State Retirement Pensions: Females
(asked on 12th December 2018) - View Source
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many complaints of maladministration from women born in the 1950s relating to the change in their state pension age submitted to her Department’s Independent Case Examiner have been (a) resolved, (b) rejected, (c) closed for other reasons.
Individual government departments have long established complaints procedures. That approach has not changed under Labour governments 1997-2010 or successive governments. The DWP has a two tier complaints process which considers formal complaints about our service. Once a complainant has exhausted the DWP complaint process they are signposted to the Independent Case Examiner’s Office if they are dissatisfied with the final response to their complaint. The Independent Case Examiner is independent.
The table below provides information on the method by which complaints submitted to the Independent Case Examiner’s (ICE) Office, concerning changes to women’s State Pension age, were closed.
Reason for complaint closure | Number |
(a) Resolved (we have interpreted this as meaning closed following issue of an ICE investigation report) | 192 |
(b) Rejected (the complaint failed to meet the ICE acceptance criteria) | 1,598 |
(c) Paused for other reasons (includes withdrawn complaints and those closed following a High Court decision to grant permission for a Judicial Review of the Departments handling of the change to women’s State Pension age – it is not within the ICE remit to consider issues which are, or have been, subject to legal proceedings.) | 2,506 |
The Independent Case Examiner’s Office received the first complaints from women relating to changes in their state pension age in October 2016. The table below provides details of the numbers received in each of the past three reporting years.
Year (April to March) | Number received |
2016/2017 | 243 |
2017/2018 | 2981 |
2018/2019 (to 13 December 2018) | 1072 |