The following was submitted by myself at a FAS consultation meeting with the department of Works and Pensions on the 16th May.
I was informed on the 21st March this year that the trustees of my occupational pension scheme had agreed to allow the company, which made me redundant 10 years ago, to wind up the scheme in such a way as to allow the company to keep trading.
I have been told that as a deferred member I will only receive at the most 20% of the £17,000 a year pension I had expected when I retire in four years time and that it would cost me £300,000 to replace the missing pension.
The trustees have advised me that the current cash equivalent of the pension has been reduced by 92.8% from £220,953 to £15,909.
I had thought that I had reached the stage in life where I had financial security and had a chance to return something to the community. I have retrained to become a secondary school science teacher and started my new career at the age of 60. I now find myself in a profession where everybody retires at sixty with a guaranteed pension, while I face the prospect of working on past sixty-five with virtually no pension at all.
I have approached OPAS and they tell me that the trustees and the company appear to have carried out all the actions required by law and that the agreement reached probably meets the criteria required by the relevant Act.
I believed that if there was a set of criteria, which allowed the company to walk away from its obligations to pay my pension, the same set of criteria would make me eligible for the FAS compensation scheme.
I now know that this is not true and that it is proposed to exclude people like myself from the FAS scheme.
At first I, and everybody I have spoken to believed that this could not be true.
When I wrote to the Department of Works and Pension, Patricia Hollis stated in her reply: “ We do have sympathy for all those who are affected by pension losses through no fault of there own. However, we strongly believe that solvent employers have a duty to support their schemes and that we focus assistance only where schemes employers are insolvent. It would not be right to allow employers to ignore this moral responsibility and allow them to offload the under-funding in their schemes onto the general taxpayer.”
I am an example that proves this is exactly what has been allowed to occur. The employers are not meeting their responsibilities with your sanction and I, a general taxpayer for the whole of my working life, am being told that I must bear the enormous cost.
Sympathy will not replace my pension; sympathy will not stop the constant worry my wife and I have about the future and constant anxiety about the injustice of it all. Sympathy will not give us back the retirement we have earned and paid for.
My wife no longer sleeps at night, she feels that she will no longer be able to help her daughters when they marry, she will not be able to visit her only brother who lives in Australia and will not be able to do all the things she had hoped she would be able to do with and for her grand children. She and I now face a future where we will have to work as long as our health will allow.
Winning say £125,000 is said to be a life-changing event, think what having £300,000 taken from you can do.
The government is trying to decide how to persuade people to save more for their retirement. When our children ask what should we do about pensions we can only say ‘’Keep control of your money or spend it before somebody does it for you.’’ The current system offers no security at all; it allows companies to walk away from their responsibilities and does not offer any way for those affected to obtain compensation.
If I have misunderstood the situation in some way perhaps you could advise me how I can either pursue the company for what is rightfully mine or how I can qualify for compensation under the FAS compensation scheme.
Dr Altman, No. 10 & Treasury pensions adviser & London Schoool of Economics governor who
is recommneding an increase in government pensions compensation, to my FAS address & letter May 2005
"Dear Dave
...sincerely hope that you will receive your
pension along with all the others who have lost out so dreadfully after believing Government assurances that they were safe.
I hope that the Parliamentary Ombudsman report will recommend compensation for all of you and am working hard to help
achieve that. You all deserve it!
Ros "