Stage 2 Decision

White has delivered his Stage 2 Internal Dispute Resolution Procedure (IDRP) decision and unsurprisingly the Barclay's UKRF Trustee has not found in the widow's favour.
I could respond to this but so far, apart from seeking clarification for a couple of the more blatant weasel word statements my actions have been focused on discussing the issues elsewhere. Until the Stage 2 letter wider distribution of my complaints could have been seen as somehow unfair. The system requires that I give them a year to decide whether they have disadvantaged me. Now they have decided that they haven't, all is well with WTW and the Barclays UKRF they see no problems, neither do they hear any problems.

The Stage 2 Trustee statement claims there was no reason financial or otherwise to deliberately manipulate the truth. When I read this I felt an urge to explain why service level statistics matter so much, why the administration might claim an email was lost or why they might fail to answer questions on multiple occasions, even when those questions were direct and straightforward. However, this urge to explain was fleeting, because there was no need. The Trustee was offering a spurious piece of nonsense and they knew it.

Not only has there has been so much published about the duty of care the Trustee has regarding the administration of pensions under their control but they also had the benefit a close relationship with Willis Towers Watson, so we can have no doubt at all that they fully understand the financial penalties if WTW fails to deliver.

Consider these statements all published by the Financial Regulators;

"Where applicable, industry or other quality standards should be referred to.

The administrator will be required to perform the services so as to meet or exceed the service levels. For example, that it will deal with transfer requests within a fixed timescale or answer telephone calls within a fixed number of rings etc. Service levels, service credits and pricing mechanisms for fees need to be carefully designed to ensure that they drive best behaviours and do not lead to perverse outcomes. For example, payment focused on the time taken to respond to transfer value quotations, combined with service levels that do not encourage the TPA to respond quickly could lead to member complaints of slow response times whilst the TPA would still be hitting the service levels – on the face of it performance requirements are being met but in practice the outcome is highly unsatisfactory as fee levels do not reflect an improvement in service quality / performance in real terms and scheme members are unlikely to be happy with their experience."

Clearly everyone, including Ian Malone, Colin White and the Barclays UKRF Trustee understands that fees are affected by meeting service level targets. They know that meeting those targets is the primary concern of the administration team and their primary concern is not the scheme members' satisfaction. So why was Malone so keen to tell me that when they were dealing with a dying man's urgent request the 30 service level standard was only exceeded by a mere 3 days? And why did the Stage 2 decision letter include the statement;

"You have claimed that the Barclays team knew that the administration failures denied Mr Matthews the opportunity to transfer. Given the need for manual calculation, we have seen no evidence that WTW intentionally delayed dealing with your husband's transfer request. In addition, there is no reason (financial or otherwise) why a transfer request would be delayed, subject to it meeting UKRF requirements.

The Trustee claims - "we have seen no evidence" that WTW intentionally delayed the transfer. I don't believe that this was ever my claim, although since submitting my complaint I have read a number of reports about the deliberate delays in pension transfers and so maybe I should have considered this. My complaint was the deliberate obfuscation and denial of their initial error in 2015, when they advised my husband;

• that he could not transfer to anything other than an overseas scheme
• IFA certification was a mandatory requirement for transfer requests prior to April 2015
• that my husband could obtain the forms he required from their online system (ePA)

The administration did NOT attempt to satisfactorily remedy these errors in 2015.

The transfer was valid for just three months and although my husband sent his request by email the Barclays Team at WTW chose to post a physical transfer package to our remote rural address in Australia. That took three weeks. Within days of receiving this package my husband contacted the Barclays Team by email to question the truth of the advice that he could only transfer to an overseas scheme.

Seven days later he was told that he had been sent a false statement.

Of course the Trustee does not consider it to be a false statement, they have some weasel words to explain the error. In their commitment to denial of responsibility they appear unable to recognise the capacity of the English language to communicate complex concepts without confusion. In a global society it is unbelievable that the Barclays Team are acting in the best interests of their scheme members when they allow WTW to make sweeping assumptions of where a scheme member wishes to place their pension monies, rather than offering the scheme member choice.

Choice was surely the fundamental factor that underpinned the changes within the new pension freedoms offered in 2015. By the time my husband received WTW opinion that he could actually transfer to a UK scheme over a month of the 3 months allowed had elapsed. But still WTW did not send him the necessary paperwork, and when he asked for clarification of what he believed to be the incorrect advice relating to IFA certification WTW misled him again with false information. 

The Barclays Team acknowledged his email and replied to two of the three points raised. However they did not respond to the question relating to Trustees' requirement for an IFA certificate. After 4 months of investigating the events surrounding my husband's failed transfer the Stage 1 decision letter appeared, in which Ian Malone stated;

"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 ..."

Most of us interpret concluding as meaning the finish. 
But my husband actually sent an email on 16 June 2015. Did Malone deliberately choose to overlook this email when he was crafting his Stage 1 decision? Or was he just incompetent or careless? His motivation might be of interest further down the line when an interested agency is attempting to identify such matters, for me what is important is that his choice of words, deliberate or careless created the impression that my husband did nothing after receipt of the 15th June 2015 email. The Stage 1 decision letter was factually incorrect.

Did it matter?

This old widow thinks it did matter, because my husband was trying to force an answer out of the Barclays Team, trying to clarify his understanding of the IFA requirement based on the advice he had been given. He had been advised that IFA certification was not needed.

There was a brief reference to this within the Stage 2 decision letter, dated 4th May but no unequivocal statement that my husband was misled by the Barclays Team, nor any comment at all on why Malone chose to deny the existence of my husband's 16 June email. Further enquiries had to be made by the old widow before the Colin White provided the following statement on 19th May 2017;

"In relation to the response to your late husband's email of 8 June 2015 in respect of requirements to obtain independent financial advice, the response from Ms Bienko dated 15 June 2015 did not answer this question. The answer was made in response to a follow up email from your late husband dated 16 June 2015. WTW responded on 23 June 2015 and stated "Please note there is no flexibility in regards to you seeking independent financial advice before transferring your benefits. This is the policy of the UKRF and cannot be changed.

In the Trustee's Stage 2 response, they highlighted and took into account that this was incorrect in their determination. They stated that although the Pension Schemes Act 2015 introduced a requirement for trustees to check that a member has obtained the appropriate independent advice before transferring a member's benefits, this requirement came into effect for requests made after 5 April 2015. Your late husband's request was prior to this date and transitional arrangements enabled transfer quotations, which were guaranteed for three months, to proceed without the requirement to obtain independent financial advice..."

It was true that the Trustee did mention the incorrect information but they did not connect all the various delays and errors to clearly state the position my husband was in when he received the incorrect information.

The Barclays Team had posted an overseas transfer pack when my husband wanted to transfer to a UK scheme, it took a month to clarify that a UK transfer was acceptable, and another month to get the incorrect information that IFA certification was a mandatory requirement. Concurrent with these errors he was also given, on multiple occasions the incorrect advice that he could download the UK transfer documents from the online system, known as the ePA.

If he had been sent the correct advice about transferring to a UK scheme and the UK transfer documentation then the incorrect IFA information would not necessarily have hampered the transfer, because he could have completed the paperwork and sent it to his IFA in the UK for onward submission. He would have incurred IFA costs that were unnecessary but this error in isolation would not have stopped transfer progressing.

The multiple points of failure in the Barclays Team administration frustrated the transfer.

The Pensions Regulator does provide guidelines, but not mandatory rules, on service levels and compensation but these all appear focused on the relationship between the Trustee and the administrator. So far this widow has not identified any clear standards on what a scheme member can claim for compensation. What the Pensions Regulator does illustrate is that within the relationship between the Barclays Trustee and WTW there are financial incentives to denying administration failures have occurred;

"Should the administrator fail to meet or exceed the service levels (except as a result of the fault of the trustees or, where it is a party, the principal employer) it may be liable to pay a “service credit”. Service credits are usually treated as a reduction in the price payable for the services, and accounted for on a monthly basis. They will often be subject to a monthly or annual financial limit set at a percentage of the standard fees.

Repeated or severe service failures can lead to escalation of the level of service credit payable and/or a termination right on behalf of the trustees. Care should be taken to ensure that service credits are not the sole remedy of the trustees in the event of a service failure (e.g. rights to terminate and claim damages should be clearly preserved where the level of performance drops substantially below that which the service credits were intended to compensate)."

So why would the Stage 2 Trustee decision letter claim there was no reason financial or otherwise to deliberately manipulate the truth in a situation where the administration have screwed up?