The Pensions Ombudsman has announced further delays to its long-awaited decisions on pension liberation complaints, stating they will not be published until the autumn.
There are now over 80 pension liberation complaints with the Ombudsman and it is likely the numbers are growing.
In an update today (21 August), the Pensions Ombudsman said: “The pension liberation cases that we are looking at need very careful consideration – in particular of the detail of the transferring and receiving schemes.
“We have needed to ask for extra information in most cases – and we need to give the parties the facts and the opportunity to make their own submissions and comment on our possible findings.
“We recognise that the pensions industry is highly interested to know what the outcomes will be. Unfortunately we are not yet in a position to publish our decisions on any of the cases. We expect to be able to do so in the autumn.”
In June FTAdviser reported that the Pensions Ombudsman had delayed decisions due to “complexity”.
The decisions were meant to be published in April or May and at that time FTAdviser reported that the Pensions Ombudsman was “nearing decisions on them... it is unlikely they will be published before July”.
Tony King, pensions ombudsman, previously attributed the delays to “complexity” and “the need to have the full picture”. He also said there has been “no dramatic change in numbers”.
Following on from this, FTAdviser reported that pension liberation now accounted for 5 per cent of complaints that the Ombudsman received.
At that time, pension liberation complaints had jumped to 52 in the 12 months to the end of March 2014 with the majority concerning blocked transfers, the Pension Ombudsman’s annual report revealed.
However, the report added that there were a few groups of “multiple complaints brought by representatives who had been advising the transfers” and therefore this had slightly skewed the total figure.
