State Pension

adminannie

Hi As I didnt work my full years to get a full pension I am on a reduced pension which I started to collect last Sept when I was 60yrs old.

I get a total of £51.49. My mum who has never worked got the full pension.
it was first a widows pension and then a state pension.

This doesnt seem right to me, I have paid full pension for at least 20 yrs and get £51 and my mum who has never paid a stamp gets the full pension.

Does this mean I have lost out through working and paying a stamp or does mine go up when I am 65yrs old. Thanks for any advise Annie

margaretclare

Hi Annie

Your Mum will have got her full pension through her late husband's contributions - that's the explanation.

You could have got a pension forecast before you retired and you should have been given the option to pay for the years you missed - that's sometimes worth doing. Have you applied for pension credit?

Margaret Clare

EdInvestor

I imagine that originally when your Dad was alive your Mum's pension based on his contributions was not the full amount (currently the equivalent is about 49 pounds) of the basic state pension.

After she was widowed, that amount would have been made up to the basic state pension level, I believe, as otherwise her household income would plummet drastically -eg from a "his and hers" pension of 82+49 = 131 at today's rates to one based on the married woman's rate of only 49 pounds. The widow would immediately have to go on means tested benefits.:( The top-up should at least help some women who have other savings.

Not an expert on this but I think that's how it works.

Did you know that 90% of single women pensioners have to claim pension credit and only 16% of all women are eligible for a basic state pension?

The Government really needs to get a grip on this scandalous situation IMHO. The rules make it too hard for women to get their own pension.

adminannie

Hi Margeret Thanks for your reply, answers to your questions are, I did get a forcast and because I had worked for the last 18yrs I couldn't make up any time missing, I was off work looking after children, apparently this has changed now and you get an allowance if you are off looking after children. If my Mum got it off my Dads stamps does that mean when my hubby is 65yrs will mine increase to the full one. Annie

CIS

Home Responsibilities Protection for looking after your children only came in to effect from 6/4/1978, prior to this there was nothing to cover your pension.

Your mums pension would be based on your dads National Insurance record, when he died she would have been given an age related widows pension, proving your mother was old enough to qualify for this they would have awarded it for life. It would be calculated using two different methods, and the best one used.

At its simplest, one method adds together the two records, the other method substitutes part of the record for the husbands.

The only way that you could get an increase at 65, is if your are married, and the value of 60% of your husbands Basic State Pension is higher than your Basic State pension, your would then be topped up to the 60% figure. However, £51.49 , if it doesn't include your Graduated and Additional Pension, is too high to get any increase, if it includes Graduated and Additional Pension, deduct these from the figure to get your Basic State Pension, if this is then less than the 60%, you should get some top up.

In general if you cant get any top up through the 60% rule, you wont get anything unless you calim pension credit or you get your top-up at 80, an extra 25p per week.

CIS

Please also note that to get your increase off your husbands records, he has to be claiming his pension already, so if hes not 65 by the time you are, you'll have to wait until hes 65 and claims his pension.

EdInvestor

If Annie's husband were to die before she does, would she get extra widow's pension like her Mum?

littlereddevil

Can a person claim pension credit if they have a working partner?

margaretclare

Editor wrote:

Did you know that 90% of single women pensioners have to claim pension credit and only 16% of all women are eligible for a basic state pension?

The Government really needs to get a grip on this scandalous situation IMHO. The rules make it too hard for women to get their own pension.

Yes, this is true. Women were given the option when they married of paying the smaller 'married women's contribution' which covered only industrial injuries, not unemployment, sickness or retirement. This option ceased in April 1978 i.e. for women who married after that date, but very short-sightedly IMHO, women already paying the smaller contribution were allowed to continue. This means that there are women only just coming up to retirement now, as well as older, who won't have a state pension in their own right.

To be fair to the government, the whole climate of opinion has changed in my lifetime. In the 1950s/60s it was never expected that a married woman would expect to have a pension in her own right. Women who are now realising the parlous situation they're in have told me: 'I was told I had to change to the "small stamp"'. I've said: 'No, we always had the choice, whether to pay full or not'. 'Oh no, when I went back to work after the honeymoon the employer's accounts department told me I had to change'. I've had this type of conversation over and over again with women who are younger than I am now who are just finding out the full situation they're going to be in. With the increase in life expectancy a woman retiring at 60 can look at several more decades of life - living to 100 is much more common than it used to be! We've also seen increased divorce levels at all ages - people are divorcing after decades of marriage, and that didn't used to be the case.

I am incredibly lucky. I'm in that small proportion of women who not only gets full SRP plus SERPS (for when I wasn't contracted out) plus pensions based on work. Of all the wrong decisions I've made in life, the decisions to pay full NI contributions and to work full-time so that I could stay in the NHS pension scheme are the ones I'm most pleased about now. I was laughed at then by women I worked with who said 'Oh, I need the money now, the kids need shoes, I'm not worried about retiring' and these were women whose earnings were sneeringly called 'pin-money' and unimportant compared to the male breadwinner. Well, pin-money bought an awful lot of family necessities as well as pins! I worked with lots of women, and I've heard them talk, on night shift, in coffee-breaks.

I feel strongly that what the Government in 1978 should have done when they abolished the possibility of paying smaller 'married women's contributions' was to abolish it across the board i.e. abolish it for women already paying it as well as for women marrying after that date. It would have been a political hot potato, but it would have saved thousands of women from facing decades of poverty.

Margaret Clare

margaretclare

adminannie wrote:

Hi Margeret Thanks for your reply, answers to your questions are, I did get a forcast and because I had worked for the last 18yrs I couldn't make up any time missing, I was off work looking after children, apparently this has changed now and you get an allowance if you are off looking after children. If my Mum got it off my Dads stamps does that mean when my hubby is 65yrs will mine increase to the full one. Annie

Hi Annie

If you were paying full contributions and stopped work to look after children then you should have Home Responsibilities Protection for those years, if you were getting Child Benefit.

You need to go back to the Pensions Service: https://www.thepensionservice.gov.uk
and tell them you need Home Responsibilities protection for the years you received Child Benefit.

Margaret Clare

Lazy_Ike

anneg wrote:

Can a person claim pension credit if they have a working partner?

Pension credit guarantees a minimum weekly income. It is means tested. Income accruing to a spouse, and a (grossly over estimated) percentage from any savings are included as income. If the total income for you and spouse exceeds the minimum income figure (cannot remember it, but for married persons it is some where around £150-160) than no award will be made.
Hope this helps