As though women didn’t suffer enough from inadequate pension provision, due to broken career patterns, child care responsibilities and lower pay, the Government has just admitted that thousands of  women may have overpaid national insurance contributions (NICs) and be due an extra lump sum payout following administrative errors.

There are two areas where women may have been affected. The first concerns married women’s NICs, which applied during the 1970s, but have now been phased out.

These allowed married women to  pay less NICs on the assumption that they would claim on their husbands’ state pension record.

However, this created a time lag between the age at which these women were entitled to the state pension - namely age 60, and the state pension age for men, which is currently age 65.

During this gap, women might have to wait until they could receive any state pension.

To address this problem, women were allowed to make additional voluntary contributions, so that they can claim some state pension based on their own NIC record, on reaching 60.

But the DWP has discovered that between 1996 and 2002, it failed to send out letters to such women, pointing out the facility for them to make voluntary contributions to plug gaps in their NIC records.

Because the DWP omitted to do so, it is now saying that married women can make the additional payments now and have them backdated.

The second area where the DWP admits that mistakes have been made in calculating ing the number of  years women caring for children should have been credited with NICs because they were eligible for ‘home responsibilities protection’  (HRP).

HRP could have reduced the number of years of NICs needed to build up a full basic  state pension to 20 (from 39 years), because a  woman caring for children could be eligible for a maximum of 19 years’ HRP.

So where a woman has not been adequately credited with HRP, she may have paid too much NICs.

The DWP says it is conducting a review and that women who have suffered financial loss due to errors will get their money back with interest.

In the meantime, if you think you may be affected, contact the Pension Disability and Carer Service on 0845 602 1785.

If you are due to retire before 2010, you can get an instant calculation of how much your basic state pension will be by going to:

http://www.thepensionservice.gov.uk/approachingretirement/home.asp

If you are due to retire after 2010, the following link will tell you when you are due to receive your  state pension, (but not  the amount:

http://www.thepensionservice.gov.uk/resourcecentre/statepensioncalc.asp

For a post April 6 2010 basis state pension forecast, ring 0845 300 0168.