Government urged to intervene in divorced women's underpaid state pensions

A bill calling on the government to include divorced women in its efforts to repay thousands of individuals who have been underpaid the state pension has been introduced in Parliament.

The State Pension Underpayments (Divorced Women) bill had its first reading in the House of Commons on March 8th.

The bill, which was brought by Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Green, is looking to “expand the scope of the legal entitlements and administrative practice exercise to correct state pension underpayments to include underpayments to divorced women”.

The Department for Work and Pensions has previously estimated it has underpaid 134,000 pensioners, mostly women, more than £1bn of their state pension entitlements, with some of the errors dating as far back as 1985.

Pensioners affected are those who first claimed the state pension before April 2016 and who do not have a full National Insurance record, or who should have inherited additional entitlement from their deceased partner.

However, divorced women have not been included in the DWP’s correction exercise.

Some believe there could be further errors detected in relation to these women.

They include two groups:

• Women who were divorced at point of retirement and where their pension failed to take account of the contributions of their ex-husband;

• Women who divorced post retirement and notified DWP but whose pension was never reassessed.

The DWP state pension correction exercise currently covers checking for errors for three groups:

• Widows whose state pension was never reassessed when their husband died;

• Married women whose husband turned 65 after March 17, 2008, and who never got an automatic uplift to the 60 per cent ‘married woman’s rate’;

• Over-80s who never got an automatic uplift to the 60 per cent ‘over-80s’ rate.