Unclaimed Pensions

It’s actually far more possible for a person to lose track on money in a pension, whether it’s occupational or personal, than you might imagine (for obvious reasons, this doesn’t include state pensions).

You might have been in a job for a short while and not realised money was being put in a pension fund, or it might involve someone else, now dead, who didn’t know they had some money in a pension, or had forgotten it was there (which might be more common in the case of a personal pension).

The Pension Service, which administers pensions in the UK, believes that there’s around £3 billion in pension money that’s lying around unclaimed, but it’s difficult to come up with a more exact figure.

Finding a Pension

There’s a total of approximately 200,000 occupational and personal pension schemes in existence. That’s a massive figure, far, far bigger than banks or building societies. Trying to track one possible pension in all of those could be rather like looking for a needle in a haystack for an individual, at least without a great deal of information when starting.

However, the Pension Service can help with this – at least to an extent. They maintain a database of all the schemes, both past and present. It costs nothing to use it, and you can access it through the website, via mail or on the phone.

After you’ve requested a trace, the service will contact you with the result. If they discover that you, or whoever you’re representing, has money in a pension, they’ll give you the contact details for the fund so you can follow up and claim the money.

What They Need From You

Be aware, though, that without a certain amount of information there’s not a lot they can do. You’ll need to supply them with your own details, obviously, as well as the name of the pension scheme or the employer (with their full name and address, information on whether the employer changed names and whatever else you know). If at all possible, it would also be useful to supply information on the type of pension scheme – occupational, personal, etc.

Obviously, the more details you can supply, the greater the likelihood of them being able to locate the pension. You can even use this service if you live outside the UK but believe you have a claim on a UK private pension.

Claiming The Money

The Pension Service can help put you in touch with whoever has the pension, but you’ll be on your own when it comes to making the claim, although, in most cases, the procedure should be fairly straightforward.

You’ll need to establish your claim and prove your identity. From that point it should be simple to obtain payment. If you’re the heir to an estate with a pension it might take a little longer for the claim to go through – but you might also have had quite a job even tracking down the pension in the first place.