Government in pension misselling scandal
So says the Parliamentary Ombudsman, Ann Abraham. It is rare to find government departments guilty of ‘maladministration’: it’s a hard charge to stick. It did not stick with Equitable, even though the DTI clearly was not up to the task of assessing the life company’s reserving adequacy, because the fault lay with Parliament’s mandate to the DTI not the DTI’s execution of its mandate. But in the case of the 80,000 people who lost their pension rights when their employer failed, there was no such excuse. In its desire to encourage pension scheme membership, the Government has repeatedly claimed that occupational pension scheme benefits were guaranteed. ‘Guaranteed’ is a term unscrupulous financial sales staff have played fast and furious with and lies behind all of the misselling scandals of recent memory.
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