mystery of pensions

Where then did you source the original numbers you gave us for for that L&G policy? £61.30 x 52 weeks = your £3,187.56pa for sure, but wasn't that the unrevalued pension you had already earned as at year 2000 when the policy started or maybe even at 5.4.1997?

And the Secured Minimum Pension Transfer Value £58,124.82 - where did that come from? It is surely the amount that the trustees paid to L&G in 2000 to buy your deferred annuity?

And finally, where did you get that £61.30pw figure if you didn't do a calculation yourself to get it (£3,187.56pa/52)? Is it a number L&G have conjured up recently as a pension forecast?

Looks worthy of a lot more investigation to me ...

When did you join the old pension scheme, and can you remember your approximate salary at the end of 1996? And you were still with the same company when the DB scheme was finally disappeared at September 2000?

The widows pension you describe as not great, but if that is again a year 2000 figure, it is exactly what you would expect from a good Final Salary scheme (a 50% widows pension) and the real question is what has happened to the annual revaluations in deferment?

As I showed in that CAG link a few posts back, a 6.25%pa annual revaluation of the original plan figure for the pre-1997 GMP part of the pension would be typical.

My still in existence FS scheme from the same era is also a fixed 6.25% pa revaluation of the pre-1997 service earned GMP.

You can do your own validation / estimation on what your original FS scheme might have earned you as a pension by early 2000 before the old scheme was wound up. The L&G policy was largely supposed to stand in the place of the original scheme. That's largely what Section 32 of a Finance Act long ago was intended to acknowledge as fair play by employers/trustees who had tired of shouldering the pension liabilities themselves.

Let's take a round number 2000 salary just for estimation purposes - let's assume your salary was £25,000 per year by early 2000.

If you had left at that point, perhaps after 8 years employment (you haven't said exactly when you joined the original scheme) and assuming membership of a good FS scheme, then your earned pension to that point (pension entitlement on leaving service) may have been worked out on what is loosely known as a 60ths basis (depends on scheme but 60ths was still typical for old FS schemes still existing at that point). EVery year of service earns you a sixtieth of your final salary as your pension entitlement. Some schemes were better than that or worse than that, but 60ths was fairly typical.

Never mind GMP and COPE and SP and all that for the moment. The calculation of your earned occupational scheme total pension at the date of leaving service would have been approximately 8/60 x 25000 pa = £3400pa which happens to be in the same ballpark as the figure £3,187.56 you have given us.

Have I guessed about right for your number of years served as at 2000 and your salary as at 2000?

Then as I say, the very big unanswered question is how the original scheme would have automatically have revalued that leaving pension entitlement throughout the long wait until 2033 which I presume is the year in which you reach age 65? And the implied real question is whether the L&G policy which replaced most of your original pension, should also be automatically revalued over the years to 2033, reflecting what your original pension scheme almost certainly would have done if it had survived and if you had left in early 2000.

Form the CAG example I showed you, you can deduce from the revaluation regime described that it makes an enormous difference.