Is scheme specific lump sum protection *additional* to the LSA?

Seanw101

I have 2 pensions, neither accessed yet - the older one has "protected rights" of some kind on it which I believe is the same as "scheme specific lump sum protection", namely at some point in the distant past I became entitled to take more than 25% tax free from that pension and those rights still exist, potentially.

I've been doing a lot of digging around today and can't for the life of me work out whether these rights are additional to the current LSA of 268k or whether the LSA is now effectively a hard upper limit. I expect at some point in retirement the LSA will apply to me as I expect to withdraw more than 1.078M over that time, so am wondering whether I'm wasting my time worrying about these protected rights, which seem pretty limited anyway last time I asked about them. Standard Life mentioned a sum of about 20k, but again I'm not sure if that means I'd get 25% of the 20k extra or all of the 20k extra.

Some of the reading I've done suggests the order in which I take tax free cash from those 2 pensions might make a difference to how much I can take in total, but haven't been able to find anything explaining why that might be or how it might work in practice. If the LSA is a hard limit and I'm going to exceed it in any case, I would think that maybe the ordering would make no difference?

Wondering what I may be missing here?

Does anyone understand any of this, or can point me to any decent resources that explain it? I've found moneyhelper is just too superficial, gov.uk pages tend to be overwhelming with jargon, and then there are "adviser only" pages from financial companies that are almost useful, but still very hard to draw clear conclusions from.

DRS1

Have you read this?

Scheme specific tax-free cash protection

It has something about the order of taking things near the end.

Seanw101

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81872162#Comment_81872162

many thanks, that looks potentially helpful

leosayer

I looked into this last year regarding one of my pension's scheme specific lump sum.

I'd recommend looking at your retirement provision holistically rather than get (like I was) suckered in to thinking you must make use of the protection available from your scheme.

My thread here:

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6609781/db-lump-sum-protection-option-no-brainer