Contact with essential services
By phone, post or face to face in person
Offline options maintained
Offline
- All public services required to provide well-publicised and accessible offline routes to contact public services by phone, post or speak to someone face to face.
Background
Age UK campaign
Offline and Overlooked.
6 million older people are not online or cannot use the internet to do what they need and do it safely.
They are increasingly being shut out from essential services.
And many more simply want the option to use the post, phone or speak to someone face to face.
With access to NHS appointments, council services and even parking swiftly moving online by default.
EXAMPLE IN RECENT YEARS
..."letters told people to use an online checker to see if they were entitled and to use an online claim form to apply.
The response to these letters was poor, with recipients put off by the online claim process, thinking the letters might be scams, or not understanding the issue."...
Background - Unclaimed Home Responsibilities Protection Credits towards National Insurance record:
..."The Department for Work and Pensions annual report for 2024/25, published yesterday (July 10), revealed there is a reduction in the amount due to mothers with NI specifically due to missing Home Responsibilities Protection (HRP).
Consultants LCP said this is not because the government thinks the problem is any smaller than before, but because it has slashed the proportion of entitled women who it now thinks it will be able to find.
This is primarily due to the failure of a mass letter-writing campaign by HM Revenue & Customs which had an extremely poor response.
The issue arose because many thousands of mothers are missing HRP on their NI record — a form of protection for those who received child benefit for a child under 16 since 1978.
These years should have generated a form of NI credit which would have helped to boost the state pension of many such women.
However, when DWP undertook full sample checks of state pensions following a previous set of large-scale errors, it discovered many cases where mothers did not have HRP on their record."...
..."this largely arose from claims made before 2000 where it was not required to put an NI number on the child benefit claim form and therefore such claims were not linked to the NI record correctly.
To track down such women, the government undertook a publicity campaign which included letters from HMRC to 370,000 people, of which 257,000 are already over pension age."...
..."The result of this is that the government has so far corrected the records of just 12,379 pensioners, paying out £104mn.
... short of the original estimate of well over £1bn that was due.
The DWP now expects to spend just £29.8mn more on future corrections and has removed £1bn set aside for such payments in its accounts."...
Source FT Adviser