Lloyd blasts Labour pensions fiasco

5.56.00pm GMT Tue 4th Dec 2007

Lib Dem parliamentary campaigner Stephen Lloyd has condemned the Department for Work and Pensions for losing a local residents pension and benefits file.

Old Town resident Mrs Rosemary Freeman contacted Stephen Lloyd and told him that the Department for Work and Pensions had lost virtually all of her and her husbands papers relating to their disability benefit and pension going back over thirty years.

Stephen said: "It beggars belief that the department could lose Mr and Mrs Freeman's file. After the shambles of the government losing the two discs containing the personal details of 25 million people in receipt of child benefit, I find it hard to believe they've made such a mistake a second time. The only good thing that has come out of this mess is that Mrs Freeman has always been good about keeping records. If she hadn't I have no idea what would have happened.

"I suspect this could be the tip of the iceberg so I would be very interested to hear if any other local residents have had their file lost by the Department. I have written to the Secretary of State, demanding that he conduct an internal enquiry to (a) find the Freeman's file and (b) reassure me that others have also not been mislaid."

Mrs Freeman added: "I only discovered our file had been lost when I wrote to the Independent Case Examiner over a separate issue. You can imagine how worried my husband and I were to discover our papers going back years and years had disappeared. My own view is the different departments in the DWP have been through too many changes over the last few years, moving from Blackpool to Motherwell to Milton Keynes to Crawley."

"What makes it worse is this has happened before and we've had to photo-copy our own records numerous times to send back to the DWP. However, this time it's worse as it appears almost our entire file has been lost."