Pensions department faces 'serious questions' over non-payments

A saga over unpaid state pensions means the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) should face "serious questions" about its work, a leading MP has said.

Thousands of people reaching the state pension age of 66 have applied for their state pension, but have not received any money.

The backlog has been blamed on pandemic workload and staffing issues.

Stephen Timms, who chairs the Work and Pensions select committee, said the issue would be raised with ministers.

"There are clearly serious questions to ask about the way the DWP administers the state pension," he said.

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Over the course of the summer, thousands of people have not received their state pension entitlement despite applying for the money in good time.

Among them was Christine Shawcroft, who turned 66 in the middle of July, and - like many others - had made numerous calls to the DWP, spending at least 45 minutes on hold before getting through.

Christine Shawcroft was waiting for her pension payments to start

She said that she had been losing patience with the department, not least because she had failed to receive an adequate explanation about the missing payments.

They eventually started to be paid weeks late, but a matter of days after be case was featured in BBC coverage about the issue.

Pension problems

The backlog has come when the DWP was already facing a heavy workload and criticism about separate underpayments of the state pension going back decades.

A week ago, the National Audit Office (NAO) said that repeated human errors made for years were to blame for a scandal which led to more than £1bn of state pensions not being paid.

The NAO said 134,000 pensioners, mostly women, were underpaid pensions because outdated computer systems led to mistakes.

Mr Timms said: "Only last week we learned that the department has underpaid pensioners by more than £1 billion, because its systems were not good enough to pick up the mistakes.

"Now pensioners are having to wait weeks for the payments to which they are entitled and on which many of them will be relying. The committee will be raising this with ministers when Parliament returns."

A DWP spokesman said that hundreds of staff had been redeployed. Unpaid pensions should be sorted out automatically, and the system would be back to normal by the end of October.

"We are sorry that some new state pension customers have faced delays receiving payment," he said.

"All those affected have been identified and we have deployed extra resources to process these as a priority. Any claims made today should not be subject to delay."