Home Responsibilities Protection Correction Exercise — Repaying UK Women's Underpaid State Pensions

Between 1978 and 2010, Home Responsibilities Protection (HRP) reduced the qualifying years needed for a full UK State Pension for parents and carers, overwhelmingly mothers, who claimed Child Benefit. A systemic data-recording error at HM Revenue & Customs meant HRP was in many cases never linked to the claimant's National Insurance record, leaving women who retired since 2010 with chronically underpaid pensions.

In 2022 the Department for Work and Pensions identified the scale of the problem, and from 8 January 2024 the DWP-HMRC 'LEAP' correction exercise began writing to potentially affected pensioners inviting them to check and correct their National Insurance records.

By 31 March 2025 the exercise had identified 12,379 confirmed underpayments and paid arrears averaging GBP 8,377 per person, a total of roughly GBP 104 million.

DWP's provisioned liability for HRP underpayments fell from an estimated GBP 1.2 billion to GBP 29.8 million between valuations, largely because far fewer people applied than projected -- evidence that outreach to eligible women, especially the oldest and most vulnerable, remains incomplete.