TONY HETHERINGTON: Do I have to repay £7,400 from Civil Service pension?

Tony Hetherington is Financial Mail on Sunday’s ace investigator, fighting readers corners, revealing the truth that lies behind closed doors and winning victories for those who have been left out-of-pocket. Find out how to contact him below. 

Ms J.G. writes: I claimed my Civil Service pension in 2016 and have received it ever since.

Last year I discovered my husband had been having an affair, and as part of our divorce arrangements I had to provide a transfer value for my pension.

When I applied for this, I was told I had received too much because my employer at the Ministry of Defence used incorrect details. At age 67, I have been asked to hand back £7,400.

Tony Hetherington replies: Going through divorce in your 60s is traumatic. You told me you had been married for 42 years, and the split meant you had to sell the family home.

To then be told, out of the blue, that the people responsible for calculating your pension had made a mistake, and the Government wanted to reclaim £7,400, left you in emotional tatters.

Breaking up made harder: Going through divorce in your 60s is traumatic

You told me: ‘I feel simply bullied and my health is suffering. It is all an unfair battle.’

Civil Service pensions are managed by the private company Equiniti. However, its staff explained that they work under directions from the Cabinet Office in Whitehall. Officials there told me they were already considering a complaint from you, so with your agreement I waited to see what that produced.

What it produced was an unpleasant response which suggested you should study Annex 4.11 of Managing Public Money, published by HM Treasury.

In a nutshell, this says that anyone who is overpaid their pension can ask to have a repayment demand scrapped, but they will have to complete a statement setting out their financial position, backed up by bank statements, receipts, utility bills and anything else to show how much money you have and how you have spent it.

I repeatedly asked the Cabinet Office for a statement from Nick Thomas-Symonds MP – the Paymaster General and the minister responsible for the Civil Service pension scheme.

How did the mistake arise? Was it the responsibility of the Ministry of Defence or some other party? And what kind of message does the Government send out when it effectively says that if you are a spendthrift with little or nothing in the bank then you might be let off the hook, but if you have behaved responsibly, and have savings, you must fork out £7,400 to foot the bill for someone else’s errors?

Mr Thomas-Symonds offered no comments and no answers to any of these questions.

But a Civil Service investigation did shed some light on this mess.

Your career began in HM Revenue. You later transferred to the Department for Work and Pensions and finally to the MOD. Your pension was based on the total time spent working for the Government, and someone added the dates together incorrectly.

There was no way you could have known this when you retired. You were simply told you were entitled to a lump sum of £17,054 and an annual pension of £2,558.

By the end of 2023 your pension had risen to £3,161 – only to be slashed to £2,487, which is said to be the right figure.

The Civil Service investigator says: ‘It is difficult to determine who was responsible for the initial mistake, and I am satisfied no further action can be taken to do so.’

The Cabinet Office has used its discretion to award you £500 to make up for the very clear distress this episode has caused.

You have not received the £500, of course – it has simply been knocked off the £7,400 demand.

A spokesman told me the Government must ensure that taxpayers’ money is accounted for and recovered if an error is made.

He added: ‘We apply stringent guidelines on the recovery of overpayments and work to ensure any money is recovered with flexibility and the least burden possible.’

Which strikes me as another way of saying – as the Prime Minister did – that ‘those with the broadest shoulders should bear the heavier burden’.

But how can anyone with a pension of just £2,487 fit this description? The Cabinet Office refused to say.

My BA points took flight

B.D. writes: I believe BA’s computer system has been hacked. I have lost 250,000 Avios points as a result, along with others in BA’s Executive Club.

Tony Hetherington replies: The value of BA Avios points varies but each point is worth roughly 1p, so you lost flights worth around £2,500. Lots of BA customers have had the same issue.

Grounded: Avios looters get into BA customers’ accounts by using the customer’s own email address and guess the password

BA denies its systems have been hacked. Rather, they appear to be vulnerable just as a bank would be if it tied its front door shut with a piece of string…