A mammoth undertaking

Last month I blogged about the frustrations I’d been having with the administrators of Chris’s pension scheme – letters addressed to the wrong person, with an incorrect return address, missing enclosures, or just not arriving at all. My boss saw the post, and suggested to me that I was actually in a position to do something about it.  Not only am I one of their pensioners, but since Chris and I worked for the same firm, I’m also an active member of the scheme and, what’s more, I personally know at least one of the pension trustees. In fact, I worked with him for a while a few years back.

So I sent an email from work to the trustee, linking to the blog, and with a covering note saying that I thought he might appreciate some feedback on the “user experience”  of the scheme from the point of view of a pensioner. I offered to meet up with him for a coffee if he wanted to talk it over further. He immediately got back to me, thanking me very much for the information, and saying that he would definitely take me up on the offer next time he was visiting the Malvern site.

This week we managed to meet up, and I talked through the saga with him. I emphasised that I was not making a formal complaint – merely giving factual feedback. He said that all of the trustees had read the blog, and were really pleased that someone had taken the effort to tell them how things felt when interacting with the administrators as a client of the scheme. I’d dug out all the correspondence and taken it along with me, together with a timeline of what happened when, so he could see here the delays occurred. He took copious notes and I got the strong feeling that some robust feedback would be given from the trustees to the administrators in the near future!

I’m very pleased about that. One of the reasons Chris and I started this blog was in the hope that our experiences could be used to help, or at least inform, other people. I do hope that this blog can be instrumental in getting procedures tightened up at the pension administrators, so that the next widow/widower who needs to make a claim has an easier time of it than I did.