People Like Esmé

This is article 3 of 5 in the Fincentive founding series. Start from the beginning →

My mother was called Esmé. She was particular about the accent. It made the name distinctive, she said. She worked for a high street bank for part of her working life and came away with a small pension for her trouble. Not large, but hers. She had earned it.

In her later years, she became a carer for my stepfather. It was a role she took on quietly, without complaint, as many people do. What she didn't take on (couldn't take on, really) was the system that existed to support her while she did it. Carer's Allowance. Pension Credit. Council Tax Support. The passported benefits that flow from each. The forms, the thresholds, the rules that change, the guidance that assumes you already know where to look.

She did eventually receive much of what she was entitled to, but only after considerable effort, time, and persistence that many people simply don't have. Nothing in the communications she received pointed her towards any of it. Not even the small pension payslip arriving once a year from a bank she'd worked for decades earlier. The entitlement existed. The data existed. The connection didn't.

Later, when dementia began to affect her life, we spent months navigating the additional support available to her. Phone calls, paperwork, referrals, appeals. We got there eventually. But it took time we didn't have, and knowledge we had to acquire from scratch. For families without that capacity, and most families don't have it, the outcome is different.

I am not telling this story to make a point about my mum. She was resilient, resourceful, and not given to self-pity. I'm telling it because she is not unusual.

761,000 households

761,000 households are currently eligible for Pension Credit but are not receiving it.

The average amount they're missing is £2,121 a year. When Pension Credit is claimed, it acts as a gateway to a cascade of other support: Housing Benefit, Council Tax Support, the Warm Homes Discount, a free TV licence for those over 75.

The total value of passported benefits for an eligible household can reach up to £9,056 a year.

£5 billion in pensioner-relevant benefits goes unclaimed every year in the UK.

The people missing out are not, in the main, people who have chosen not to engage. Policy in Practice, whose annual Missing Out report provides the most comprehensive picture of this gap, identifies three barriers that explain almost all of it: awareness, complexity, and stigma.

Awareness: many people simply don't know they qualify. They assume that having some savings, or some pension income, or having worked all their lives, means they fall above the threshold. They're often wrong.

Complexity: the system is difficult to navigate. Multiple applications, overlapping rules, eligibility criteria that interact in non-obvious ways. Even people who know they qualify can be deterred by the effort of pursuing it.

Stigma: the most underestimated barrier of the three. Many people who worked throughout their lives, who took on caring roles without complaint, who managed on what they had, find it difficult to identify as someone who needs support. The framing matters. 'You're entitled to this as a pensioner' lands differently from 'you're applying for benefits.' For people like my mum, the second framing would have stopped her before she started.

Government awareness campaigns have pushed Pension Credit take-up to around 65%. [1] That number has largely plateaued. The people still not claiming are, by definition, the hardest to reach through broadcast messaging.

A poster campaign or a television advert doesn't solve an awareness problem for someone who doesn't know the question to ask.

“National Pension Tracing Day exists because people lose track of what they’re owed. But the harder problem isn’t lost pensions. It’s the support people are entitled to right now, sitting unclaimed because no trusted voice has pointed them towards it.” Alan Morahan, Founder, National Pension Tracing Day

What the pension system already has

The scheme that paid my mum's annual pension already held the most relevant piece of data in her financial life: her verified income. It knew, within a reasonable margin, what she was living on. It communicated with her once a year. She opened it because it confirmed what she'd been paid. People pay attention when money arrives.

And yet nothing in that communication ever connected her verified income to the support she might have been entitled to on the basis of it. The data was there. The relationship was there. The moment was there. But none of it was joined up.

This is not a criticism of the scheme that paid her pension, or the administrator responsible for it. The payslip was built to confirm a payment, not to start a conversation. Nobody designed it to do more than that. But it is worth asking what it could do, with the infrastructure that now exists, and what the cost is of it continuing not to.

The infrastructure now exists

There is an assumption, still present in some corners of the industry, that this cohort cannot be reached digitally. The data does not support this. Ofcom's Communications Market Report 2024 found that 79% of adults aged 65–74 own a smartphone, a figure that has risen consistently for a decade. The FCA's Financial Lives Survey 2024 found that digital engagement is not the barrier it once was for older cohorts.

My mum passed away before any of this existed. But if she were still with us, she would have had a smartphone. She would have used it. Picture her annual pension notification arriving digitally, saying clearly, in plain language: 'many pension recipients are entitled to additional support they don't know about. Here's how to find out in two minutes.' There is every reason to believe she would have followed that prompt. The maze would still have existed. But she would have had a map.

The pension infrastructure

Pension infrastructure is closer to solving this problem than it might appear. The data exists. The relationship exists. The infrastructure to connect them now exists too.

What hasn't existed, for my mum, for 761,000 households, for millions more missing Carer's Allowance and Council Tax Support and the passported benefits that flow from them, is the connection itself.

The schemes paying their pensions communicate with them every year. For most of them, nobody has yet asked what that communication could do.

That question has an answer. But first: why did it take this long to ask it?

Sources
[1] Policy in Practice. Missing Out 2025. September 2025. policyinpractice.co.uk/publication/missing-out-2025/
[2] Ofcom. Communications Market Report 2024. ofcom.org.uk/research-and-data/telecoms-research/data-updates/communications-market-reports/2024
[3] FCA. Financial Lives Survey 2024. fca.org.uk/financial-lives