JohnB wrote:I believe the £34 COPE figure, as I was contracted out manually for 3 years in the private sector in the late 80s, and probably for the 10 years when I worked in the civil service in the 80s-90s. I've never made any voluntary NI contributions, and only claimed unemployment benefit for 6 months, no other benefits, so I can't see how any extra payments could have come in. After that I was either abroad or working as a contractor or employee using salary sacrifice to be paid minimum wage, so very little NI would have been paid.
Ah, but being contracted out doesn't
necessarily mean that you won't get any Additional State Pension -- even if you were never contracted in.
The way the ASP is calculated is that they figure out your
gross ASP, as if you'd never been contracted out, and then they subtract a
contracted out deduction (COD), which is the
guaranteed minimum pension (GMP) that will be provided by your contracted out pension scheme, to arrive at your
net ASP, which you will receive and is what people mean when they talk about just "ASP". Gross ASP - COD = (net) ASP.
However, while the idea of contracting out was that the pension scheme would pay you what the state would have (i.e. GMP would be the same as gross ASP, so net ASP would be zero), while the gross ASP is revalued in deferment by national earnings, pension schemes had a choice of methods for revaluing accrued GMP rights, only one of which was the same as that used for the ASP! The practical upshot of which is that up to 1997 the gross ASP and GMP/COD could be revalued at different rates, so gross ASP minus COD can be non-zero. (In fact, it can be negative as well as positive, but the net ASP is always floored at zero.)
It's complicated, and that's probably more than you wanted to know.
But if you really want to know the ins and outs of it, see here:
https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/SN02674A 3 year old schedule has a record of class 1 NICs, but the class 2 and voluntary class 3 NIC columns are all 0
Umm...do you not have online access to your pension forecast and NIC record? If not, start here:
https://www.gov.uk/check-state-pensionSo are the magic words to ask: "Additional State Pension, "Second State Pension" and "SERPS"?
You could just ask that, but I'd say it'd be better to ask for a breakdown of how your 2016 starting amount was arrived at. In my experience and from reports from others it's unlikely they will get into
gross ASPs and CODs but will refer just to (net) "ASP". The figures you should get from them are (hopefully
):
Old system --
basic state pension ((£119.30 * 28 / 30) = £111.35), plus
additional state pension (I reckon £17.69) = £129.04
New system --
single (new) state pension ((£155.65 * 28 / 35) = £124.52), minus
COPE (£34) = £90.52
So your 2016 starting amount should be £129.04, which will be revalued to £144.55 this year. Let's see what they say....!
BTW, if you'd like a further probably-more-than-you-wanted-to-know, the COPE is made up of the COD (as above) for being contracted out up to 1997 and a
rebate derived amount (RDA) for being contracted out from 1997, so if you haven't been contracted out since then then your COPE is your COD....