Pension Forecast/Home Responsibilities Protection

sagalout1954

Hubby retired recently and just for the sake of it I decided to get a pension forecast for myself (age 55).

Discovered the NI Contributions Office had 'lost' 15 years of my Home Responsibilities Protection. The onus was on me to 'help' them find it, apparently their records are destroyed after 10 years!

Thankfully I was able to give my Child Benefit number even though that stopped for me in 1995, I still had an old letter from the DSS which quoted it.

If any of you stayed home to look after your children from 6 April 1978 might be wise to just get a pension forecast to make sure everything is in order.

adrisco

Roughly same age as you plus same background ie Home Responsibities. I'm going to check immediately. Thanks for the warning.

McKneff

You can only get home responsibilites credit if you were paying full NI stamp before stopping work to have/look after children.

CIS

TBH when I used to work in Pension Forecasting lost HRP records were a very small number of cases which we had to refer to HMRC. In any case where you have a qualifying year of NI then any HRP on that year has no effect anyway as a year of contributions takes precdent over a year of HRP.

sagalout1954

........and when you ARE one of those "small number of lost HRP records" cases, and have NO NI contributions for ANY of your HRP qualifying years because YOU WERE NOT WORKING THEREFORE PAID NO NATIONAL INSURANCE (the Governments point for introducing HRP to give some protection to women {mainly} who left work to raise children), then as I've stated, best to check your records sooner rather than later.

If I followed your advice CIS, under current rules, I wouldn't be getting a full pension if I were of pensionable age right now - because 10 years of HRP were 'lost'. I'm glad I checked, discovered the error and got it sorted long before I need to start drawing my pension.