National Insurance Credits for Past Years?

irelavv

I've been looking at my Personal Tax Account and found that there are a couple of minor mistakes on it:
For a past year, I have paid slightly less NI according to my P60 when compared to my online account;
For a past year, I haven't automatically received Working Tax Credits since I was on a full-time, low-income job.

My main concern is 4-5 years ago when I was between jobs but didn't have anything steady. I was mostly unemployed but I was actively looking for work. I didn't apply for JSA or any other benefits but if I had and was approved, I would have automatically received Class 1 NICs. However, now I know that my unemployment and non-claiming of benefits was the reason for missing NICs.

On the government website they advise to contact a local Job Centre (specifically for cases like mine), but there is no further info on what evidence I need to provide or how successful claiming National Insurance Credits would be. Has anyone done this before? And have you any idea if claiming said NI after 4-5 years is too long? Thanks

PS: Sorry if posting in wrong section.

p00hsticks

I wasn't aware that you could claim NI credits without actually claiming a benefit - are you sure you've read that right ?

The people over on the benefits board would probably be able to advise further

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/categories/benefits-tax-credits

Have you got a pension forecast ? Before you pursue the avenue of trying to get these potentially missing credits (which I suspect may be a long, laborious and possibly fruitless journey) I suggest you check your forecast, as there's a bit of leeway in the system in terms of being able to miss a few years without it aversely affecting your eventual state pension amount

https://www.gov.uk/check-state-pension

Silvertabby

p00hsticks said:

I wasn't aware that you could claim NI credits without actually claiming a benefit - are you sure you've read that right ?

The people over on the benefits board would probably be able to advise further

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/categories/benefits-tax-credits

Have you got a pension forecast ? Before you pursue the avenue of trying to get these potentially missing credits (which I suspect may be a long, laborious and possibly fruitless journey) I suggest you check your forecast, as there's a bit of leeway in the system in terms of being able to miss a few years without it aversely affecting your eventual state pension amount

https://www.gov.uk/check-state-pension

When Mr S and I retired from the RAF we still needed 44 years (him) and 39 years (me) for full basic State pensions, so the financial advice at the time was to 'sign on' if you had a gap between retiring/starting a new job in order to avoid losing a whole year of NI credits.

There was no such thing as an 'NI only' claim, so we had to go through the faff of applying for JSA.  Even though we wrote on the claim that we were applying for NI credits only, due to our RAF pensions, it still had to rock along on the JSA system.

We eventually received letters saying that ' our applications for JSA had been carefully considered, but had been rejected - because under current Government rules we had too much money to live on'

We did get our NI credits, but only by jumping through the usual hoops of 'signing on' every 2 weeks - when we had to explain ad nauseum that we didn't want just any old job, but were happy to wait for the right jobs to come along.

In hindsight, wish we'd never bothered.