Or let them begin in a few months.
The April reforms have put a lot of pressure on pension companies to deal with clients who want to cash in their pensions. But unfortunately some companies have been given bad exposure in the news, in this case, Prudential.
They have been criticised for causing a delay in a clients access to her pension by several months. The client was a divorcee and the reason for the delay was because Prudential had said it was “inundated” as a consequence of the reforms.
Let’s call the financial adviser of the client Mr X. So Mr X said that his client had a pension sharing order following her divorce. Then in February this year, Mr X contacted Prudential on behalf of the client, asking them to issue a plan.
Prudential apparently issued the policy in May according to Mr X, though it was back-dated to late April. Mr X had said:
“No one at Prudential during discussions or emails would give me a definitive answer as to why the case was taking so long to issue.”
Prudential had claimed that the pension sharing delay was caused by them being inundated because of the pension liberation. However, Mr X said the case was with Prudential 6 weeks before any liberation application could be transacted. Pension sharing delays are nothing new and we have cases which have taken 2 to 3 years to complete. But the pension freedoms have definitely slowed things down. So if you are considering what you are going to do once you receive your pension share you do need to be considering the current timescales.
Well at least the delay wasn’t 20 years like in the Dale Vine and Kathleen Wyatt divorce case.
