State Pension Telephone Claim -  DWP Gatekeeping

Hi All,

A colleague has just been attempting to assist a client with a telephone claim for their state pension and the pension service refused to complete the claim on a conference call. They said it was standard practice and something they never allow but we have not previously encountered this and we do not experience issues with this when attempting to complete other DWP assisted benefit claims except for UC gatekeeping.

Just wondering if anyone else has experienced issues with this or if it is just DWP gatekeeping and the help available varies from adviser to adviser.

Hi Gareth
I helped a client apply for the State Pension via a telephone conference call at the end of November. So no, it is not standard practice and yes, it is gatekeeping to refuse an application.
What possible reason could they have for refusing it? Do they think the adviser is coercing the client from a distance?

Hi Gareth,

I had an extremely poor experience in about October trying to help a client. 10+ phonecalls to State Pension, an array of security being failed (in relation to an old address they were no longer living at), suggestions that I was prompting client and therefore they needed to end the call as well as calls where client couldn’t recall the right info. It’s a client where they don’t have enough years to qualify for State Pension so I needed to claim for both. Due to complete inflexibility of the phones, resulted in a visit being booked where they only claimed for State Pension and didn’t claim for Pension Credit at all. I was deeply unimpressed at the overall experience.