My 66-year-old mother has been told that she has been overpaid her civil service pension by £40,000 and must repay it, or face legal action. Once the tax she’s paid on the income is deducted, she owes £32,000.

Her monthly pension payments have now been cut, which means her annual income will fall from £19,700 to £12,000, and she was, additionally, ordered to repay £496 a month for five years. This was later reduced to £100 a month, and a charge was put on her house as security. She’s been told she will have paid everything she owes when she’s 93.

She is on medication for depression, and the stress has had a severe impact on her.

MT, Runcorn, Cheshire

Your mother is one of hundreds of retired civil servants who face a lifetime of debt through no fault of their own.

In 2019, MyCSP, which managed the pension scheme on behalf of the Cabinet Office until last December, admitted that 2,000 pensioners collectively owed £2.7m in overpayments because of its own miscalculations. In some cases it had taken more than a decade for the mistakes to come to light.

This is the same pension scheme that left scores of newly retired civil servants without any income after payments failed to materialise. In your mother’s case, she questioned the size of her payments in 2021 and 2025, but was assured by MyCSP they were correct.

Her life, like all the others affected, was upended by a bombshell letter from MyCSP breezily informing her of the error, demanding repayment by bank transfer, warning of legal action if payments don’t start in three months, and apologising for any “inconvenience”.

Pension providers have a legal duty to recover erroneous payments, regardless of whose fault it was, or how long ago the mistake began, to protect the scheme’s funds. That is, unless the beneficiary can show that repayments would cause them considerable financial hardship.

However, affordable repayment plans must be offered, and pensioners can’t be forced to repay more than 15% of the debt a month, which means some face paying for the rest of their lives.

I pointed out to the Cabinet Office that your mother would struggle financially with the repayments because of her depleted income, but it remained implacable.

“We empathise with the concerns; however, we must ensure all taxpayer money is accounted for, and recovered if a payment has been made in error,” it says. “We apply stringent guidelines … and work to ensure money is recovered with flexibility and the least burden possible.”

Public, as well as civil servants, are also receiving bland letters telling them of life-changing debt that will deplete their income.

MB of Belper, Derbyshire, was informed by the NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA), which administers NHS Pensions in England and Wales, that a blunder in his calculations in 2014 had led to a £35,000 overpayment since he retired in 2021.

“My monthly payments dropped by £400, and I was simply told how to repay in one lump sum,” he writes. “When I complained, NHS Pensions recalculated the debt as £33,000 and expected me to trust their maths. My wife and I have had to renege on a promise to help pay for our son’s wedding.”

NHSBSA accepted it had missed multiple opportunities to identify the error, but told MB it was satisfied that its £1,000 goodwill offer “reflects the distress and inconvenience” caused.

It said: “The NHSBSA has a duty under HM Treasury’s managing public money guidance to recover overpayments. However, we are committed to handling each case sensitively, taking individual circumstances fully into account when agreeing a manageable repayment arrangement.”

HC’s 83-year-old mother was told, 16 years after retiring from the Post Office, that her pension had been miscalculated and she had to repay £20,000. Her monthly income was then cut by a third.

“She has become very ill over the matter and feels bullied and intimidated,” says HC.

The mistake came to light in 2018. HC’s mother says she has spent the subsequent eight years trying to get answers from Capita, which took over the administration of the Royal Mail pension scheme on behalf of the Cabinet Office in 2018 and that of the civil service scheme in December 2025.

I have therefore advised HC to complain to the Pensions Ombudsman, and the Cabinet Office has confirmed that recovery action will be suspended until the ombudsman reaches a decision.

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