Retirees missed out on more than £500m in state pension payments in the last tax year due to thousands of errors by civil servants, official data has revealed.
More than one in 20 retirees were underpaid after a litany of “official errors”, the Department for Work and Pensions admitted on Thursday.
The revelation comes as separate data reveals a third of DWP staff were not working at its head office at the end of last month.
Sir Steve Webb, a former pensions minister, said that the scale of state pension mistakes was “truly shocking”.
“Urgent action is needed to drive up standards of administration so that pensioners can have confidence that the pension they are being paid is correct,” he said.
Overall state pension underpayments hit a record high last year, with retirees missing out on £670m, up by almost a quarter compared with the year prior. Civil servant mistakes accounted for £580m, or 87pc, of total state pension underpayments.
Some state pensions were overpaid, but at just a fraction of overall underpayments, at £100m.
The record number of overall errors come as concerns rise over the number of civil servants working from home. In the Department for Work and Pensions, around a third of staff were not working in its Westminster headquarters during the third week of April, official data shows.
Helen Morissey, of the broker Hargreaves Lansdown, added that the mistakes primarily affected women who retired before 2016 under the “old” state pension system, who were owed uplifts in their pension when their husbands retired or died.
