Pension Centre

Afternoon all,

I know that all claims, correspondence, etc now go via the mail handling facility in Wolverhampton but can anyone confirm the date this started to happen?

Prior to this, claims were dealt with at various Pension Centres, the locality of which often bore no geographical proximity to the area of the claimant. Is there any way of trying to find out which office would have dealt with a claim originally?

I have an appeal that is going back several years so am trying to ascertain which office would have dealt with the original claim. The Pension Service aren’t keen on giving me this information so wonder if any of you good rightsnet folk could help?

John

http://docs.dwp.gov.uk/dwp-postal-addresses.pdf

That suggests August 2013 but I must admit I thought it was later than this - November

Thank you, that’s really helpful and will certain help my arguments.

Do you know if there is any way to find out which office would have dealt with a claim for Pension Credit that was submitted prior to this date? I’ve done a quick trawl on t’internet and haven’t managed to come up with any answers.

The Pension Service are arguing that the client hasn’t had any letters about Pension Credit from the Belfast Pension Centre because PC claims from people living in England have never been processed in Belfast. They may be right but I’m not convinced, am sure I’ve seem something in the dim and distant past where some claims for people living in England were dealt with at the Belfast Pension Centre.

It used to be that you could put the claimants postcode in and it would give you the address of the actual pension centre but that facility doesn’t exist anymore, it now just gives you the mail handling address in Wolverhampton

John

Isn’t it in the appeal papers?

Believe it or not, it isn’t - they haven’t included copies of the actual correspondence, what they had done is they have quoted the text but not included the office address that the correspondence was sent from.

I’m using the fact that they seem selective with the information they’ve provided as part of my arguments but I wanted to try and work out which Pension Centre actually sent the correspondence so I can include that as well.

Your client could stick in a subject access request (possibly sent to each pension centre that you suspect was involved??), which may turn up some further detail:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dwp-request-for-personal-information

We have partner status with DWP. I have a notification from our national partnership team Emailed on 10.12.13 advising us that all PC claims must now go to Wolverhampton mail service centre.

From recall I seem to think a lot of documents sent in to support claims to PC - like bank statements went to Belfast for scanning etc and return. This would be like an admin centre rather than a processing centre.
But I have a very vague recall that when centres were experiencing backlogs, blocks of work were sent to other centres and that could wel be the case with your client.

Pension Centres were set up all over the country some intended to be only temp to allow for the initial take up of PC. Others then merged. But I would have thought the records were all kept online.

I have some useful contacts with Pension Service and will see what I can find about the various centres over the years.

Thank you all for your input, it’s been really helpful.

Provided more information (including your comments) to support the appeal. Two days later received a reply from HMCTS saying the DWP revised the decision to a more favourable decision so the appeal has lapsed. Following day, received a letter from DWP reinstating benefit for the whole period in question and saying they own my client £3200.

Good result! Thanks again for your help

John