I am heartened to read on the website of the Financial Regulators Complaints Commissioner the following statement (thanks Rich Caddy, thanks Al Rush).
British Steel Pension Scheme (BSPS) update – 11 October 2024
By way of an update in relation to the BSPS matter, we have been thoroughly and independently examining the FCA’s files in relation to the eight-year period relating to BSPS, and we are also looking into a longer timeframe to understand the FCA’s awareness of issues in the defined benefit transfer market prior to the BSPS matter. We have received a significant amount of additional information from the FCA relating to their decision-making process which we have almost finished reviewing.
The Office of the Complaints Commissioner is taking into consideration all of the information and points raised by the individual complainants as well as the further documents recently received from the FCA and is working to issue its report encompassing all of the relevant information as quickly as possible whilst ensuring a thorough and careful investigation is completed.
If you have registered a BSPS complaint with us and would like to provide us with any further information, please contact info@frccommissioner.org.uk as soon as possible and in any event before 31 October 2024.
We will be issuing a further update about BSPS on our website on 4 November 2024.
An inheritance problem
We should not forget that it is now seven years since Time to Choose forced steelworkers to consider their pensions as potential pots.
Many of the steelworkers I spoke to in the autumn of 2017 gave as their reason for transfer, the capacity to pass their pension pot on to their family “tax-free”. It is the grimmest of ironies that some of these pots are now potentially taxable on death from April 2027, which will be the 1oth anniversary of the Regulatory Apportionment Agreement that triggered one of the most egregious mis-selling scandals of the past quarter of a century.
Defined benefit pensions are not liable to Inheritance tax and will not be post 2017 whether paid to the steelworker or surviving partner.
Let’s hope that the FRCC will find for the steelworkers and that they finally get redress and maybe the opportunity of restitution.