No freedom for my pension!!!

hyubh

Silvertabby wrote: »

When the 'Pension Freedoms' were announced, the newspaper reports did say that they only applied to personal/money purchase pension plans, and not to the (unfunded) Public Sector defined benefit schemes.

A complete swindle in my view... If good upstanding citizens like grantie2u want to do the public-spirited thing and transfer out on SCAPE terms, the cash should be made available to help them do exactly that.

grantie2u

well thanks all for your comments, interesting. My complaint, quite apart from the fact that whether we like it or not and whether we have a gold plated scheme or not is this, as my pension provider, Royal Mail had a duty to write to its individual members to inform them that after this date in 2015 we could not transfer our pensions, this would have given us the choice to either move it or not, we were not given that choice. Fact.

PeacefulWaters

grantie2u wrote: »

well thanks all for your comments, interesting. My complaint, quite apart from the fact that whether we like it or not and whether we have a gold plated scheme or not is this, as my pension provider, Royal Mail had a duty to write to its individual members to inform them that after this date in 2015 we could not transfer our pensions, this would have given us the choice to either move it or not, we were not given that choice. Fact.

Perhaps the letter got lost in the post.

GunJack

grantie2u wrote: »

well thanks all for your comments, interesting. My complaint, quite apart from the fact that whether we like it or not and whether we have a gold plated scheme or not is this, as my pension provider, Royal Mail had a duty to write to its individual members to inform them that after this date in 2015 we could not transfer our pensions, this would have given us the choice to either move it or not, we were not given that choice. Fact.

Even if they had done, youd've been pushed to do so - from legislation to cut-off was only a month

grantie2u

I think we've been stitched up, its unfair to have pensions freedom for everyone but then say people with pensions which now fall under the unfunded public sector schemes cant access the freedoms, it is through no fault of the members of these schemes that they are now in this situation, we paid in when the employers were told by the schemes actuaries to take years of payment holidays but where are the sanctions on the them?

Linton

grantie2u wrote: »

I think we've been stitched up, its unfair to have pensions freedom for everyone but then say people with pensions which now fall under the unfunded public sector schemes cant access the freedoms, it is through no fault of the members of these schemes that they are now in this situation, we paid in when the employers were told by the schemes actuaries to take years of payment holidays but where are the sanctions on the them?

No, you didnt pay in when your employer took years of payment holiday. With an unfunded scheme your and your employer's payments dont go into a pot. Broadly the money you both paid in went to pensions paid out to current pensioners with the risk that they dont match taken by the employer and ultimately by the tax payer. You paid in to gain a right to a future pension, that's all. There is no pot out of which you could be paid.

PeacefulWaters

grantie2u wrote: »

I think we've been stitched up, its unfair to have pensions freedom for everyone

Millions never had these freedoms you seem to think everybody else has.

but then say people with pensions which now fall under the unfunded public sector schemes cant access the freedoms, it is through no fault of the members of these schemes that they are now in this situation

And it's no fault of anybody else that you have a pretty decent pension, packed with guarantees that most of the population don't have.

we paid in when the employers were told by the schemes actuaries to take years of payment holidays but where are the sanctions on the them?

Seems a bit irrelevant.

Malthusian

grantie2u wrote: »

I think we've been stitched up, its unfair to have pensions freedom for everyone but then say people with pensions which now fall under the unfunded public sector schemes cant access the freedoms

Personally I would have given everyone in your situation the right to transfer out of unfunded schemes in exchange for, let's say, 20x their annual pension. But the Government is less cruel than I am.

it is through no fault of the members of these schemes that they are now in this situation

Of course it is. You could have not made contributions to your pension and instead saved the money in your own name; you chose to give up flexibility and access in exchange for the benefits that the Royal Mail pension scheme offered. And you would have been insane to do anything else.

we paid in when the employers were told by the schemes actuaries to take years of payment holidays but where are the sanctions on the them?

What has that got to do with it? Employers were forced to take pension scheme holidays in the 90s because putting money into a pension scheme that already (by all actuarial calculations) had enough money to meet its future obligations was viewed by all right-thinking people as a means of dodging their fair share of corporation tax. Can't have that, can we.

Pension freedoms were introduced because it was no longer tenable to force people down the road of buying annuities with their personal pensions, given the crap rates annuities offered. People in gold-plated pension schemes have no reason to worry about annuity rates - they will get a stupendous rate of return no matter what annuity rates are like. (Indeed, they are part of the reason why annuity rates are crap in the first place. We are trillions in debt, in part due to public sector pension liabilities; because we are trillions in debt we need to inflate our debt away as much as possible; to stoke inflation interest rates need to be kept low; because interest rates are low annuity rates are crap.) Pension freedoms were never intended for them - they aren't the ones who needed pension freedom.

grantie2u

Ah, now I understand, it's all my fault :-)

hyubh

grantie2u wrote: »

Ah, now I understand, it's all my fault :-)

FWIW, it wasn't predictable to me that the government, in order to take the pension fund off of the privatised Royal Mail's books, would convert it to an unfunded scheme. While the situation was a bit different, the probation service was also privatised by the same Tory-Lib Dem government, yet its funded pension liabilities (LGPS - each probation trust was a member of its local LGPS fund) were kept that way, just bulk transferred to a single LGPS fund (Greater Manchester) with the government becoming direct guarantor.