Future Pension Centre phone statistics

eskbanker

Not sure if this has been posted elsewhere already, but a written Parliamentary question was answered (unlike most phone calls....) in late May, outlining the number of calls made to FPC by 4 week period and what happened to them.

It's clear that they weren't prepared for the massive increase in call volumes around the (initial) NI top-up deadline, in that the prevailing average was in about 40-50,000 territory but peaked at over a million in March, of which 93.5% were blocked, compared with the grand total of 2 calls being unanswered in September/October 2022!

https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2023-05-18/185825

jem16

So the huge increase to 1m calls followed Martin Lewis’ pension special in February 2023. Many calling probably didn’t need to call. 

Silvertabby

jem16 said:

So the huge increase to 1m calls followed Martin Lewis’ pension special in February 2023. Many calling probably didn’t need to call. 

Exactly.  He encouraged everyone to check, just in case they could benefit.

I've always suspected that the majority of phone calls clogging up the system were from those who wouldn't/couldn't benefit, but who rang out of FOMO.

squirrelpie

I have no dog in the fight but ...

isn't it also the case that if their web site had been well-designed and presented what people wanted to know in a clear, easy to understand and unambiguous way, they wouldn't have thought they needed to call to clarify their situation?

p00hsticks

squirrelpie said:

I have no dog in the fight but ...

isn't it also the case that if their web site had been well-designed and presented what people wanted to know in a clear, easy to understand and unambiguous way, they wouldn't have thought they needed to call to clarify their situation?

To develop such a website would, I think be a pretty major piece of work if it were to cover all the possible scenarios and capture all the information required to give people what they want to know.

For example, it's (relatively) easy to extrapolate from someone's forecast to say that buying this back year will increase your current state pension forecast (or that buying that year won;t) but if the person is still a few years off state pension age then without knowing what their intentions are going forward in terms of employment, moving abroad, potentially claiming benefits etc then they still may be wasting their money by buying it as it won't  actually be needed. 

Silvertabby

squirrelpie said:

I have no dog in the fight but ...

isn't it also the case that if their web site had been well-designed and presented what people wanted to know in a clear, easy to understand and unambiguous way, they wouldn't have thought they needed to call to clarify their situation?

The website makes it absolutely clear that the COPE amount isn't deducted from the State pension.  Yet how many times has that question been asked on these boards alone. 

badmemory

I think the problem is that people read it is taken from the 2016 "start figure" and misunderstand.  Which as a lay person I find quite understandable.  Perhaps the very fact that Martin can crash websites is on its own an indication that they are not doing a stellar job.  Thankfully I got my son to sort his early in Feb before the first hiatus.

p00hsticks

badmemory said:

Perhaps the very fact that Martin can crash websites is on its own an indication that they are not doing a stellar job.  

Personally I think it's at least partly an indication that Martin and other such journalists have not done a particularly good job in making the issue widely known at an early enough stage - after all, the DWP & HMRC infrastructure to deal with these queries has been in place and operating successfully since even before the introduction of the new state pension in 2016.

 Instead they seem to have waited until the deadline was imminent before raising the issue, and then failed to explain the situation with sufficient clarity to prevent those who aren't actually affected from panicking and taking up resources through FOMO.

 The cynical part of me thinks that perhaps they enjoy the drama and perceived importance of being the alleged cause of websites crashing.....but if you can show me that Martin was already drawing peoples attention to this five or six years ago I'll happily take it back.

MSE_Martin

An interesting note above - I saw the report published in private eye last week.  A few points (written at speed) are relevant.

1. First... I am delighted to have played a part in raising awareness of this crucial issues to huge numbers of people - which will massively improve their lives in retirement.  That needed doing. And my job is to do just that.  So overall it's a huge positive.
2. The system creaking to control it, is a problem, and one that needs addressing. Which is why I've met more than one with the pensions department, Treasury and pensions ministers to push for exactly that to happen - ensuring I don't just tell people about it, I try and ensure it runs as well as it can do.
3. The Feb show wasn't my first on this, but it was the biggest with a full prime time pension show (done again in June). I had covered it in many other places.
4. My recipe of what to do was to check on the WEBto find the info - not calling FPC.  I then said, correctly you need to call the FPC if the web showed you were unlikely to get full pension and had shrotfalls.  When I later was told part of the issue was people were just calling FPC straight away, I put info out to try and reenforce the message not to. Yet sometimes human nature is people just call even when you've said web is the way
5. In terms of 'not making it known at a early enough stage' - well we published, from memory, a year-ish before the deadline - once we got on top of how important it was, and we pushed ever since. I didn't know about it earlier to talk about it, and was a bit busy on a few other things, like pandemic finances - so other big projects were off the agenda. 
6. We know from our email there is nothing that creates action more than a deadline, people leave it to the last minute even when warned. That's again just human nature
7. As for Poohsticks somewhat cynical note (i'm a cynic too so that's not a dig).

- "perceived importance of being the alleged cause of websites crashing" actually I crash virtually every website i hard-mention when my show is on and yes it does add a little instant frision.  Yet that's just the nature of the fact web isn't built for such traffic peaks and is normally only for an hour or two.  The consistent problem with the phone line is very different, they simply didnt have close to the capacity needed to deal with demand.

We always contact places before a main mention on the show is coming to warn them in advance.  In fact I gave over a month's  notice of my second show on this to the govt so it knew it was coming (which is, reading between the lines, why they did the deadline extension the day before it, when they realised they couldn't cope)
8. Much of the problem is the combination of a) This deadline b) the issues with older women's state pensions that left 100,000s miscalculated which took up govt resource too c) the fact the structure meant you needed to make two calls - one to HMRC just to gain a long code to make a payment (which confused people and they called the wrong place).  The new system being put in place should be much better... I hope.