State pension backpayment alert for 370,000 – dont ignore this letter to boost income | Personal Finance | Finance [Video]

State pensioners have been urged to check if they qualify for an income boost as hundreds or thousands are estimated to have been underpaid.

Home Responsibilities Protection (HRP) was a scheme designed to help protect the state pension of parents and carers. It ran from April 6, 1978, until April 5, 2010, when it was then replaced by National Insurance (NI) credits.

People received HRP automatically if they claimed Child Benefit for a child under 16, or Income Support because they were looking after a sick or disabled person and were not available for work.

However, after the benefit was replaced with NI credits, it has since been discovered that the system failed to accurately record HRP credits for some claimants. As a result, people – largely women – who took time of out work to raise children or care for people have been underpaid their state pension.

This underpayment occurred because missing HRP credits …