This week, we’ve launched a new online Pension Tracing Service on GOV.UK, making it faster and simpler for people to find a lost workplace or private pension.
The free online service has had over 100,000 users since we began testing it in October 2015, helping many to trace their lost pensions.
Lost pensions
On average, people have 11 jobs during their working life and can easily forget where and how much they’ve contributed to a past pension, or have lost details about their scheme.
It’s estimated that 4 out of 5 of us will lose track of one of our pensions and leave them unclaimed. This means an estimated £400 million is currently unclaimed in private pensions, and demand for tracing pensions is growing.
Reuniting people and pensions
The Pension Tracing Service has been available through telephone and postal enquiries since 2005. In the past 10 years, there’s been a 436% increase in requests, with over 169,000 last year.
The new fully online Pension Tracing Service helps reunite you with your lost pension (or pensions). It provides contact details of providers, to help you track them down and find your hard-earned savings faster and more efficiently.
On average, 1,000 people a day are now visiting the new service, getting their results in seconds, rather than days using the previous system. You can quickly review your pensions for your whole career, searching for your lost pension by using your former employers’ names. After you get the search results, you will know how to contact your past schemes to find out about your pension with them.
How it works
By searching for the name of your previous employer or pension provider, you can find the contact details for your lost scheme, such as a contact name, telephone number, email and postal address.
The service searches a database of more than 320,000 pension schemes to obtain contact details. It can’t tell you whether you have a pension or what the value is, but it can give you contact details for the people who can.
Yvonne found a lost pension pot of over £10,000
Yvonne Mavin, 59, from Gerrards Cross, London used the online Pension Tracing Service earlier this year. Within two weeks she’d found a lost pension pot of over £10,000 with Aviva, relating to an employer she’d worked for over 30 years ago.
“I have been looking at financial planning for my retirement, but as it was so long ago I had just lost track of it. I had already tried writing to the old address I had for the company and just got my envelope returned. I was surprised how simple it was. All I had to fill in was my name, email address, and the company, plus a box that just asked me to tell them any other information that might help trace my pension.”
Don’t miss out
I’d encourage you and anyone who thinks they may be missing out on any savings to use this free online service at www.gov.uk/find-pension-contact-details.