Recommendation 19

The Department told us that it began exploring the potential for underpayments from April 2020, following a number of complaints by individual pensioners and a campaign by the former pensions minister Sir Steve Webb and Tanya Jefferies of Thisismoney.co.uk from January 2020, who provided the Department with example cases of underpayment.44 The Department then published an estimate of the underpayments in May 2020. The Department said that it did not consider it to be a significant issue until August 2020, when a scan of its IT systems revealed that many more people could have been affected than it thought previously.45 The Department first provided a detailed breakdown of State Pension underpayments to the public and Parliament in its 2020–21 Annual Report and Accounts, published in July 2021.46 This was followed by a progress update in October 2021, published shortly before our evidence session.47 When the Chair of the Work & Pensions Select Committee tabled a parliamentary question on 15 October 2021 concerning the breakdown of men and women in the backlog for new State Pension applications,48 the Department responded that ‘this information is only available at disproportionate cost’ to the Department. During the course of our evidence session the Department clarified that some of the data requested was available at an aggregate level, though had only recently been available.49 Financial justice