DWP failings left ex-pat in the dark about £3,000 a year pension cut
Date of article: 15/01/2025
Daily News of: 23/01/2025
Country: 
United Kingdom
Author:
Article language: en
The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) took eight years to inform a British ex-pat about a change to his pension that would leave him £3,000 a year worse off.
The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) is urging Government bodies to make sure their communication with the public is always fair, clear, and consistent.
Adrian Furnival, 82, and his wife Sheila, 67, moved to Brittany in 1994. Adrian found out in 2018 via an annual statement from DWP that from 2020 he would no longer receive Adult Dependency Increase (ADI) payments, a supplement given to households when the main earner reached State Pension age, but their partner had not. This meant he would be over £250 a month worse off.
People who lived in the UK had been told about the change to ADI payments eight years earlier in 2010.
PHSO found that the Department failed to properly communicate the changes to Adrian and that DWP should have told him about the changes in April 2010. The Department also failed to respond to his initial queries and complaints in a timely way.
The Ombudsman recommended that DWP apologise and pay Adrian £675 for the injustice he suffered.
The number of those who were living abroad and entitled to ADI is unknown but in May 2019, a year before ADI ended, DWP told Parliament that 10,817 people were still in receipt of ADI. The Ombudsman recommended that DWP should also provide a comparable remedy to anyone who approaches the Department in a similar situation.
Rebecca Hilsenrath, Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, said:
“Poor communication from Government departments damages trust in public services.
“DWP has a history of failing to communicate pension policy changes clearly and failing to learn from its mistakes. In Adrian’s case, this meant that, without the right information, he lost the opportunity to prepare for his retirement. It also caused him unnecessary financial worry.
“Anyone who believes they have had a similar experience to Adrian should contact DWP. DWP has complied with our recommendations and will provide a comparable remedy to anyone who approaches them with a similar situation.”
Adrian, who was born in Bedford and served in the Army, said:
“It came as a shock to me. They sent the leaflet to us every year, so they could have told us at any point from 2010 onwards.
“The key issue for me is why I wasn’t told that my income would be going down by approximately £70 a week sooner. We only have our pensions as income, so we were worried about what we were going to do to make ends meet.
“If they had told us at the same time as everyone else, we could have had eight more years to plan for the shortfall. That would have given us enough time to do something, my wife or I could have tried to get a job. By 2018 we had no way of replacing that income.
“This could have been handled much better and I knew that it could well effect other people in the same situation. When I first queried it with DWP, they took nine months to reply and it felt like we just went round and round. Which is why I then raised it with my MP and brought my complaint to the Ombudsman.”
In December, DWP accepted PHSO’s finding of maladministration in how it communicated changes to the State Pension age to women born in the 1950s and apologised. The Department said it will learn lessons and work with the Ombudsman to create an action plan to make sure future changes are communicated well. The Department did not accept our recommendations in full and will not create a compensation scheme for women affected.
