A mammoth undertaking

Chris had been a member of the company pension scheme since he first started work for them about 18 years ago. It’s quite a small scheme, as it only contains those of us who were working for the company when it was privatised some ten years ago – at which point the rather good final salary scheme that we were both on was promptly closed to new employees. So there are only a few thousand people in the scheme, and a relatively small number of active pensioners. Hence you might think it would be fairly straight-forward to administer.

I first phoned the pension provider the week after Chris died, to stake my claim to his pension. I was a bit confused that the various bits of paperwork I had about the pension had two different addresses on them – so I asked which I should use to send them a copy of the Death Certificate. Neither, it turned out; they had moved to a third address but hadn’t updated their headed notepaper! Although they said they had mail-forwarding arrangements, I was very pleased I’d checked as it would at best have led to a delay.

The first set of paperwork they sent me to fill in was missing one of the enclosures, which they said was “vital” for processing my application. So I had to phone them to chase it. After that, it seemed to go smoothly for a while and the widow’s pension is indeed being paid monthly into my bank account. It’s not a lot, but enough to pay for a cleaner and one good holiday a year, so will considerably improve my quality of life.

However, they also said that I “might be due a lump sum” at the trustee’s discretion. That seems to be a legal thing to keep any lump sum outside the estate for inheritance tax purposes. There was also the mystery of what had happened to Christopher’s Additional Voluntary Contributions, where he had put a lump sum from his redundancy payment directly into the pension, not knowing at that point that he was terminally ill. I phoned several times and also wrote to them asking what was happening, but just kept getting holding responses saying that the trustees were “looking into it”. Not very comforting! Perhaps the trustees don’t actually meet all that often?

They did eventually pay out the lump sum and AVC  at the end of last month, but forgot to tell me about it! The first thing I knew was when I went to get some cash out of the cashpoint and found there was more in my account than I was expecting. I had to phone them up and say “This isn’t a complaint – but have you just paid me some money direct into my account?”  It would have been nice to have received a letter first – if only to stop me worrying that someone unauthorised was laundering money through my account……

The latest installment of the saga happened today. I’ve just had a letter of apology from them for sending out a “Pensions Focus” newsletter last month addressed to Chris! If anyone should have known he was dead, it was them! I did think at the time that it was decidedly obtuse of them, and that people less robust than me might have got very upset. As it was, I merely found it amusing – the latest in a long line of sub-optimal communications from them.

Overall, I think their heart is in the right place, and I have absolutely no complaints about the results. But I do think that maybe their procedures could do with tightening up considerably.