Patience pays (or allows you to pay). HMRC reply after more than two years.

[adamu]

Here's a rough timescale of my latest communications with HMRC in order to try to keep up my voluntary UK National Insurance payments:

• March 2018: Change Address. Send them a letter with my new address
• April 2018: Get a letter forwarded from my old address by Japan Post asking for payments for 2017-2018. Pay.
• June 2019: Wonder where this year's payment request is. Send them a letter asking that, and also reminding them my address changed.
• December 2019: Change address again. Send them another letter with my new address, also reminding them I'm still waiting to pay this year's pension. Include copies of previous letters too. Use registered post. Confirmation of delivery around a week later.
• 2020... Start to wonder if maybe I should write to my MP. Or more realistically at least brave the call centre first. But decide to give up for the time being because they're probably swamped with Universal Credit and subsidy claims.
• May 2020: Get a letter dated April 2020 asking for payment for 2018-2020 (two years) . Pay.

I'm guessing they didn't handle my 2018 change of address, so the 2019 request got sent to the old address after the forwarding expired and thrown away. Maybe they got the June 2019 letter but didn't send a reply. I know they got the December letter (or at least that it was delivered to the PO BOX) because of the registered post. I suspect they probably handled it, didn't send a reply, and then in April the annual process kicked in and I got the standard request for 2 years of payments. There was no acknowledgement of any of my letters in the standard-form letter that eventually arrived.

They have at least made the request for payment a lot clearer now, listing the exact bank details you need to transfer to on the letter itself. Previously you had to go online and do some detective work on the website to find the correct details.

(edited to add more details)

[Beaglehound]

They are not the greatest. I received a letter last week about 2019-20 payment. Of course their bank details have changed (not numbers but account name) and now has too many characters for my U.K. bank’s account name field, so I spent a weary paranoid few minutes googling whether this was likely to be a problem before deciding to just fit in as many characters as I could. Haven’t checked whether it has been credited yet but their account seems to have accepted it.

[adamu]

As far as I know the UK Banking system doesn't use account names for transfers, that's just for your reference, although there are plans to change it in the future. Only the sort code and account number is used for the transfer.

[RetireJapan]

Every time I have to deal with the car crash that is HMRC I am immensely grateful for the Japanese civil service. They may have too much annoying paperwork, but I have yet to have them ignore me, lose paperwork, or just not answer the damn phone

[adamu]

Every time I have to deal with the car crash that is HMRC I am immensely grateful for the Japanese civil service. They may have too much annoying paperwork, but I have yet to have them ignore me, lose paperwork, or just not answer the damn phone

The Kuyakusho lost my Zairyu Card when I moved in here. The clerk was just like: "Here's your My Number Notification card, that's everything!" and I was like "What about my residence card?". I waited about an hour before telling them I had another appointment. The Kacho or whoever drove it to my apartment 30 minutes later and did lots of bowing. Still not bad for a screw-up.

[Beaglehound]

As far as I know the UK Banking system doesn't use account names for transfers, that's just for your reference, although there are plans to change it in the future. Only the sort code and account number is used for the transfer.

Yes, my googling seemed to suggest that was the case but that the deadline is approaching for implementing account name checks as well and some banks are already doing so. Nationwide had no clear info on their current policy but I reckoned that with the correct number and sort code there was no chance of it being sent to the wrong place and the worst case would be them refusing the payment.

[Beaglehound]

Every time I have to deal with the car crash that is HMRC I am immensely grateful for the Japanese civil service. They may have too much annoying paperwork, but I have yet to have them ignore me, lose paperwork, or just not answer the damn phone

Yep, over officiouness is preferable to blasé incompetence every time.

[Wales4rugbyWC23]

I always send a cheque for my voluntary NICs only now used by HMRC and grandparents every March. My only worry is that I only have a few cheques left. I think I will have to do monthly direct debits soon.