Handling Pension Disputes - Reducing Time & Cost

Introduction

Pension disputes can be costly and time consuming. Handling member complaints correctly and promptly can reduce the risks involved for employers, trustees and managers and produce a better experience for the member and their dependants.

Presented by David Gallagher of Fieldfisher, this webinar aims to give pension professionals an understanding of the legal principles that will be applied if their member dispute goes to the Pensions Ombudsman or to Court.

It will break down the key case types for disputes, namely ill-health retirement, death benefits and historic errors and offers practical advice on how to manage cases from the start to minimise the risk of them becoming a dispute and to maximise the chances of defending them if challenged.

What You Will Learn

This webinar will cover the following:

• Best practice on managing pension scheme transfers, balancing the rights of the member to access their pension saving with the duty on scheme trustees and managers to protect them from scams and ensuring all key decisions are properly recorded
• How to manage an ill health retirement process
• How to deal with death benefit cases, collecting information sensitively but promptly and ensuring the process followed is fair and robust to challenge
• The legal principles of correcting benefits where historic errors have caused underpayments and overpayments including special cases such as transfers in, transfers out and deaths
• Recent cases
• CMG Pension Trustees Ltd v CGI IT UK Ltd [2022] on forfeiture of unclaimed benefits after 6 years and historic calculation errors
• The Lloyds Bank cases on GMP equalisation and The Conditions for Transfer Regulations 2021 introducing red and amber flags on pension transfers

This webinar was recorded on 11th January 2023