to ensure pensioners receive the support to which they’re entitled." 

  

The department expects the speed at which the exercise is progressing to keep increasing – saying that almost 58,000 cases have been reviewed in the last seven months, about 8,300 a month, compared to a total of 54,000 reviews in the first 15 months. 

 

According to the National Audit Office, the DWP will need to look at about 19,000 cases per month to meet its target deadline. The DWP told the Public Audit Office it was confident it could achieve a 400% increase in workload by boosting staff from 500 to 1,500, increasing the speed at which cases were reviewed, and deploying automation tools, which were still under development. 

  

The department was severely criticised by the committee earlier this year, which found the underpayments happened “because of the department’s use of outdated systems and heavily manual processing, coupled with complacency in monitoring errors and a quality assurance framework that is not fit for purpose”. 

 

In addition, the DWP had been insufficiently transparent to parliament and had not given enough information to people who were worried they had been underpaid, according to the committee. 

 

Nine in 10 of those affected are women, many of whom were entitled to a proportion of their husband’s state pension. One of the highest identified underpayments amounted to £128,448. 

 

The errors were discovered and brought to wider attention in 2020 by individual pensioners and LCP partner Sir Steve Webb, who was pensions minister in the department from 2010 to 2015.