After ministers were first made aware of the error in 2017, it took a further four years for any fixes to be implemented. In 2019, it was revealed that around 360,000 incorrect estimates had already been handed out in the three years since it was launched.
HMRC admitted that some people due to reach state pension age after April 2029 were still incorrectly being told they would receive the full amount and did not need to make extra payments. The error had already been corrected for people reaching state pension age before this date.
Following The Telegraph’s coverage, HMRC published a message on Monday aimed at users checking their state pension forecast via their Government Gateway account.
It advised anyone wanting to use the tool who will reach state pension age after April 2029 to wait until 14 Feb to do so, following a “system update” on 13 Feb, which would “improve the accuracy of forecasts”.
The online tool was launched in Feb 2016, two months before the new state pension was introduced. It was designed to help people check they were on course for the maximum payment and top up any missing or incomplete years by making additional payments.
However, the tool was unable to register any manual adjustments applied to the records of workers who had “contracted out”.
This option – now abolished – allowed millions of employees to opt out of making contributions to the additional state pension, known as Serps, if they were saving into a private or workplace pension.
When someone retires, a deduction is made from their final state pension for any periods when they were contracted out. As the tool did not reflect this quirk, up to 800,000 people could have been told incorrectly that they did not need to make any more National Insurance contributions to reach the qualifying number of years.
The Government said it did not know how many people were still affected.