Yes you do - they send you out a letter about 3 months before you reach the qualifying age telling you to claim it if you want to receive it. These days you do it online, though you can write or probably phone up.
If you don’t claim it, it gets deferred and you then get a slight increase in the pension amount when you do decide to claim it, depending on how long it’s deferred for.
Indeed, few even in the press mention it at all. Another thing that gets ignored is the last government creating the perceived ‘asylum seeker hotels’ issue by basically putting a go slow on processing asylum claims and allowing the number of people awaiting a decision to increase massively. If you were cynical (and I am esp. where politicians are concerned) you would think it was intentional 
In addition to the Dublin Protocol thing I believe the French offered the UK Government the opportunity to set up an asylum seeker processing centre at Calais, but they declined.
The whole thing, including the suffering and deaths for the desperate people crossing the Channel, is so unnecessary.
Hi Chris. I have just claimed my State Pension. I went online and downloaded and printed the claim documents. Completed the forms, history of where employed and where lived. Signed and then enclosed original birth certificate and marriage certificate, all put in an envelop and posted to DWP Wolverhampton . Bit of a laborious process. It has to be sent off no earlier than 3 months before your retirement date. I received my birth and marriage certificates back in France after only two weeks. Impressed to see them again. Now I wait……..
I don’t remember having to provide any employment history but I am still in the UK so my up to date records would have been “in the system”.
It maybe the claim form is different for overseas claimants. I don’t know, on the HMRC site my employment history was all up to date but they still wanted it all written on the claim form.
Should have just called them😉
I am female, I am in the target group and I knew many years ago that the pension age was changing. My understanding is that relatively few women were not sent “ the letter”. I wasn’t, but I still knew about it. I guess if you never read a newspaper, or watched TV or had friends in a similar situation you might not know about it.
I claimed my state pension whilst still living in the UK as did my wife. Don’t claim and it’s deferred as some who reach pensionable age may still be working or have other means of income and don’t want it paying until later. It would never be paid automatically at pension age.
I think it must be Peter, I claimed my Uk pension earlier this year, ( I live in Uk), and no employment history asked for.
I wasn’t sent the letter as I had already taken early retirement in 2010 and moved on (registering new address of course) so was no longer permanently in the UK when the extra year was added in 2011. As for the previous changes, who reads pension news when not at pension age? I certainly didn’t as had other things to read and think about
But did you know about the change. I just don’t know anyone who didn’t.
The nearer this F gets to being elected PM, the more worried we should become. Like Trump, they are both in it for personal power and would use it to effect their own dark purposes.
Quite bluntly, a large swathe, possibly a majority in UK, either outright aggree with what we may dismiss as ridiculous, or they are idiots who believe this charlatan will restore Britain.
Should they believe Starmer instead?
The fact that he is not working class is now being openly shown by the remarks he is said to have made whilst at Dulwich College.
Given the choices available I would believe Starmer or Ed Davey fairly readily.
If Badenoch or Farage told me the sky was blue I’d go out and check.
If it comes to a direct either/or then absolutely, yes.
If Farage shook my hand, I’d be checking my watch was still there and I don’t have a particularly expensive watch.
Starmer is not dishonest nor does he have a personal agenda.
Starmer’s problem is mostly about image - he looks like Arthur Putey the meek accountant from Monty Python, and he is absolutely rubbish at explaining his policies and getting people on side to accomplish them.
Also, to be fair, he is trying to keep the lid on a party which is notoriously split between the hard left and the Blarites (and perhaps now a third faction of Starmerites).
There is that. But the Tories have been split for years and nobody knows what any of Reform actually believe, apart from “keep out foreigners”. 
I still think it’s mostly a question of cack-handed comms, along with a few own-goals due to inexperience. Maybe they need to hire Dominic Cummings.