Comments on the Stage 1 decision

Comments on the Stage 1 decision letter dated 13 September 2016

The grey text is Mr Malone’s, indented.

Reasons for Dispute

1.         The delay in responses from the Barclays team at Willis Towers Watson ("the Barclays team") were unacceptable and resulted in your husband not being able to transfer his pension.

2.         The Barclays team did not answer questions that were asked of them throughout the proposed transfer process, and did not refer to previous correspondence on file when responding to requests for information.

3.         You have been financially disadvantaged by the delays experienced.

These three reasons are Mr Malone’s own creation; they ignore my primary reason for complaint. My primary complaint is that the Trustees made an offer to my husband in 2015 and the Barclays team frustrated his attempts to accept that offer.

The actions giving rise to my complaint commenced with the handling of the 2015 transfer request.  In 2015 the Barclays team sent a statement of entitlement to a guaranteed cash equivalent accompanied by false and misleading information that the offer was qualified. The statement sent read;

“I am only able to proceed with a transfer if the receiving scheme is a Qualifying Recognised Overseas Pension Scheme”

This statement was wrong, and the Barclays team only provided documents for an overseas transfer. These were the actions by the Barclays team that frustrated my husband’s acceptance of the transfer offer. All subsequent actions by the Barclays team merely added to the distress we experienced as we were confronted by an administration team acting as though their mission was to frustrate the transfer.

My husband was made an offer in May 2015 which we believed was in good faith but he was denied the means to enable him to accept that offer.

Summary of your complaint, investigation undertaken and response to your complaint.

1.         The delay in responses from the Barclays team at Willis Towers Watson ("the Barclays team") were unacceptable and resulted in your husband not being able to transfer his pension.

On 24th March 2015, your husband emailed the Barclays team to request a transfer in respect of his 1964 Pension Scheme benefits. Because your husband was beyond his normal retirement age (which was 28 June 2005) he did not have a statutory right to a transfer, as was explained in the Barclays team's letter to your husband of 1 May 2015, and the transfer was therefore at the Trustees discretion. The Trustees can only exercise this discretion with Barclays consent, which needed to be obtained before the calculation could begin. This also meant his transfer value needed to be calculated manually by the Scheme Actuary, as the administration team do not have the expertise required to perform this type of calculation in these circumstances.

The introduction of statutory rights into the discussion is interesting, but irrelevant.

At no time was my husband defending his statutory right, nor was my complaint about the delay in preparing the 2015 transfer value. Statutory rights and the time it took to receive the 2015 statement of entitlement were not in dispute.

He received an offer of a transfer value and was content with the time taken and the sum proposed. What he was not content with was the advice offered by the Barclays team that he could only transfer to an overseas pension arrangement.

A cash equivalent transfer value was provided to your husband on 1 May 2015 which allowing for public holidays was twenty five clear working days after his initial request. The Barclays team and your husband then exchanged further emails, concluding with an email from the Barclays team to your husband on 15 June 2015, in which the inclusion of an overseas transfer pack was explained, along with how your husband might obtain a UK transfer form.

Mr Malone took four months to investigate my complaint and during that time he did not ask any questions of me. If he had asked me why we did not avail ourselves of a UK transfer form in the manner advised by the Barclays team in their email dated 15 June 2015 I could have told him. My husband did log on to the Barclays site and attempt to obtain the forms that the Barclays team were unable or unwilling to email to him, this was the result;

You may find it difficult to read but the message on my poor quality screen print is;

“A quotation could not be produced for you. Please contact us for a quotation.”

This was another frustration for my husband who tried a number of times and attempted to understand the interface and why it would not offer him access to the necessary forms.

If Mr Malone had investigated the Barclays team’s advice before he had written his dismissive comment, “… along with how your husband might obtain a UK transfer form.” he would have realised that the Barclays team were once more issuing incorrect advice to a scheme member.

The online computer system did not service my husband’s pension despite the Barclays team providing him with the following advice in 2015 and again in 2016;

“You can go online and view your benefits, update your personal details and get illustrations, including options such as a transfer value and early retirement illustrations. Visit

https://epa.towerswatson.com/doc/BCL/login.htm. log on and explore this facility…”

This advice was incorrect.

Mr Malone does not explicitly confirm that the website was not in fact a facility offering any service at all to members of the UKRF pension scheme who had passed their normal retirement date. However, his awareness of the systems limitations is implicit within his comment, “… his transfer value needed to be calculated manually by the Scheme Actuary, as the administration team do not have the expertise required to perform this type of calculation in these circumstances.” Mr Malone knew that accessing the online system was not an option for my husband.

In January 2016 my husband attempted once more to get some action from the Barclays team.

On 30 January 2016, it appears that your husband emailed the Barclays team, notifying them that he wished to transfer his UKRF benefits to another UK pension arrangement and requesting the relevant forms. Your husband also explained in this email that he had acute terminal brain cancer. Regrettably, the Barclays team did not receive this email, and so the request for the relevant paperwork was not actioned, nor was his request for access to the online Barclays sites. The Barclays team have investigated this aspect and have confirmed to me that this email was never received and they have been unable to determine why. While the Barclays team email address had changed shortly before, the old email address, which your husband appears to have used, was still active. Further, there were no reported system outages at that time and the Barclays team have not been made aware of any other emails which were sent at a similar time by other members, but not received. In the absence of evidence that (i) there were system errors on the part of the Barclays team at the time and/or (ii) that the email was successfully sent, I cannot hold the Barclays team accountable for a failure to receive the email, as it may be that there was an error in the transmission of this email from your husband's email account.

Mr Malone does not make it clear in this paragraph whether a contemporaneous report was submitted to the technical support group on 26 March 2016, the earliest date that the Barclays team claimed they were aware an email from a scheme member had been lost during the period of parallel running the two email addresses. If technical failures are not reported by the Barclays team, as and when they occur then the extent of any failures will not be recognised. I will not bother with this at length because it is irrelevant. However, persons reading section 2 of Mr Malone’s investigation, where he admits to some of the Barclays team failures will conclude that his willingness to accept the email was lost by some outside agency is the result of bias.

On 26 March there is no doubt that my husband’s email was received, but Mr Malone does not record that two emails were sent, one to towerswatson and one to willistowerswatson. Mr Malone claims my husband sent this follow up email on 20 March, but he gives no evidence for this and I dispute the accuracy of his record.

On 20 March 2016, your husband again emailed the Barclays team, including his email of 30 January 2016 and asking for confirmation that it had been received, noting that he was unsure as to which email he ought to use. The Barclays team replied on 4 April 2016, asking for additional information to confirm your husband's identity, which he provided on 5 April 2016.

Neither email received any denial or confirmation that the January email was received.

I am responding to this section of Mr Malone’s report not because it affects any of the actions in 2015, with which my complaint was primarily concerned, but because this particular wording, “… your husband again emailed the Barclays team, including his email of 30 January 2016 .” is important. My husband did include the full text of his earlier email, and it was an email from a dying man addressed personally to a member of the Barclays team;

The Barclays team read this email from the dying scheme member and introduced a delay by making a spurious request that Mr Malone refers to as, "... additional information to confirm your husband's identity."  Mr Malone makes no mention here of the other pertinent information, "... I have a terminal illness."

When advised that a scheme member has a terminal illness would any reasonable person deliberately introduce completely unnecessary delays while they undertook an identity check?

Would the man on the Clapham Omnibus assess the Barclays team action in this instance as sincere? When the Barclays team received my husband's email on 26 March 2016 they knew they were dealing with a man in crisis, a man who was terminally ill, a man for whom delay would have serious consequences.  Mr Malone responds that, after delaying for 9 days the Barclays team needed, “… additional information to confirm our husband’s identity.” (by Mr Malone’s incorrect account using the 20^th March date they would have delayed by 15 days – but he makes no comment on this)

When this request for further identification was received my husband realised that we were not merely dealing with incompetence, but something more institutional. Please consider these points;

My husband had addressed his email, "Dear Ms Bienko", a person with whom he had corresponded just 6 months earlier. Was this a name that the Barclays team could reasonably be expected to recognise? If Ms Bienko had left the organisation had any effort been made to provide continuity of contact?

My husband was using the same email address that he had used for those 2015 communications with Ms Bienko, regarding a transfer to the UK based Equitable Life pension provider. Did anyone check the correspondence on file to ascertain whether the email came from an email address that could be verified?

My husband ended his email with his full name Paul Matthews, and his Barclays staff number was included in the email header. Does Barclays have many scheme members with this same pairing of identifiers?

When the two items of identification, name and staff number, are considered in conjunction with the use of Ms Bienko's name and transmission from the same email address, and requesting the completion of an action that had been frustrated due to maladministration just a few months earlier was there any genuine reason to doubt the authenticity of the email received?

Or might a reasonable person assess this action as another delaying tactic intended to frustrate the transfer?

On 6 April your husband again asked for a transfer pack to enable him to transfer to a UK pension arrangement. As with his transfer value request in 2015, as your husband passed his normal retirement date, it was necessary to ask the Scheme Actuary to calculate the value of his pension.

As I have outlined above, you husband did not have a statutory right to a transfer. However, by way of background, where a member does have a statutory right to request a transfer value, the relevant legislation broadly requires that the transfer value should be provided within three months of the date of the member's application. Barclays, the Trustee and the Barclays team aim to provide members with transfer values in significantly less time than this, and have agreed that where possible cash equivalent transfer packs should be provided within 10 working days of a member's application. For cases which need to be referred to the Scheme Actuary for calculation, as in your husband's case, a further 10 working days is allowed. In your husband's case, the Barclays team issued the transfer pack on 10 May 2016, which is 3 days outside this target period. Although regrettable, this is not a significant delay and, as you will see in respect of his 2015 application not unusual.

Mr Malone does not show how he worked out the number of days it took before a response was received, but he does offer a poignant reminder that for many people financial institutions remain 5 day a week operations, whereas for my husband the work of maintaining the computer systems upon which Barclays is entirely dependent was a 24/7 operation. He sacrificed many hours of family life and gave up weekends so that problems could be resolved quickly and projects implemented on time. If the systems programmers in Barclays adopted the Barclays team’s work ethic there might be some serious failures.

The statutory right argument was never an issue, and however often Mr Malone mentions it this will not change. A transfer value had been calculated by the Scheme Actuary in 2015. That value was valid until August 2015.

Is it beyond the imagination of Mr Malone to contemplate a scenario where the Scheme Actuary might be able to act a little more quickly for a dying man’s request? The transfer value offered in 2015 was £121,112 and in 2016 it was £121,565. Could that small adjustment in a retired member’s fund, to which no new contributions were made, justify a complete re-working that took 23 days?

Was it impossible for the Barclays team to email the necessary documents without waiting for the Scheme Actuary, so that my husband could deal with the IFA and receiving institution in advance of a final figure being agreed? Nobody could reasonably have expected the transfer value to have varied so significantly that an IFA’s advice would change. In dealing with my dying husband the Barclays team demonstrated a lack of urgency and a complete failure of humanity.

The speculation that Mr Malone enjoys commences in 2016. He doesn’t explain why he chose 2016 and not 2015.

I can only speculate as to what might have happened if your husband's original request for a transfer value had been received the Barclays team on 30 January 2016, but do so for completeness. Based on the agreed time limits, had your husband's email of 30 January 2016 reached the Barclays team, I would have expected the transfer pack to have been issued on or around 26 February 2016 at the earliest, or around the 4 March 2016 based on the time needed to calculate his transfer value in 2015. Before a transfer could have been made, it would then have been necessary to have completed the following;

a)    Your husband would have needed to obtain financial advice from a registered and suitable qualified Independent Financial Advisor (IFA) in the UK;

Here Mr Malone assumes that we would find some difficulty in accessing an IFA. Why would anyone think this? Nowhere within the Pensionwise booklet published by the UK government, nor on the moneyadviceservice.org.uk is there any suggestion that IFAs have become an endangered species.  Is this comment suggesting that the online directory of IFAs is an unreliable source? To get an IFA to sign a document that they had given us advice would have taken less than a day, if we had been given the document required by Barclays.

b)    Your husband would have needed to locate a receiving, authorised UK pension arrangement which would accept the transfer payment. In his email to the Barclays team of 6 April 2016 your husband indicated that he wished to transfer his benefits to Equitable Life, but this would not have been sufficient information to make a transfer.

We had already transferred both of our Cadbury-Schweppes pensions to Equitable Life and I cannot imagine why Mr Malone has included the stupid comment that a transfer needed more than the name of the institution. Equitable Life is partnered with Canada Life, if an annuity was essential for the GMP element they could accommodate our requirements. They cater well for impaired lives and we would have accepted them as a provider. Talking down to a complainant in this way, as though she knows nothing about financial services or client administration is both crass and illustrative of an unattractive arrogance. This whole speculation from Mr Malone is suggestive of a man wishing to demonstrate his busy-ness, a person trying to justify taking four months to produce such a poor response.

c)    All of the relevant paperwork from your husband, the IFA and the receiving arrangement (including a statement from the IFA that appropriate advice had been given) completed and returned to the Barclays team;

During the early months of 2016 while my husband was dying there were more family and friends than usual travelling back and forth between the UK and Western Australia. If Barclays find the use of email too challenging for the transmission of documents then other methods are available.

d)    Checks by the Barclays team to ensure that the receiving scheme was fully registered with HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) and fulfilled all requirements under the UKRF and legislation, including that the IFA was appropriately qualified. While there is no suggestion that your husband's benefits were at risk in this regard, due to a number of recent high-profile cases in the UK there has been considerable tightening of the law and guidance in this area in the last three years; and

If the Barclays team were involved then I have to admit that delays would probably be inevitable, extensive and totally inexplicable, unless some management intervention demanded an improvement in performance. Mr Malone fails to mention that recently many financial journalists have been reporting not on cases of fraudulent unregistered pension providers, but on cases where deliberate barriers have been introduced when pension transfers are requested, including some reports that unnecessary requirements for IFA advice were imposed.

e)    Processing of the transfer request by the Barclays team and payment of the money to the new pension arrangement.

Again, I do agree with Mr Malone that the Barclays team involvement in any process would prove to be a problem. Previously I had thought Barclays to be an institution well capable of transferring funds electronically, in the past they were even known to engage in international  banking activities.

Taking the earlier date of 26 February 2016 as the first day upon which this work could have begun, this would have left only thirty two working days to achieve steps a) to e) before your husband passed away on 14 April 2016. Based on experience of the timescales of other transfer requests and the added complexity that your husband did not reside in the UK, it is my view that it would not have been possible for your husband and the Barclays team to achieve all of this within this timescale.

Mr Malone continues on, and on, all of his speculation ignoring any potential for Barclays to treat a member of their pension scheme in distress any differently to a routine transaction, and ignoring the possibility that an administration team who had frustrated an offer in 2015 might have the capacity to provide responsive actions in 2016.

How did your Barclays team react when they read that Paul was dying?

“So, you’re dying, what do you expect us to do about it?”

“Don’t bust a gut over this one, he’ll be dead soon anyway.”

What they certainly didn’t do was offer any consideration at all. They knew that his 2015 transfer was frustrated by their own false and misleading statements, and their failure to provide the necessary forms, but when offered the opportunity to make good those mistakes they did nothing.

In summary, therefore, whilst it is regrettable that the Barclays team did not receive your husband's 30 January 2016 email, I consider it highly unlikely that the proposed transfer would have been completed even if this email had been received. In the light of this, I am unable to uphold this aspect of your complaint in that I cannot agree that the Barclays team should be held responsible for the delays experienced or that they are responsible for the transfer not being completed. I am aware that your husband was unwell and in hospital for some of this time and, while I have not taken this into account in reaching my conclusion, I think it makes it all the more unlikely that the necessary steps could have been completed in time.

Unlike Mr Malone I do not need to speculate as to what would have happened if the correct information and paperwork had been sent to my husband in 2015. The transfer would have been completed.

2.         The Barclays team did not answer questions that were asked of them throughout the proposed transfer process, and did not refer to previous correspondence on file when responding to requests for information.

It is clear from the information on file that questions were not answered on a number of occasions. Your husband initially enquired about the transfer value of his pension in 2015. On 8 June 2015, he made a number of enquiries of the Barclays team, one of which was regarding the need to obtain financial advice regarding the transfer. The Barclays team failed to address this question in their response on 15 June 2015, and had to be prompted by your husband to address it in a further email. Second, in an email sent on 26 March 2016, your husband asked for confirmation of the correct Barclays team email address, and also for confirmation that the email he had sent on 30 January 2016 had been received by the Barclays team. In the Barclays team's response sent 5 April 2016, neither question was answered.

Furthermore, when the transfer pack was issued, the covering letter stated "I am only able to proceed with a transfer if the receiving scheme is a Qualifying Recognised Overseas Pension Scheme (QROPS)", and the pack contained only the paperwork for a transfer to a Qualifying Recognised Overseas Pension Scheme. Although it is the standard practice to issue overseas transfer packs for members who reside outside of the UK, it is clear from the records that your husband had confirmed on a couple of occasions previously that it was his intent to transfer to a UK based pension arrangement. I consider that this ought to have been taken into account by the Barclays team in their communications with your husband and therefore agree that the level of service that he received from the Barclays team fell below that which the UKRF aims to provide to its members. I can confirm that this matter has been raised with the Barclays team administration management, as it is important that member's specific requests are addressed when a response is sent to them and that standard process and/or paperwork is not used without heed for what they already know about a member's specific circumstances.

I have detailed my proposed resolution to address the level of service your late husband received under the heading "The Stage 1 decision" below.

The Barclays team did more than just fail to answer questions, they made false and misleading statements; not only the QROPS advice but the direction to a website when the system did not support scheme members such as my husband.

Requesting further identification from a dying man who had provided sufficient information to commence the action requested. Not confirming or denying whether the January 2016 email was received.  Refusing to provide an unequivocal statement as to whether the involvement of an IFA was a legal requirement.

Mr Malone has not commented on the fact that when the spurious identification information was sent to the Barclays team they offered no acknowledgement at all. He states that they received the requested information on 6 April. How was this communicated to my husband? How could we know that? The email sent on 6 April has yet to be acknowledged, and I’m not anticipating that it ever will be.

My husband died never knowing whether his email confirming his details had ever arrived at the Barclays team. We received no confirmation about the January email, and no confirmation about the April email.

On 28^th April, as a new widow I telephoned the Barclays team. Did Mr Malone listen to that recording? It was an acrimonious and horrible communication experience that nobody should have to endure. On 11 May 2016, still hearing nothing from the Barclays team allegedly servicing a request from my husband, and with no acknowledgement that the Barclays team had ever received the email containing the additional information Mr Malone assessed as vital, I sent yet another email;

On 12 May the transfer documents, bearing 10 May date arrived by email. Still offering the incorrect advice;

“I am only able to proceed with a transfer if the receiving scheme is a Qualifying Recognised Overseas Pension Scheme”

Still offering the incorrect advice;

“You can go online and view your benefits, update your personal details and get illustrations, including options such as a transfer value and early retirement illustrations. Visit

https://epa.towerswatson.com/doc/BCL/login.htm. log on and explore this facility…”

Mr Malone does not comment on this aspect, but it does indicate something - either Barclays is not a learning organization or they deliberately wish to obfuscate and confuse the scheme members and are unwilling to make amendments that might make transfers easier.

But I did get an apology, so why complain?

3.         You have been financially disadvantaged by the delays experienced.

Under the 1964 Pension Scheme Rules, you are entitled to a spouse's pension, which is payable for the rest of your life. I can confirm that this spouse's pension is currently 2,234.54 a year, and will be put into payment once all of the relevant documentation has been received. This pension will be effective from the date of your husband's death, which means arrears of pension from 14 April 2016 are also due to you.

Furthermore, a lump sum equal to the unpaid pension instalments which were due to your husband from 28 June 2005 (his 60th birthday, which was his Normal Retirement Date) to 14 April 2016 is also payable to your husband's estate. I can confirm that this amount has been calculated to be 38,322.03 (gross). Please note that both the spouse's pension and the arrears lump sum in respect of your husband's pension instalments are subject to UK tax, but you may be able to reclaim some or all of this from HMRC depending on your personal circumstances.

As noted under point 1 above, I have found little to suggest that, even if the Barclays team had received your husband's 30 January 2016 email, the transfer value could have been paid out in the limited timeframes which, in the event, applied. I cannot therefore agree that any financial disadvantage which you believe you have suffered is due to the delay on the part of the Barclays team.

If the transfer had completed there would have been a value of 121,112 for a new provider. A joint life annuity to provide my husband with an income equal to the GMP element for his remaining few months and half that amount as a spouse pension would not have used the entire pension pot, bearing in mind our ages and my husband's diagnosis of terminal brain cancer. The balance after the annuity had been purchased would be available for me to inherit tax free as my husband was under 75 when he died.

Mr Malone has not provided any response to the 2015 transfer failure.

More interesting still is Mr Malone’s figure of a spouse’s pension of 2,234.54 a year. He makes no comment as to where he obtained this, or how it was calculated. The statement of entitlement was presumably provided by the Scheme Actuary, after he or she had toiled away manually for an excessive number of days. The May 2016 statement shows a total scheme pension of £1,745.07 a year. The spouse pension would normally be just half of that figure.

Mr Malone was responding to a complaint and he took the full four months to consider the detail of this case. I suggest that he, or some competent person offers some explanation as to the difference between the pension Mr Malone is now offering on 13 September 2016 and that offered on 10 May 2016. For a pension fund to be offering such wildly different figures is disconcerting as scheme members are rarely in a position to contest what they are quoted.

The Stage 1 decision

I have reviewed the points you raise and I am satisfied that the transfer value could not have been paid to a new provider within the foreshortened timeframe that applied.

However, it is clear from your late husband's file that the level of service he received was not of the standard which I expect to see and which UKBF aims to provide to its members. Once the Barclays team received your husband's request to transfer (on 26 March 2016), there was a slight delay in the provision of the transfer pack when measured against the ideal timescale. The team failed to respond fully to your husband's enquiries, and, furthermore, the paperwork which was sent was not properly tailored to the information your husband had given to the team. In light of this, I have decided to uphold point 2 of your complaint and to award you £500 for the poor level of service provided by the Barclays team. This award is on condition that it is accepted in full and final settlement of your complaint.

Mr Malone does not indicate what standard he would expect to see, and he particularly avoids giving any indication as to how the Barclays team might be expected to offer a remedy when they have failed to provide service of the standard he expects.

He completely ignores the information that my husband was dying. He ignores that the Barclays team knew administration failures had denied him the means to accept the offer made by the Trustee in 2015. The Barclays team had an opportunity to remedy their 2015 failure early in 2016, and they chose not to do so.  

We can only speculate as to their motivation to act this way.