The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) provided more than 22 million personalised state pension statements to people who requested them in the past 18 years, Guy Opperman has said.
In a written answer to Parliament published yesterday (22 October), the minister for pensions and financial inclusion said the requests had been made either online or by telephone or post, and were based on both old and new state pension rules.
He added the government encouraged people to request a personalised state pension statement as part of its on-going communications.
These statements are separate from the Check Your State Pension service, which hit the 10 million state pension forecasts milestone last month.
The online service, which can also help individuals work out whether they can improve their state pension through voluntary national insurance contributions or a workplace pension was launched in 2016.
These contain the same information as the paper statements, but can only be retrieved by the individual.
Financial advisers tend to ask clients to fill a form to request a written statement, since they can't perform the online check on the client’s behalf in his absence.
Kay Ingram, director of public policy at national firm LEBC, said it was good to see that a higher proportion of the working population was checking their entitlement as the state pension had undergone a lot of changes since 2016, after the new state pension was introduced.
She said: "Understanding what you can expect from various pensions, including the state is a good first step to planning retirement.
"It also means that those who have not yet built up enough credits to get a full state pension are taking steps to find out about the possibility of topping up their contributions by making extra voluntary payments in or claiming credits to which they may be entitled."
According to data from HM Revenue & Customs, more people have been making use of the opportunity to top-up their national insurance contributions to boost their state pension.
The amount of money being paid in voluntary (Class 3) NI contributions has increased fivefold, from £12.8m in 2016/17 to £69.1m in 2017/18.
The high number of people asking for state pension statement also indicates the importance of including this data in the future pension dashboard.
FTAdviser reported yesterday that the government has not yet decided whether the project will include state pension data.
Ms Ingram said it would be ideal for the dashboard to include these forecasts. But she added: "I would not want its inclusion to hold up the launch of the dashboard as the details of the state scheme can be gathered from the existing service offered by the DWP.
"The dashboard will be of more help to individuals in reuniting them with lost private pensions, now estimated to be worth £20bn and in helping advisers cut the cost of advice by having access to pension information in a more streamlined manner."
maria.espadinha@ft.com
