Help needed urgently

wallyboyes

My wife is having problems with Contracted Out Deductions, and we cannot get the dept of work and pensions to give us any sensible answers to our question.

The problem is that she had a pension with Thomas Cook of £1200pa when she left. Some time later she joined me in my Travel Agency and we set up a small pension with Commercial Union, who took over the Cooks pension telling us that they would make more money for us, at the same time changing the retirement date from 60 to 65.

On receiving state pension we found the C O D was £24.00 per week, after questioning we were advised that as my wife had a £1200 pension this was correct.

We told them that she had not yet received the pension from Norwich Union who had taken over CU. After contacting the Ombudsman Norwich Union were forced to revert back to the original retirement date, but no mention was ever made about the COD.

By this time the market in annuities had fallen and all my wife gets is £56 per month and the COD is £24per week.

Can someone help please

CIS

There's no way to appeal the COD, its a standard rate applied which depends on the type of scheme and the age of the person. ( I used to work for state pension forecasting calculating COD/AP etc etc)

The COD has nothing to do with the pension company, it is purely down to the governments rules depending on the scheme type.

What you have fallen in to is the trap of schemes not performong as well as they where expected to do and falling behind the rate that government expected the schemes to perform at, its happened to a lot of people who contracted out.