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It’s worse than this, much worse

Callers trying to beat the deadline for topping up their pensions are being ignored and cut off

Savers are struggling to plug gaps in their national insurance record to boost their state pension because government telephone lines keep cutting out.

We haven’t even been able to get a response (to a registered letter) asking for aid in tracking down a lost NI number. Despite the promise being a response in 10 days.

That’s before we even get to the point that the pension should have been in payment for 18 months – and isn’t – nor that we’d like to top it up.

Government is actually denying that there is even an NI number associated with the birth certificate, passport and drivers licence.

Fortunately we’re in a position where we can just shrug and accept that government has stolen the money. But the cunts are going to have to fight damn hard to get any more out of us.

6 thoughts on “It’s worse than this, much worse”

  1. Tim, if you have ever been an employee, your former employer should have made annual returns to both HMRC and DWP showing your NI number, so it should be findable from those returns which are kept to make sure that the employers hasn’t just pocketed the tax deducted from your wages. A couple of decades ago I got a pension forecast which alleged I hadn’t paid some NI contributions and when I complained my ex-employers complained and found one year’s returns had been filed in a cavern in Wales without the data being entered onto the DWP computer (so all the employees had been maltreated the same but I was the only one approaching pension age who expected a full pension), and all our records were then corrected, so it’s worth checking.

  2. This has been happening to my sister for months ! She wrote to them in the end and all the twats said was “Call us to arrange a payment.”

    Luckily I foresaw this and got my pension sorted before the chaos at DWP became really bad.

  3. Someone I know is having a similar problem, and the DWP said they’re currently struggling to meet their target of replying to correspondence within 10 weeks.

    The reason, naturally, is Covid.

  4. Same position. I’ve been trying to get a payment reference code to top up about six weeks’ payments to get a whole extra year from a short while back, but have had no response since November! I’m trying to give the government money, and they are too incompetent to let me.

    I’ll just have to accept losing 1/30th of my pension. Cnuts!

  5. @ jgh
    Write a letter to them copied to your MP (or vice versa). I have been assured that they (and almost all civil servants) have standing orders to respond to complaints from MPs

  6. I meant to say that I wanted to reclaim some pension contributions from when I lived in Germany.
    I said to the DWP guy ” Can I do this now, seeing as I’m arranging with the Revenue to pay extra NI?”
    “No wait until about 6 months before you officially retire. We can’t process them early and the Germans won’t let us either.”

    So I have to keep my payslips for another X years in a cupboard. Either the mice will have eaten them or the German and UK states will have gone bankrupt. I might be able to show them on Antiques Roadshow

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