My 99-year-old aunt died a year ago leaving assets worth £23,000. We appointed a solicitor to sort out her estate and his face dropped when he heard she had received pension credit, as he said the Department for Work and Pensions was taking an age to deal with checks on entitlement.
He estimated that it would add at least £1,000 to the cost of winding up the estate. Eight months later, not quite believing that a simple matter could take so long, I wrote to my MP. He extracted a letter from the DWP, which claimed that letters went astray and/or were not passed for action. It also claimed to have subsequently found a “discrepancy”. Months passed, including the anniversary of my aunt’s death, and still we have heard nothing. We are caught in a modern Jarndyce v Jarndyce. What strikes us as weird is that the DWP grants benefits and then assesses the status of the recipient post mortem.
Even if it is worthwhile, does the process really have to move with such glacial slowness? HC, London
The DWP says that recovering overpaid credits takes time because it has to trawl through the person’s financial history, which can involve large amounts of paperwork. “As each case is considered individually there is no typical length of time for the review to conclude,” a spokesperson says. “We don’t have large volumes of identified debt outstanding.”
There is some logic behind the lunacy of post-mortem reviews. Most recipients over 65 are given an assessed income period (AIP) which can last up to five years (or, for those 75 and over, indefinitely) and during this time they don’t have to report any changes to their income.
When an AIP comes to an end their circumstances are reviewed and their pension credit recalculated. Beneficiaries under 65 have to report any change in income immediately.
The DWP investigates when probate figures show that the net value of a recipient’s estate exceeds the capital sum they declared when they applied for income-related benefits. The AIP policy may spare pensioners onerous annual form filling, but it’s a headache for their beneficiaries because the legacy can’t be distributed until any debts are identified and repaid.
“It is also a painfully slow process, which I would imagine is down to a lack of manpower,” says Mark Goodson, trust and estate practitioner at FW Goodson. “What makes it worse is that very often pension credit is a small weekly amount, sometimes just a few pence. Getting through to someone to discuss it on the telephone can also be difficult and slow, but you may get some success as it could accelerate the case to the top of the pile – especially if the amount claimed is relatively small.”
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