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Dear Becky,
My wife, 76, fell from a horse and broke her spine in 1984. She has been paraplegic ever since and has been totally unable to work. She has received Disability Living Allowance (DLA) all these years and still does.
When she eventually came to pension age, she didn’t receive her own pension but does receive a percentage of mine.
My query is shouldn’t she have had her pension contributions paid for her all those years when she was unable to work and then receive a full state pension on retirement age?
Regards,
George K
Dear George,
Firstly, I am so sorry to hear about what happened to your wife, all those years ago.
To lose the ability to live normally and work through an horrific, life-changing injury is a truly awful event with innumerable costs, one of which, in your wife’s case, was the ability to build up a full National Insurance record.
If someone is disabled and receives Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), they are usually eligible for National Insurance credits. Unfortunately DLA doesn’t come with National Insurance Credits.
Given her age, she would have become entitled to the state pension under the old, “basic” state pension system. As a woman who reached pension age before 2010, to get the full basic state pension, she would have needed to work, or have received relevant credits, for 39 qualifying years.
To get any state pension at all under the old system, someone must have worked enough to reach at least 25pc of the full number of qualifying years (which works out as 10 years).
Depending on other factors and whether she was working beforehand, she may not quite have managed to build up this minimum entitlement through employment before her accident happened, when she was 37, and so this is why she doesn’t receive any state pension in her own right. Instead, she would have got a 60pc married woman’s pension when you retired.
If your wife took time out of work to care for children aged under 16 from 1978 onwards, she should have been eligible for Home Responsibilities Protection (HRP), which parents were automatically granted as a way to preserve state pension entitlements. This was later replaced in 2010 by the slightly less generous National Insurance Credits (under 12s only).
As she reached retirement age before 2010, any HRP she received would not have been converted to NI credits. To work out whether any years in work plus any HRP she received would qualify her for some state pension, the number of HRP years is deducted from the target of 39 years for a full pension and then she would need 25pc of the reduced number.
It’s also worth mentioning that a few years before your wife’s injury, pre-1977, the married woman’s stamp was still available. This allowed women to reduce their NI contributions – a “Reduced Rate Election” giving them more take-home pay but sacrificing some of their state pension, and entitlement to credits, in the process. If your wife had opted for this, this could have further dented her entitlement.
Your wife continues to receive DLA because she was born before 8 April 1948. Those born after this date who were previously receiving the allowance have had to apply for Personal Independence Payments (PIPs) instead.
The severe nature of your wife’s injury and resulting condition presumably means she receives both the “care component” and the “mobility component” of DLA at the higher rate. DLA is tax-free, whereas the state pension is taxable income. Being in receipt of DLA enables access to other forms of assistance and it is worth checking eligibility for these, if you are not already using them.
I think it’s worth looking into whether she is entitled to more state pension than she is receiving. As a first course of action, I would suggest you check with the Department for Work and Pensions whether your wife’s state pension entitlement was correctly administered, particularly if there were years of HRP.
Given the number of changes to the system that could have affected her, it’s quite possible that an error has been made somewhere and she is in fact eligible for some state pension of her own. If an error is found, payments can be backdated.
You can contact the Pensions Centre to check this, or call them on 0800 731 0469. Please do persevere if this process takes a while; the DWP is currently processing thousands of claims due to historic errors.
It might also be worth seeking an assessment for Pension Credit for her, which the Pensions Centre can also help with. Her income from DLA is disregarded for calculating Pension Credit and given her low income from her share of your pension, you may be jointly eligible for this.
If your joint weekly income is currently less than £306.85, then Pension Credit could top it up to this amount and as your wife presumably meets the definition of someone with a “severe disability”, she could be eligible for an additional £76.40 a week. You might also be eligible for Carer’s Allowance, if you are not claiming this already.
‘My wife, 76, is paraplegic after falling from a horse in 1984 – why doesn’t she get state pension?’
Pensions Doctor: our reader wants to know if his spouse is entitled to backdated payments