Widows and widowers may be owed thousands by DWP, says former pensions minister

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has updated the public on two major steps as a number of people may be owed large sums of money. They say they have made progress in the State Pension Underpayments Legal Entitlements and Administrative Practice (LEAP) exercise, as well as the Home Responsibilities Protection (HRP) corrections exercise.

It comes after Sir Steve Webb, a former pensions minister and now a partner at LCP (Lane Clark and Peacock), raised concerns about potential new errors in the State Pension system. He suggested that a specific group of individuals might be affected by annual underpayments amounting to roughly £2,000.

Sir Steve, who previously served as a Lib Dem MP, highlighted that widowed individuals already retired when they began claiming the New State Pension could have been short-changed and might be eligible for back payments. Acknowledging the complexity surrounding inherited State Pension issues, LCP has created an online tool to simplify the process for people to verify their entitlements.

This initiative follows the success of another LCP-launched tool designed to assist married women in identifying any underpayments, which has received over one million visits. Commenting on the matter, Sir Steve stated: "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," reports the Daily Record.

"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