For Elizabeth Fletcher from Hemsworth, in West Yorkshire, the state pension is a lifeline.
The 90-year-old is among the one-in-four pensioners who treasure it as their main source of income in retirement.
Crucially Elizabeth’s £201-a-week state pension and pension credit payments also fund the fees for her new care home, which she moved into on January 15.
So when the Government suddenly stopped all payments to Elizabeth just 11 days after she’d settled in on January 26, her new life was thrown into chaos.
Over the following nine weeks, Elizabeth went on to miss out on nearly £2,000-worth of payments.
Lifeline: Elizabeth Fletcher, 90, from Hemsworth, in West Yorkshire (pictured with daughter Wendy) uses her state pension to fund the fees for her care home
And despite her daughter Wendy’s best efforts to find out why her mother no longer received any state pension, she was unable to get any answers from the Department for Work and Pensions.
Without the money, Wendy, 63, who lives nine miles away in Wakefield, says she feared her mother would be evicted from the care home.
Wendy says: ‘It has been incredibly stressful. My mother is not very well and cannot deal with the problem, so I have taken it upon myself. But it seems to be impossible to get through to the DWP for help.
‘I have been tearing my hair out and doing everything I possibly can.’
Wendy says she alerted the pensions department on January 26 to the fact that her mother was moving into a care home.
Until January, Elizabeth received attendance allowance, which helps with extra costs if you have a disability severe enough that you need someone to help look after you in your home. Wendy notified the DWP of her mother’s change in circumstances when she moved into the care home.
She expected her mother’s attendance allowance to stop but was shocked when the state pension and pension credit payments were also immediately halted.
‘I tried to do everything by the book but it has been a nightmare,’ says Wendy.
‘The invoices kept coming through from the care home and I’ve been worried she will be evicted for non-payment.’
Elizabeth, mother of five and grandmother of five, was known as the Shirley Bassey of the North in her youth, when she sang at working men’s clubs.
She worked in various roles throughout her lifetime, including hospital assistant.
Wendy says it became clear Elizabeth needed full-time care when she could no longer remember how to do simple tasks, such as make a cup of tea. Her symptoms present as dementia, Wendy believes.
Wendy, who worked in the police force for more than 40 years, most recently as a police community support officer, has leukemia and has taken early retirement. She says the ordeal has taken a big toll on her own physical and mental health.
The former officer has spent hours making calls to the pensions department, but despite her efforts, no one helped get the payments resumed.
After hour-long waits to speak to an official, Wendy says she was met with ‘rude, unhelpful and inexperienced’ workers who were unable to resolve the issue. On three occasions, the line was dropped mid phonecall.
Mistakes: In 2020, the Government admitted it had made systematic errors in state pension calculations. In total, 237,000 elderly women were affected
She says: ‘They kept putting the phone down. I don’t know whether it’s because it got too complicated for them but the call would just end abruptly.’
Each time the call was terminated, Wendy faced another hour-long wait to speak to another worker. The frustration brought her to tears.
In March, out of desperation as she feared her mother would soon get evicted from the care home, Wendy contacted her local MP Simon Lightwood, who wrote to the DWP.
Nine weeks after the payments were halted, Wendy was relieved to see that £1,809.45 had been deposited into Elizabeth’s account. But she received no letter or phone call to explain.
‘The money just turned up one day. They have not given me any apologies and have not told me why it happened,’ she says.
When approached by Money Mail, the DWP confirmed the payments would resume as normal.
A spokesman says: ‘We have reinstated Mrs Fletcher’s pension payments and issued arrears to cover the suspension period. We are sorry for any inconvenience caused.’
It is understood that the payments were stopped due to an administrative error made by the pensions department.
Money Mail has seen cases in the past where state pension payments have been incorrectly cut or suspended when the recipient reported a change in circumstances.
In one case, a widow’s state pension was cut following the death of her husband, while other suspensions have been down to computer glitches.
In 2020, the Government admitted it had made systematic errors in state pension calculations.
In total, 237,000 elderly women were affected. Estimates suggest they are owed nearly £1.5 billion in underpaid state pension.
Last week, MPs wrote to the DWP raising concerns about yet another group of women who have potentially been underpaid state pensions.
Divorced women who reached state pension age before 2016 may have been shortchanged if they wrongly missed out on top-ups related to their ex-husbands’ contributions.
Sir Steve Webb, a former pensions minister and partner at consultancy LCP who has been at the forefront of highlighting underpayments, says the mistake in Elizabeth’s case was ‘unacceptable but not surprising’.
‘The DWP operates at such scale that the individual can get lost,’ he says.
‘You would imagine this sort of situation happens all the time and it will happen increasingly frequently as more of us live longer and need care, so the DWP should have systems in place to make it seamless.’
- Have you had issues with the state pension? Write to j.beard@dailymail.co.uk
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