Monday 24th November 2025, 14:27
Just breathed a sigh of relief.
While i was on holiday in the UK No. 1 son sent me an email about a letter that had arrived from the DWP. It gave me sixteen weeks to provide a proof of life or they would stop my UK state pension. The letter was received on 20th June but was dated 26th May!
Does this happen to pensioners in the UK or is it only those living outside the UK that must do this?
Anyway sixteen weeks puts the deadline at 15th September which sounds like a long time but was in fact too short for me because I wasn't expecting to get back to Norway before the middle of October. Sending the letter and the enclosed form to me in the UK wasn't practical because I was travelling and the poste restante service in the UK is pretty much unusable. You actually have to visit a TG Jones store to find out if they have a post office and if that office offers the service. Not much use if you haven't arrived at the location. In Norway you just address the letter to Recipient's Name, Poste Restante, address of post office (which you can look up online).
So I searched the DWP web site and found a PDF of the form. Filled it in electronically and asked a friend in Nottingham who is qualified to witness my signature and ID (has to be a teacher, doctor, lawyer, or similar) to print it and fill in her details. She brought it with her when we met up at Nottingham Chameleons. Sent it off a few days later. But the DWP doesn't acknowledge receipt it seems and I have no idea how to discover if they received it or accepted it.
Anyway, it's more than sixteen weeks from the letter and more than three months since the quarterly pension instalment was paid in August so I've just checked my UK bank and found that I received a payment at the beginning of this month. Hurrah. I'd beter set myself a task to check for the next one just in case there are internal delays inside the DWP that mean that a stop order is still wending its way through the bureaucracy.
