Pension Ombudsman

I've no wish to embarrass the man I hope will closely examine the Barclays UK Pension Fund inadequacies for me, but in the interests of recording facts I feel I must place on record what I know. 

His name has been redacted because I don't think this matter is a personal failing, it is an institutional failing with its origins in the time and motion work of the 60s and early 70s. 

Too many people that I speak to have replied with sympathy for the Ombudsman's office, stating with some authority that every public service department is under pressure because of government cuts. Have we all been brainwashed? 

I received this acknowledgement that the queue of cases awaiting review is quite short;

There was no suggestion here of an office in crisis, under pressure from a mounting workload that was too much to cope with.

By the late 70s and 80s most high performing companies had realised that rewarding workers based on volume of throughput, how they measured against turnaround targets was not serving their business.

When we pay anyone based on how many cases, transactions or units they deal with during a day we are rewarding speed, we are not measuring the quality of their responses.

Within a few days the case worker that the manager assigned my review to sent me a request for the documents that the manager had already examined and approved as clear and acceptable. I wrote back saying I did not understand why I should have this further imposition on my time and resources.

The manager's response;

All I could think when I read this was that the colleague had not read the casework notes, had started to deal with something without bothering to read or understand. This would be bad if it was something trivial but the Ombudsman only deals with people who have progressed through the rigours of the internal dispute resolution procedures. The cases that end up on the Ombudsman's desk involve people who have been seriously hurt by the actions of a pension provider, they would not be assigned by the manager until this is so.

The actions of the case worker so closely mirror those of the Barclays UK Pension Fund administrators that I really do despair.

Barclays staff are better served by denying that they ever recieved a communication than by admitting they made a mistake. The get better turnaround figures and meet their targets by only answering the easy bits in a client's communication, or by giving incorrect unchecked advice, than by taking the time to ensure complete accurate replies. 

One message we must all take from this is that the excuse people are under pressure is just not universal. Some people are, but we must not cloak everyone with a single blanket excuse.

Too busy to get it right first time is not a good enough excuse because it just multiples the number of tasks to be undertaken.