I got a letter this week from Aviva about a pension policy I’d had for years – long before they employed Bruce Willis to do their adverts and were called plain old Norwich Union. They were very kindly checking that I was still the same person but just living at a different address. This got me thinking about just how easy it is to lose track of pension benefits and how important good record keeping in schemes actually is. It is however generally an area that’s really undervalued with very little resource being committed to ensure that the primary purpose of a pension scheme – namely to pay the right benefits to the right member at the right time – is achieved. Hopefully the increased attention being paid by the Pensions Regulator to record keeping will encourage everyone involved to treat it a little more seriously.
