Why does acessing a camera attached to a springarm socket cause a NULL refrence error

Development Programming & Scripting
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1

As the title says, I am trying to access a camera component attached to a springarm socket that I have defined as follows

public:
UPROPERTY(EditAnywhere, Category = "camera")
USpringArmComponent* Springarm;

UPROPERTY(BlueprintReadWrite, Category = "Camera")
UCameraComponent* PlayerCamera;

the components are instantiated this way:

AXpCharacter::AXpCharacter(const FObjectInitializer& ObjectInitializer)
	: Super(ObjectInitializer.SetDefaultSubobjectClass<UCustomMoveComponent>(ACharacter::CharacterMovementComponentName))
{
Springarm = CreateDefaultSubobject<USpringArmComponent>(TEXT("SpringArm"));
Springarm->SetupAttachment(GetCapsuleComponent());

PlayerCamera = CreateDefaultSubobject<UCameraComponent>(TEXT("PlayerCamera"));
PlayerCamera->SetupAttachment(Springarm,USpringArmComponent::SocketName);
}

When I attempt to access the Camera component as follows:

PlayerCamera->GetForwardVector()

I receive a NULL reference error, testing in blueprints confirms that ‘PlayerCamera’ is NULL
Why is this and how should I access the camera correctly?