Lost pension entitlement: what can we do when no evidence is available?

What happened

Ms W became eligible to collect her state pension in 2011 but decided not to retire for a further two years. She expected to receive a lump sum of backdated pension when she began claiming her state pension in 2013.

However, because she had been receiving widow's benefit, she could not backdate her pension for more than 12 months.

Ms W says that she spoke to the Pension Service when she decided to defer her pension and told it about her plans and her widow's benefit. She says the adviser that she spoke to told her that she did not need to do anything until she wanted to claim her state pension. In fact Ms W could have stopped claiming her widow's benefit at that time. Had she done so, she would have received the lump sum for the whole two years.

When Ms W complained to the Independent Case Examiner (ICE) it explained that there was no evidence of the telephone calls that she had made to the Pension Service. It added that information about her situation was included in leaflets and in a pension forecast that was sent to her before she decided to defer claiming her pension. Because of this, ICE said it could not say that the Pension Service had given her the wrong advice.

What we found

There was no evidence available to show that Ms W had spoken to the Pension Service or what advice it had given her. This meant that there was no information available to support her view that she had been given the wrong advice. When we considered this and the fact that the information that she had received showed that her widow's benefit might have an impact on any lump sum, we found that ICE had got it right in this case. We did not uphold Ms W's complaint.