Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what his Department is doing to deliver the full pension entitlement for those people in Northern Ireland who started work at the age of 14.

Following the fundamental reforms of the National Insurance scheme in 1975 the law provided that only paid contributions and credits from the year in which a person reached age 16 to the year before the one in which they reached state pension age should count for the purposes of entitlement to the state pension. The Government has no plans to review the position reached by Parliament and which has been in place for the past 40 years, since 1975.