My battle with pension providers is so Soviet

Living behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s brought what I hoped would be lifetime lows: apathetic, snarling, sometimes even violent interactions with callous bossyboots. It was quite normal to prefix a request with “bud’te chelovecheski”, Russian for “be human”, in the hope of sparking a little compassion.

True, nobody in the past year has beaten me up, arrested or interrogated me. But it sometimes feels just as harrowing. My experiences with companies and bureaucrats who are supposedly there to serve me have been time-consuming, humiliating, exhausting and worrying — and all the more so because my wife and I are at least notionally customers, and the money involved is supposedly ours. Other costs include our time, priced at zero during the endless phone marathons (“your call is important to us”), wasted journeys, form-filling and sleepless nights.

Feelings of powerlessness intensify as you age. Brilliant NHS hearing aids mean my mild deafness barely inconveniences me in daily life. But I struggle with mumbled words, especially against a noisy call-centre background and on a poor phone line. Requests to speak slowly and distinctly all too often arouse no reaction, or a raised voice and a patronising manner. I like to remind the worst offenders that the 2010 Equality Act requires service providers to make reasonable provision for disability; failure to do so is potential discrimination.

Often, even that falls flat. Scottish Widows’ “what we stand for” statement trumpets its opposition to “discrimination and inappropriate behaviour in all forms, whether racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic or ableist”. When I complained about a particularly inaudible employee, the company responded that as “the conversation had continued for several minutes”, I had clearly been able to understand. I wonder if it would take the same approach to someone with mobility problems struggling up the stairs on crutches. “You got there in the end, so stop grumbling,” might come across as heartless.

The dialogue (or lack of it) between Scottish Widows and our main pension provider, a company with the misleading name of Options (“dead ends” would be better), is a saga of forms that went missing in the post, digitally signed documents that cannot be opened, emails that were sent to the wrong address or never answered, and endless, endless phone calls. Nobody seems to care that this is our hard-earned cash. Box-ticking is the thing, and as slowly as possible. At what we thought was the final hurdle last month, Scottish Widows suddenly demanded that we gain the approval of a government watchdog called “MoneyHelper” — which offers no appointments in the stipulated timeframe.

I’ve made formal complaints to both providers. Scottish Widows offered me £100, which I suggested they donate to a mental health charity, preferably one dealing with their clients. Options is still mulling a growing list of their blunders, first submitted on July 1.

Fighting these battles runs in my blood. My late father was a consumer-rights pioneer in the early 1960s. I have an economics degree. I used to write about finance. I know the law. Written communication holds no terrors: I write as easily as I talk (more so, these days). I can track down decision-makers and guess their emails (top tip: write to the company secretary explaining the compliance cost of an impending complaint). I can, in extremis, play a joker, writing to the press office. Many companies have an “executive complaints” team that specialises in unscrambling problems for the well-connected and influential; another echo of the Soviet system’s two-tier justice.

t for most victims such tricks look like distant wizardry. As my wife wrote in despair (and in vain) to Scottish Widows, “What of a real-life Scottish widow, near penury and deep in grief? For shame.”

I now find it hard to advise anyone to obey government exhortations to invest in a pension. Looking back over 40 years of misselling, bureaucratic thickets, swirling regulatory changes, hidden costs and tiresome box-ticking, we should have saved ourselves the trouble and put our money in gold sovereigns (which have roughly kept pace with the FTSE). At least nobody tells you what you can do with them.

The corrosive consequences of the arrogant, wasteful financial industry damage more than our savings habits. What really destroyed the Soviet empire was not its economic failure and political repression but the hypocrisy around it. People could see that the system was not working and resented being told that they should be proud and grateful.

I worry that our financial system is heading the same way. We are told that the customer is king, that our masters are actually our servants and that we face unparalleled choice and opportunity. But it doesn’t feel like that. We are bossed around, patronised, cheated and lied to. For how much longer?