Uptake of Benefits by Pensioners

Mr Kieran Donnelly, Comptroller and Auditor General, today issued his report to the Assembly on the “Uptake of Benefits by Pensioners‘’.

Mr Donnelly said “Around 1 in 5 Northern Ireland pensioners live in poverty. For many, benefits are a significant part of their income and maximising benefit uptake can therefore contribute to tackling poverty.

The relevant public sector bodies have done much to overcome the barriers to claiming benefits. While this is to be commended, more needs to be done. To successfully reach all pensioners entitled to benefit, these public sector organisations must obtain better information on the extent of non-uptake, use data-sharing to best effect and continue to work closely with the Independent Advisory Sector.”

Main Findings

  • Many pensioners do not claim all the benefits to which they are entitled. The main reasons for failing to claim include perceptions of non-eligibility, difficulties understanding benefit systems, concerns as to how receipt of one benefit impacts on continued eligibility for another benefit, complexities of application forms and the belief of many pensioners that they have sufficient funds to live on.

Estimating Benefit Uptake

  • It is inherently difficult to estimate benefit uptake rates. Although uptake estimates exist for a number of pensioner benefits, these do not tend to be robust.
  • For example, during the period 2004-06, estimates of unclaimed State Pension Credit ranged from £26 million to £168 million while estimates for unclaimed Housing Benefit for pensioners amounted to between £5 million and £29 million.
  • The absence of sound uptake estimates creates difficulties in setting meaningful targets and creates a risk that uptake strategies are not developed on a firm evidence base. If benefit-paying agencies are to improve the level of uptake, they must identify cost-effective ways of generating the relevant information.

Data-sharing activities

  • Benefit-paying agencies in Northern Ireland can share data for the purposes of encouraging the uptake of benefits. However, data-sharing protocols between some benefit-paying agencies have not yet been finalised.
  • To support future data-sharing exercises, individual agencies should maintain records of all data-sharing activities and be in a position to produce information on the extent to which each exercise improved the uptake of benefits or detected fraud.

Measures to encourage uptake

  • The Social Security Agency, in partnership with the Independent Advisory Sector, has undertaken five Benefit Uptake Programmes at a cost of approximately £2.4 million. The exercises targeted over 70,000 pensioners and resulted in additional annual pensioner benefit payments of £17.3 million. Other activities brought the total additional benefit payments for pensioners up to over £25 million.
  • Northern Ireland Housing Executive (NIHE) measures to promote uptake have included the issue of reminders about the availability of housing benefit on all tenants’ quarterly rent statements and on all correspondence relating to rent arrears; the inclusion of Housing Benefit information in new tenancy “sign-up procedures”; and the publication and circulation of leaflets and of “Housing News” to tenants.
  • Measures introduced by Land & Property Service (LPS) have included the revision and simplification of application forms and leaflets and the availability of a “visits service” to pensioners who request assistance completing application forms.
  • An Inter-Departmental Group on Benefit Uptake (IDGBU) was established in November 2008.

The views of the Independent Advisory Sector

  • We contacted a number of Independent Advisory Sector representative groups. They acknowledged and commended the efforts that had been made to date to promote the uptake of benefits. However they also suggested that further improvements could be made. These included the need to:
    • develop a more collaborative approach and improve communication between the various agencies and with the voluntary sector;
    • adopt a longer-term approach, with better planning of individual benefit uptake campaigns;
    • extend outreach activities;
    • remove complexity within the benefits system and simplify the application process; and
    • commit to longer-term, outcome-based funding for independent advice services.