Missed Retirement Pension increase

I have a client who it now turns out should have got an increase on her State Pension a few years ago from when she turned 65, from overseas contributions. It is in payment going forward, but it seems we can’t ask for an any time revision of: a) the decision when she turned 65, because no such decision was made, because it was not flagged up; or b) the pension decision made when she was 60, because that gave the correct award at the time. She can’t recall if she noted on the original claim form whether she had spent time overseas, but had no reason not to declare it (the current claim form, at least, specifically asks at Q5). We have an appeal in against their recent decision not to backdate the increase to when she turned 65, which does not seem likely to succeed. So we’re considering a maladministration complaint. Questions, for the appeal and/or complaint:

1. What should have been the procedure? If at 60 client confirmed she had previoulsy spent time overseas, should the pensions service have automatically applied an increase when she reached 65, or would she have been put under an obligation to remember to ask them for it 5 years later?

2. On being asked for a copy of the original claim form, the DWP say that under the DPA it would have been destroyed 14 months after it was no longer needed. Their recent submission in the appeals bundle states that all the claim papers “will now be destroyed”, and goes on to quote R(IS)11/92. (I assume this means “will by now have been destroyed”, rather than “are about to be destroyed” ... ). When are papers supporting a claim “no longer needed”? Is there likely to be mileage in trying to establish exactly when or why they were destroyed?

This is not an analysis of the procedure or regulations but asuggestion of how you might approach it.

What has caused the PS to start paying the additional pension from now on?
If they knew all the time, then if you cannot get backdate or revision due to time limits then you have a good cause to claim an ex-gratia payment.

If on the other hand, the PS did not know about the overseas element, they were hardly at fault and you are stuck with standard revision / appeal restrictioons.

So I would start by asking them for full reasons of why the pension payment has been changed (and particularly, why now)

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately, the error only came to light when the client queried with UK pensions whether they could help her with a query on her overseas benefit.

It seems to us that an appeal or revision is not going to work, as they have apparently made each decision “correctly” - unless we can show that they did not follow some procedure on the original claim, and we can complain about that.