The whole of gov.uk is appalling. Oversimplified guff regardless of the topic.
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The recommendation is to call Dwp Pensions people 0800 731 0175 first to get some advice on this (although some have said here its useless), then finally you call the NI people on 0300 200 3500 who will give you a sort code, account number and 18 digit reference number that you transfer money to.
In my case, and I am 1.5 years short, but still in my 50ās. The gamble for me means I just need to live to 69 to make it worth while - Iām happy with that (unless the rules change by then)
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Yes, go see a welfare rights adviser. The only people actually capable of working through entitlements and advising on options. The sheer number of people on here who believe that the best people to advise on a government benefit are outsourced web sites and outsourced call centres is depressing.
I can only recount my own experience of the DWP helpline - the person I spoke to was absolutely clear about which additional years would impact my State Pension and those where there was no point and also on the costs/benefits of each year purchased. Like others here, I had to call the Revenue to get my payments credited to my record. Having done so, the person I spoke to then rang me back to explain that only 4 years would show on my account and the final one wouldnāt appear until the new tax year started. She didnāt want me to worry it had gone missing. No complaints from me, maybe I was just lucky.
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Mike, if you donāt mind me asking, is there a centralised āFind a WRAā¦ā type site I can point people to?
Iāve suggested the āadvicelocalā page before now but not sure if thatās the most useful.
Inevitably some people get accurate advice. The plural of anecdote is not evidence though and a quick online search of the general experience will reinforce that to what most would see as a staggering extent.
It is.
However if you have accrued an amount of additional state pension above a figure Iāve forgotten, you will get a higher amount than the ānormā.
Whoa, thatās come across a little unnecessarily aggressive. My experience is as valid as anyone elseās.
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No offence intended. Your experience is your experience. The evidence that it represents nothing like the general experience though is overwhelming.
Good question. There are several options. None of them are perfect as services tend to respect geographical boundaries which arenāt immediately apparent unless you look at the web site of a service. Advicelocal is as good as any but comes with that caveat. It will often throw up services which are in your area but donāt really offer the level of specialist advice needed for stuff like pensions and benefits. Somebody somewhere will have written that they ādo welfare rightsā because they have one staff member willing to do form filling, which is not quite the same thing.
Advice finder offers a similar service and I recall that the law centres network offer similar for themselves. I canāt remember the rules about posting links so Iāve erred on the safe side and not done so but both should be easy enough to find.
That said, whilst many local authorities no longer have in-house welfare rights teams, they usually fund the advice in their area and so their web sites should be able to direct you to an extent. Itās often not transparent though. Some areas have what we call second tier LA services where there is no obvious front door/way in and thatās because you need to present at a first tier service initially, such as CitA, who will then refer on where specialist advice is needed.
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Ah, a suggestion for the box thenā¦
Soā¦ you made a Payment - and it did not get credited - unitil you called National Insuranceā¦?
Yup, if you donāt want to wait, you can jump the queue if you ring up. Shocking. Iām ashamed of myself.
Hi @Bozz88
Iām sure some here have had negative experiences contacting the pension service and subsequently HMRC to purchase voluntary contributions and or seek clarification on what they need to do in order to maximise their state pension.
However like you my experience every year for the last 6 years has been positive. I have had no issues calling pension people, or subsequently HMRC to make payments . Perhaps we and some others here have been incredibly lucky as certainly some here are constantly saying donāt bother with the official channels. Frankly you have to in order to buy additional years.
To some our experience is purely anecdotal of course therefore not true or realā¦ā¦
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So what youāre saying is peopleās negative experiences are numerous on a web search, so outweighing peopleās positive experiences posted on this thread. Whilst the numbers may be large one has of course to remember people are far more likely to post about a negative experience than a positive one on such matters. Anecdotal evidence has its place and in context can be seen as valid.
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Just to add to the anecdotal evidence. I contacted Newcastle re pensions via the gov web site. They gave me good information. I then called and they confirmed and talked me through options and answered my questions in a very helpful manner. I asked for written confirmation of what was said including the figures. They sent it. I then followed the advice to contact the relevant tax office HMRC sent me the details of how to pay. I paid. I then followed up at the end of the advised waiting time with Newcastle to check receipt and progress of payments. All very helpful and smooth aside from the delay of pension payments generally due to Covid staff shortages and non working ( at the Covid outset).
Second case is my younger wife who at the end of last year wanted to prepare for her future retirement and get additional payments sorted. Same process except Mrs Bruss likes to confirm everything multiple times. Many more very helpful phone calls, great patience and explanations from the pension service and Mrs Bruss is now sorted. No complaints about the people. I think it is a little like the nhs. The service is being held together by the people on the front line, despite the best efforts of govt to make it unworkable.
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Yes I am absolutely saying that.
Itās a field Iāve worked in for 37 years. Yes of course people only tend to post negative experiences online but in relation to DWP and HMRC those negative experiences amount to not being able to get that to which you are entitled. They really matter.
For some itās an argument about a few quid extra on their pension but increasingly for many itās a matter of life or death. Whilst I may have referred to posts on web sites because thatās what weāre engaged in here my experience covers thousands of cases over that time; the thousands of cases my colleagues in Greater Manchester have dealt with in that time and the thousands of cases my colleagues all over the UK have dealt with in that time. The pattern is clear and good luck finding any colleague in the field offering a different perspective.
During that period there have been many reports commissioned by government; independent of government and by the many iterations of the DWP itself. The outcomes have been broadly the same over the decades. Calls take too long to answer. The answers given are wrong and incomplete way more than they are right.
The government solutions to a decades old issue are entirely predictable and all have failed. They donāt even pretend to address them any more.
Historically they used to produce annual data on both the quality of telephony and the quality of decision making. When the latter couldnāt be gotten above 67% accuracy after decades of work their solution was simply to cease to publish the data and rely instead on sample customer data e.g. ā93% of our customers say they are very satisfiedā. Not quite the same as 97% were given accurate information.
Accuracy of telephony was assessed by taking a sample of the many recordings available; mystery shopper exercises and so on. When it became apparent they couldnāt get accuracy and completeness above 20% the solution was once again to cease to publish.
In order to get forecasts one has to engage with these organisations to some degree. Generally speaking an articulate middle aged bloke will have a much more positive experience than the rest of the population but that doesnāt mean that what youāre being told is accurate.
Worth adding that Newcastle are one of the few centres with a phone line where you may get to talk to someone in-house with technical expertise rather that outsourced and working to a script. However, just to counter the āā¦ they were great with me so therefore they must be greatā idea, my own service has seen a clear uptick in the past year of calls to Newcastle going unanswered; letters going unanswered and people being directed to other arms of DWP etc. via incorrect out of use numbers and so on. There have been promises of call backs which never materialised and we have examples of NI records being backwards i.e. showing a person unemployed when they were not etc. Sharing this with colleagues nationally confirmed once again that there is a pattern to these things.
Also worth noting that many of the recent scandals around pensions with people being underpaid for years were in consequence of incorrect interpretations by those self same technical experts. Ā£200 million in underpayments with a report just this week that a further 300,000 people have been identified as likely to have been underpaid.
Go forward with confidence.
Thanks again Mike, though I did read your other posts saying essentially the same things. I get it, I really do, honestly ! You donāt rate HMRC or DWP and have a job advising people of that fact and how to navigate the welfare system.
However the thread is about making addiction contributions to gain a better state pension, (not the HMRC or DWP on issues such as welfare benefits or complex individual tax matters). Like others here I have had no issues in doing exactly that and would encourage all to check with the pension service to clarify the position of their state pension contributions, and if needed or wanted make any additional NI payments they wish.
Anecdotally it seems a majority of those who have posted their experiences of making payments for additional NI pension qualifying years on this thread have been positive.
A good thing!
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Pension Service will make national headlines soon. A scandal brewing. Facing multiple potential judicial reviews based on inexplicable delays on the most straightforward of matters and good old incorrect advice. The PS was once the gold standard DWP agency. Anything but now. The idea of having to JR to get this sort of stuff sorted is embarrassing. The sort of thing governments seize upon to claim lefty lawyers are bringing the world to its knees rather than the decimation of important services. 98.7% of respondents in a recent national survey had come across claims taking more than 6 months to process.
Weāre increasingly seeing people whose state pensions have not been processed in a timely manner (often starting many months after they ought) and whose amounts make no sense to them or us and often directly contradict written comms. from the PS. Prior to the past few years such cases would be exceptional. They are now coming in monthly if not more often.
Some confusion here about what the welfare system is @ChifChaf. State pensions are administered by the PS who are a satellite agency of DWP (the P in DWP funnily enough :)) This thread is very much about the welfare system. Always worth remembering that the next time some muppet bangs on about the cost of the welfare system. The inference is that itās those feckless benefit claimants. The overwhelming majority is your state pension.
The same issues impacting claimants of other benefits (and SRP is a state benefit) are now impacting across everything. Itās great if people here have sought advice and then had an outcome which matches that advice but itās really important to understand that no matter how many anecdotes appear here you really are in the barely 2% to whom that applies.
Well, weāll see what happens in six weeks timeā¦.as my wife starts to collect her state pension. So far, all the bumf received from the PS is in line with expectations.