A report suggests that millions of UK pensioners could find that their pensions have been underpaid, due to IT failures that have been going on for decades.
Despite reports earlier in the year station that just 134,000 people are affected the BBC is reporting that the figure is actually in the millions, and now, Steve Webb, a former pensions minister is asking the department to ‘come clean’ over the scale of the error.
Many of the errors, thought to relate to the uprating of the Graduated Retirement Benefit (GRB), are thought to have been known about since the 90s. They are said to be extremely small but they have still not been corrected.
GRB is an addition to the basic state pension for those who worked between 1961 and 1975 and was a forerunner of SERPS, the state earnings-related pension scheme.
This latest IT problem comes on top of DWP admitting that it had underpaid over 130,000 people, overwhelmingly women, over a period of decades, with a total amount underpaid in excess of £1bn.
More than 500 civil servants are to be employed to put this error right, and the correction of those errors is expected to take until the end of 2023.
