Pension credit take-up hits 75% after campaign brings 190,000 new claims

Three-quarters of pensioners entitled to pension credit are now claiming it, according to figures published by the Department for Work and Pensions on Tuesday, up from 63% in 2023 and the highest rate since the benefit was introduced in 2003, after a campaign that identified likely claimants by matching tax, housing benefit and council records.

The department said 190,000 new claims had been approved in the year to August, worth an average of £3,900 a year each, and that the number of pensioners entitled but not claiming had fallen from an estimated 880,000 to 560,000. About £1.4bn a year remains unclaimed.

The increase follows a decision last year to write directly to pensioners whose council tax support or housing benefit records suggested they were likely to qualify, rather than relying on advertising. Of 710,000 letters sent, 31% led to a claim, compared with a response rate of under 2% for previous television and radio campaigns.

“For 20 years we told people to ring a number. It turns out most of them do not think it applies to them, and the ones who do think it is charity,” said one DWP official involved in the campaign. “Sending someone a letter that says ‘our records suggest you are entitled to about £70 a week’ is a very different conversation.”

Edna Clough, 81, from Burnley, received a letter in February and now gets £61 a week on top of her state pension, as well as a free TV licence and help with her council tax. “I had worked all my life and I had a little bit put by, so I assumed I would not get anything,” she said. “My neighbour had been telling me to apply for years. It took a letter from the government to make me believe her.”

Advice charities said the campaign had worked because it had been targeted, but warned that the remaining 560,000 would be harder to reach. Paul Whittle, an adviser at Citizens Advice in Hartlepool, said the people still missing were “the ones with no benefit records at all, who own their house and have never claimed anything”. “They are not on anybody’s list. You find them when the boiler breaks and they come in because they cannot pay for it,” he said.

Age UK said the figures were “genuinely good news” but that a 75% take-up rate still meant one in four eligible pensioners going without, and called for the data-matching approach to be extended to attendance allowance, a benefit for older people with care needs that has an estimated take-up of under 60%.

The DWP said it would run a second round of letters in the new year using additional data from energy suppliers on customers in arrears.