WTW Pension delay impending poverty

query37363

Hi my partner’s relevant birthday passed around a month ago and his pension still hasn’t turned up. At every turn there’s paperwork which needs resubmitting or some other administrative hiccough. We were relying on the income and are really stretched now without it and the longer time goes on the more dire the consequences of delay get.

Is this normal? Is there anything we can do? It’s so frustrating to feel so powerless.

Thank you in advance

Marcon

query37363 said:

Hi my partner’s relevant birthday passed around a month ago and his pension still hasn’t turned up. At every turn there’s paperwork which needs resubmitting or some other administrative hiccough. We were relying on the income and are really stretched now without it and the longer time goes on the more dire the consequences of delay get.

Is this normal? Is there anything we can do? It’s so frustrating to feel so powerless.

Thank you in advance

Your title suggests this is a pension administered by WTW rather than state pension. If so, it's a company (occupational) scheme and must have something known as the Internal Dispute Resolution Procedure. Ask for a copy of that and also ensure that the trustees themselves know what is going on. Your trustee board should include member nominated trustees, so your partner might even know one personally (shouldn't make a difference, but sometimes it does).

Before doing so, make sure that your partner has done everything they've been asked to do. If you complain about delays which are in truth not down to WTW, it won't help speed things up.

query37363

This is helpful, thank you

Brie

Dealing with WTW isn't helped by the fact that they administer so many occupational pensions.  I need to send separate emails for each of my pensions with them and get different time scales and different quality of responses from each.  One section sends me everything as zipped files and I always need to go back to them and ask for them to be posted as I can't unzip the files.  And then it usually takes 2 emails and a couple of phone calls to make it happen.  Very annoying.

xylophone

Hi my partner’s relevant birthday passed around a month ago and his pension still hasn’t turned up. At every turn there’s paperwork which needs resubmitting or some other administrative hiccough. 

Are you able to be more precise about the exact sequence of events?

Was this a deferred occupational pension or was your husband working for the employer sponsoring the scheme at the time he retired?

If deferred, was it incumbent upon him to contact WTW well in advance of the time when he wished to access the pension?

If so, did he do this?

If retiring from the sponsoring employer, had WTW contacted him with some form of retirement pack?

squirrelpie

"I can't unzip the files" - that sounds an unusual problem. Can I ask what your difficulty is in unzipping them? My wife refuses to have anything to do with computers and so asks for everything on paper too, but you're posting here so obviously you do use computers.