Pension help please - non payment.

[Em8725]

Hi all,

I care for an elderly relative and hold LPA. I have looked at her bank statements today and she has not been paid her private survivors pension for 3 months.

Where do I start? I can’t find an active phone number for the company that currently holds the pensions on behalf of her late husbands employer.

Is there a minimum time frame of when they have to have this sorted out by? Will they pay it in a lump sum? She was rapidly spending through her savings which prompted me to check what was going on - and now she has nothing left in the savings pot.

I am completely clueless about pensions. She has full capacity at the moment but gets into a muddle when phoning companies. She is more or less completely independent. I am a point of contact for her, to phone companies/banks etc on her behalf.

Thankyou, I feel awful, how did I miss that 😩

Does she have any letters - I get a work pension and I always get a letter from them sometime after the end if the tax year , so perhaps she has a recent one too??

@starfishmummy Thankyou it comes from the actual employer rather than the holder of the pension. I’ve found the company but can’t find who to contact 😩

If the employer still exists call their HR and ask to speak to the pensions manager or similar. You may have trouble with GDPR actually discussing the situation but at least get an email address for urgent communication so they can get the payments rectified.

You could also try the Pension Tracing Service gov.uk, they can give you pension contact details. Some survivors pensions are for a set period not for the life of the survivor, so it is possible it is not a mistake, but hopefully not.

Just to clarify, her husband passed 3 months ago?

Sorry @Polkadotties I was in a stress and didn’t explain it well, he passed 18 years ago 😩.

The pension service tracer has given me a new address. Thankyou, I’ll write a letter ASAP whilst I look for an email address

Ahh ok. I thought it may have been 3 months since he passed away, it’s quite usual for a widows pension to take a few months to start.
It may be the pension has been suspended, they may have had returned post, my scheme automatically suspends pensions if we get returned post.

@Polkadotties When I was widowed it took seven months of chasing to get the lump sum death in service benefit from my DH's employers (no pension due). It also took four months to get the insurance to pay off the mortgage, despite chasing.
You may work for an efficient company, but not all are.

I said it was usual, not unusual

Sometimes they will send out letters to confirm you are still alive it happened to us but we were living abroad we had to get a signature from a professional to say we were still alive. Not sure if they do it in the UK? Ours is a Government pension though.

The pension should be paid for her lifetime so it's right to check what's going on.

As a PP said pension companies do periodically require proof that the recipient is still alive. Not everyone informs the pension company when a person has passed away and they keep receiving the pension income when it should have stopped.

My guess is that a letter asking for proof has not been responded to. It should be very easy to sort out and the missed payments should be made.

Thankyou. I have asked her if she’s had any letters from them but she hasn’t, since January when the last payment was, just confirming that she had been paid. Hopefully it’s a simple fix. I found an email address and am now waiting for a response - I hope this comes soon. Huge electricity bill is due (she does them quarterly!)

@Lindy2 you are right, they said they had one letter returned. The lady hasn’t returned any letters. Apparently their contact tracing team take 3 weeks to investigate but they can’t explain why this has taken 3 months - especially as they have her phone number.

we are no closer to getting this resolved. They’re saying it can take 10-15 days to investigate and a further 10-15 days to resolve. I’m at my wits end!