Women turning 66 wrongly told they were owed ZERO state pension

One retired worker at a pub was denied a pension by the state when she reached 66. She has advised other women not to repeat her mistake.

Estelle Henley is pictured above with Rob. She was shocked when she received no compensation for her April claim.

After the retired pub worker, who lives in Hythe near Southampton, fought the decision by the Department for Work and Pensions it backed down and admitted she was owed around £4,400 a year.

Rob and Estelle Shenley: Rob was shocked that she didn’t receive a pension from the state, but was certain this was wrong. So, Estelle fought against the DWP to get it back.

Women who reached the state pension age after 2016 may have been widowed, divorced or separated and could have missed out on even greater sums.

Steve Webb was an ex-Pensions Minister. He now supports Mrs Henley after having wrongly advised three other women they didn’t have any entitlement to state pensions.

Webb and This is Money previously discovered tens of thousands of elderly women were underpaid £1billion in a scandal affecting those who reached state pension before 2016.

Webb now points out a different error in Webb’s report. It concerns women who are eligible for their pension since 2016.

Those who paid ‘married women’s stamp’ for at least one year during the 35 years before they reached state pension age should receive around £4,400 a year if they are married, or around £7,400 a year if they are divorced or widowed.

There are approximately 10,000 eligible women, though it’s not clear how many of them have been denied. Mrs Henley may have had to do the same if she hadn’t fought for her rightful amount.

The DWP was not available for comment when Money requested it.

Refused a state pension at 66: ‘I knew that something was wrong’

Estelle Henley spent 15 years working full time in her pub before retiring.

And her husband Rob,  72, has kept on working part-time jobs, including as security officer for the cruise ships at Southampton Docks, in order to support them.

She says: ‘I knew that something was wrong when I was told I wasn’t entitled to a pension, but there may be other women who might not realise they have been given the wrong information.

“I encourage anybody who was turned down to receive a pension check that the error wasn’t made.”

Steve Webb is now partner at LCP. This is Money’s columnsist for pensions says that he has no doubt that there are still women who were wrongly informed they had no entitlement.

In response to a Freedom of Information request, he discovered that the Department for Work and Pensions was making errors in these cases.

He explains that DWP confessed to him that it had made errors in the treatment of this particular group of women.

“Yet, I still hear from women who were wrongly informed that they do not have a right to a retirement pension. 

“What worries me the most is how many women have trusted the DWP’s advice and now struggle to make ends meet without their pension.

“DWP should check all records in such cases, and make sure they are correct.

In an open letter to his successor, current Pensions Minister Guy Opperman, Webb says: ‘I remain concerned that even the chastening experience of discovering a £1billion underpayment in state pensions does not seem to have prompted a fundamental change in the Department’s approach to checking state pension awards.’

Webb highlighted the case of Mrs Henley and three other cases to the DWP. Webb described the amount involved as ‘potentially transforming for the women’.

– A divorced woman reached state pension age this year and was wrongly notified that her state pension would be £68.93 instead of £141.85 a week.

She knew from previous correspondence with the DWP about the higher rate for women who had paid the ‘married women’s stamp’, and Webb says that after several letters and eventually his own involvement, the Government accepted its error.

Unconfirmed state pension notification for a married woman aged 66 in the summer of last year

Webb said, “She reached out to the Department. She received a reply saying that she didn’t have any entitlement because she had only nine qualifying years.

‘In the end she got her local MP involved and DWP accepted that she was due a pension of just over £86 per week.’

A second married woman, who was 65 in fall 2020, was told that she did not have any right to state pension.

Webb says: ‘She did battle with the Department over the course of a year, eventually contacting me and threatening to contact her local MP, and DWP eventually accepted she should have been awarded the concessionary rate (now £85 per week) and backdated it for a year.’

Steve Webb (former Pensions Minister) and Guy Opperman (current incumbent), are pictured at the left.

Webb has called on Opperman to reveal how many women were affected and how much was paid out to them in lump sums when similar errors were detected in 2019, and also to review all ‘zero’ and other low state pension awards to check for further mistakes.

He expressed concern that although the state pension had been introduced in 2016, it was not discovered that there were errors for these women until 2019. These errors have continued to be committed even as recent as April 2018.

He was also curious as to why the DWP quality controls on state pension assessment have not detected this. The DWP says this raises wider concerns over whether or not the significant ongoing correction exercise for women’s pensions is ‘purely ahistoric “tidying down” of past errors.

Webb states that systematic errors can still occur if there is not enough improvement in quality control at the Department.

The National Audit Office released a report in 2012 that was damning about the state pension scandal. It stated that DWP employees made errors and managers didn’t take advantage of the opportunities.

The DWP claimed at the time it had implemented new quality control procedures and better training to ensure that historical errors don’t happen again.

This is Money continues to cover many readers who are struggling or forced to live in hardship since Last Autumn. The DWP has promised that they will address the problem by November.

These were originally for people who had reached 66. However, readers are complaining about errors in top-up payments and deferred claims by people from overseas.