Pension Dashboard - Distressing to see the reasons behind the interminable delays

hyubh

Silvertabby said:

hyubh said:

Silvertabby said:

And, of course, old service long since taken as a long forgotten refund won't appear at all.

Unfortunate, as would have made for a good opportunity for many E&W LGPS funds to get shot of old frozen refunds, but alas the government didn't see the need. Maybe get them in once Dashboard is established (and a new government is in place)...?

I was referring to refunds actually paid out yonks ago.

No liability records aren't in scope, and nor should they be. It's only with continuity of administration, both organisational and software, that you might expect old NL refund records to still exist at all. Nevertheless, the point of Dashboard is for individuals to find the pensions they have, not what they might think they have.

The LGPS I worked for certainly had computerised records for even the oldest frozen refunds, and would regularly try to make contact with their owners in order to get rid of them.  Unfortunately, I suspect that many of the tracing letters went straight onto the bin as 'scam'.  Transferring them to the pensions dashboard could help, but they would have to be recorded in a separate section as they aren't actual pensions.

For sure, which is probably partly why the consultation response from a couple of years back ruled out including them. (Also: the concept of frozen/deferred refunds is very E&W LGPS specific. Even the Scottish LGPS doesn't have them, let alone DB schemes more generally.)

Whenever you-know-who ran a 'be sure to collect your old pensions' campaign we would be flooded with calls from people who had left decades before.  'Nil remaining benefits' records weren't computerised, so a demand for pension details involved a cross campus hike to the paper archives.  Then trying to convince the enquirer that they did take a refund of their pension contributions way back when, even if they couldn't remember getting the money.  Really didn't appreciate you-know-whos advice 'not to take no for an answer - if you are sure that you have a pension then insist that they find it for you'. 

Yes, but that's not how Dashboard will work. The end user will not enter the pensions they think they have, rather they will enter key personal details then schemes across the land will be polled for whether they have any matching active or deferred records. For sure it would be great if there could be a generic system to cover NL records too, but that's never going to be on the table - and Dashboard won't be a pointless endeavour without it. Don't make the perfect the enemy of the good and all that...