Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 2
2
The Department’s complacency about the level of underpayments inherent in its approach to administering State...
Conclusion
The Department’s complacency about the level of underpayments inherent in its approach to administering State Pension has led it to fail pensioners. The Department’s highly manual systems and complex State Pension rules has led to calculation errors and the underpayment of thousands of pensioners. The Department, however, argued that low annual error rates on State Pension led it to focus assurance attention elsewhere, despite the detrimental impact on those underpaid. In addition, its quality assurance arrangements were inadequate and missed opportunities to detect, correct or prevent these errors. The Department hopes that, over time, it will become better at identifying small-scale errors that may mask more systemic issues. However, errors continue to be made even when re-assessing pensions awards as part of the correction exercise, leaving thousands of pensioners still not receiving what they are due. And examples such as the absence of regular reporting on State Pension enquiries make us concerned that senior management is not focused on designing a data strategy that detects errors in a more systematic way. 6 Underpayments of the State Pension Recommendation: The Department should start treating underpayments on State Pension as seriously as overpayments and set out to the Committee in its Treasury Minute response to this report what it is going to do both to prevent future errors and to strengthen its detection of systemic issues that lead to errors.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
2025. This should be broken down by how much coverage is being achieved by: • individual commercial suppliers, such as Openreach, Virgin Media O2 and smaller suppliers know as alternative networks or “alt-nets” etc., and the extent to which it is through full fibre technology; and • the gigabit voucher scheme. 2.1 The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Target implementation date: July 2022 2.2 The UK has one of the fastest builds in Europe, becoming a leader in terms of gigabit connectivity by 2025. The department has achieved this by setting clear, ambitious targets to galvanise operators and investors, together with a regulatory environment that stimulates competition and investment in the market. 2.3 There are now over 80 different companies rolling out gigabit broadband. The UK is on track to achieve coverage to 85% of the UK’s 31 million premises by 2025. 2.4 As of March 2022, gigabit capable networks are available to 66% of UK premises, including full fibre networks to 32% of UK premises, according to ThinkBroadband.com, up from just 6% at the beginning of 2019. • Virgin Media O2 has upgraded and extended its network, offering gigabit speeds to over 50% of the UK. Industry sources suggest at least 10% of these are served by full fibre. The company has announced an upgrade path to convert the remainder to full fibre, and is seeking joint venture partners to extend to a further 7 million premises; • Openreach - and KCom in Kingston upon Hull - have built new full fibre networks to 21% of UK premises; and • a further 11% of UK premises are able to receive gigabit services over an alternative network provider’s full fibre networks. 2.5 BDUK delivered gigabit coverage to over 600,000 premises by April 2021. BDUK has pivoted the Superfast programme, which now targets the remaining 3% of UK premises without superfast speeds, to focus on gigabit capable networks. 2.6 BDUK will report further details on the coverage achieved by its different interventions in its performance report in July 2022, and then in the annual report and accounts from 2023. 2.7 The department will address this recommendation in its letter to the Committee.