Finding lost pensions

josephineR2021

I've been trying to do this for my partner but this service seems fundamentally flawed. You need to know the name of the provider for a personal pension - if we knew that why would we need the service? My partner cannot remember the provider name so how does he trace it?

squirrelpie

The government is trying to introduce something called the pensions dashboard, which I believe will eventually be able to find pensions when just given the name of the person it's for. But unless and until that service is introduced I think the short answer is that there's nowhere that indexes all pensions in the way that is required to answer your question.

Most pensions send an annual statement, which serve to remind you of their name. If your partner has both forgotten the name of the pension that he set up and changed address without forwarding mail and lost all the old annual statements, then I think you're stuck for now. Maybe he has some friends or old colleagues who might have similar pensions that he could ask?

Marcon

josephineR2021 said:

I've been trying to do this for my partner but this service seems fundamentally flawed. You need to know the name of the provider for a personal pension - if we knew that why would we need the service? My partner cannot remember the provider name so how does he trace it?

When (roughly) did he take this pension out? Does he have any vague recollection of how contributions were made - possibly he didn't have to actually pay in anything because it funded by means of rebates from his NI contributions -a so-called 'Appropriate' personal pension? If so, DWP will be able to help.

Longstop will be the much-delayed Pensions Dashboard - but don't expect it for at least another couple of years.

Otherwise he may have to wait until the pension provider tries to contact him when he reaches 65 (or whatever age he specified as his 'expected' retirement age when he took out the policy).