The Lemon Fool

As I’m in my late 60s I thought it was about time I started accessing one of my defined contribution occupational pensions. I contacted the administrator on 1st March informing them that as they didn’t support drawdowns I’d like to transfer my pension pot with them to my SIPP. Unfortunately, there is a complication due to me being contracted of SERPS in the 90s, which I believe means some of my pension pot has to be spent on an annuity to provide a Guaranteed Minimum Pension. We agreed they would look into this and get back to me. Well, they haven’t although I phone them every 2 weeks and just get fobbed off with them telling me they’ll chase it up.

The question : is the administrator not obliged to respond to my pension access request within a reasonable timeframe e.g. 30 days?

Any suggestions on how to proceed would be greatly appreciated.

It sounds like you already have a SIPP. I transferred several pensions, one was my contracted out of SERPS but I didn't have your wrinkle. In all my transfers the process started with asking the SIPP provider to contact your donor pension. Why not put those wheels in motion?

Send them a formal complaint.

Head it FORMAL COMPLAINT.
Detail your complaint.
Detail what you expect as a resolution of the complaint (even if it seems bleedin' obvious from the detailing of the complaint).
Finish off with a sentence along the lines of "I hope to receive your full and final responses well within the eight weeks required by the Ombudsman".

If you don't get a satisfactory response within eight weeks you can then get the Pensions Ombudsman involved. Note that the Ombudsman won't consider taking up your case unless you first complain to the pension scheme and either you've received an unsatisfactory response or eight weeks have passed without one.

However, you hope not to get that far. While making a formal complaint is a necessary step to getting the Ombudsman taking up the case, the real value is that it usually gets kicked up a level, above the front line/call centre flunkies, and tends to get dealt with more quickly.

https://www.pensions-ombudsman.org.uk/

CautiousPaul wrote:Unfortunately, there is a complication due to me being contracted of SERPS in the 90s, which I believe means some of my pension pot has to be spent on an annuity to provide a Guaranteed Minimum Pension.

BTW, I don't believe that's true, however there are some situations with a DC pension where you have to get regulated financial advice to be able to transfer the pension. This a good resource:

https://www.moneyhelper.org.uk/en/pensions-and-retirement/building-your-retirement-pot/transferring-your-defined-contribution-pension#Do-you-need-financial-advice-

The key point here, certainly from both a FOS and an Energy Ombudsman perspective (from personal experience) but also I would imagine with the Pensions Ombudsman is that the company has a financial incentive to resolve the complaint because if it goes to the Ombudsman, not only do they get charged a per case fee they also have the management time etc taken up in resolving it.

Much better - except where something really goes awry - to get into their formal complaints procedure which will likely involve individual case specialists but who more importantly are going to be authorised to over-rule a computer system when the computer system says no.

While not a pensions issue, my recent complaint with HSBC took somewhat longer than planned (I think about 8 weeks in the end during which they did inform me a number of times it was taking longer than planned - and in fairness time wasn't an issue for me which it might be in your case) but they ultimately confirmed that the telephone "advice" I'd received was not appropriate and they put me back into the position I would have been had that "advice" not been offered together with an ex-gratia payment.

I put "advice" in quotation marks as they we're not offering advice - they just didn't correctly inform me of some of the T&Cs of a particular product and the complaints handler confirmed this from listening to the call transcripts.

mc2fool wrote:This a good resource:

https://www.moneyhelper.org.uk/en/pensions-and-retirement/building-your-retirement-pot/transferring-your-defined-contribution-pension#Do-you-need-financial-advice-

From which

How to move your pension

The first step is to find out your transfer value, which is the amount you have in your pension pot.

You can get this by asking your scheme administrator or pension provider.

Presumably you are stuck at this first hurdle.

They go on to say that you have to contact the receiving scheme to get the transfer rolling.

Alaric wrote:

mc2fool wrote:This a good resource:

https://www.moneyhelper.org.uk/en/pensions-and-retirement/building-your-retirement-pot/transferring-your-defined-contribution-pension#Do-you-need-financial-advice-

From which

How to move your pension

The first step is to find out your transfer value, which is the amount you have in your pension pot.

You can get this by asking your scheme administrator or pension provider.

Presumably you are stuck at this first hurdle.

They go on to say that you have to contact the receiving scheme to get the transfer rolling.

And before they say any of that they say "If you have what’s called ‘safeguarded benefits’, in particular if you have a guaranteed annuity rate and the value of these benefits is more than £30,000, you’ll have to get regulated financial advice before you can transfer.".

You don't have to presume where the OP is stuck at, he explicitly stated that he's waiting for them to get back to him on whether some of his pot has to be used for an annuity, which is why I specifically linked to the section of that page that includes the above quote.

The OP can ask for a transfer value but should check first what conditions there are around that; many schemes will only give one transfer value per 12 months for free and charge for any subsequent ones, and if so it'd be a good idea to get any potential gotchas, like the above, out of the way first.

I was contracted out of SERPs - lates 80s/90s/some 00s.
This was with Barclays.
When I transferred my pension from Barclays to HL 12 years ago they didn't query it at all.
Also, the distinction between SERPs + non-SERPs monies disappeared!
So I simply have a single pot to play with.
I think the distinction between SERPs and non-SERPs monies was stopped some time ago?

Unless they can give a full explanation of why they cannot or will not pay a transfer value to a SIPP, it seems most likely that they are just making it up. There may be something in the scheme rules, in which case they should be able to quote what it is. Otherwise it's likely just a half baked interpretation of the rules about getting advice when there's some form of guarantee involved and the transfer value exceeds £ 30,000.

Thanks to everybody who has responded.

I will go back to the administrator and request that the whole pension pot is transferred to my SIPP. I've recently done this with another occupational pension without any issues whatsoever.

I had been under the impression that I needed to buy an annuity with the SERPS contributions plus some of my non-SERPS contributions to generate the Guaranteed Minimum Pension (GMP) amount but I'm not convinced this is actually the case any longer. Because of that I had suggested they use a third of the pot to buy an annuity while the other two thirds was transferred to my SIPP. Their email response to this request contained the following sentence: "Due to the complexity of the matter, this may take slightly longer than usual to resolve." Obviously, I don't consider my request to be complex!

Interestingly, this administrator has only been looking after my pension since 2021 and they have stated that occasionally they have to refer to the previous administrator, Capita, for historic data. They also state on their website that Capita "recently experienced a cyber incidence' and 'some members' data has been compromised". I now wonder if some of my historic data has been lost resulting in this delay.