MoneySavingExpert warning as thousands may be owed cash | Personal Finance | Finance
Martin Lewis’ MoneySavingExpert (MSE) has issued a warning as thousands may be owed cash.
The money experts have shared that around 55,000 state pensions were found to be underpaid.
A whopping £650million could be owed to widows and widowers in the wake of a fresh wave of state pension errors.
The MSE said women have historically been underpaid state pensions, and one such instance of this affects women who are widowed.
The experts added that their late spouses would’ve either reached the pension age or died before April 6 2016.
So far two major historic underpayments have been uncovered and an expert warned it is the “tip of the iceberg”.
Since 2021, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has been trying to correct previous state pension errors relating to several groups of people.
Alarm was raised by Sir Steve Webb, former pensions minister and current partner at LCP (Lane Clark and Peacock), over new potential errors in the State Pension system.
Mr Webbs claimed to have been contacted by four separate people who had not been awarded any inherited state pension when they retired.
“There seems to be a particular problem for people who are widows or widowers when they claim their State Pension. In some cases DWP seems to have failed to automatically add any inherited State Pension they were due from a late partner. These cases may well be the tip of an iceberg.”
Sir Steve added: “The Department needs to launch an urgent investigation into the scale of this problem.”
Recognising the complexities of matters related to inheritance of State Pension, LCP has devised an online tool to help people check their eligibility with greater ease.
This proactive step comes after the success of another online calculator provided by LCP that helped married women probe for any State Pension shortfalls, which remarkably saw over a million site visits.
Just a few days ago, Mr Lewis urged pensioners to check on a benefit that 1.1 million people could be missing out on.
Over a million people across the UK are still missing out on a little-known benefit known as Attendance Allowance worth between £3,778 a year and £7,956 a year.
Mr Lewis said the handout is non-means tested, so potentially open to anyone regardless of income.
