State pensioners who've lost £300 Winter Fuel Payment handed £12,423

State pensioners who've lost £300 Winter Fuel Payment handed £12,423
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State pensioners who've lost the £300 Winter Fuel Payment could be due an eye-watering £13,000 from the Department for Work and Pensions. The DWP is correcting historic injustices with the state pension, and plenty of women could be owed THOUSANDS.

New evidence indicates more widows and widowers may also have underpayment errors on their State Pension claim. Former pensions minister Sir Steve Webb, who is now a partner at LCP (Lane Clark and Peacock) after a stint as pensions minister with the Conservative Party and Liberal Democrats governments, says the issue relates to inherited state pensions.

Sir Steve said: “Having had to spend years checking hundreds of thousands of historic State Pension calculations for errors, you would hope that DWP would be making sure that new claims are handled correctly. But we have found worrying evidence that this is not the case.

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“There seems to be a particular problem for people who are widows or widowers when they claim their State Pension. In some cases DWP seems to have failed to automatically add any inherited State Pension they were due from a late partner. These cases may well be the tip of an iceberg.”

Sir Steve added: “The Department needs to launch an urgent investigation into the scale of this problem.” Those affected are widows or widowers at the point when they claim their New State Pension and where either the spouse who has died reached pension age before April 6, 2016 or where they died before April 6 2016, Sir Steve said.

Some payouts have hit £12,423, according to reports. A DWP spokesperson said: "We want to ensure pensioners receive all the support to which they are entitled and have a tool to help them understand what state pension they can inherit.

"Delays can occur to a customer's state pension award when not all the information we need is provided. Once we have the necessary documentation, we will then revise the customer's claim as soon as possible."