‘£250k blunder may cost us our home’

ALAN PUCKEY has been ordered to pay back almost £250,000 by BT after it miscalculated his pension. The sum has been charged against his house, meaning any sale proceeds will be swallowed by repayments.

Alan ( right) and his wife Christine, 61, hoped to downsize but say they are now ‘prisoners’ in their own home. The bombshell has plunged them into depression and effectively robbed their family of their inheritance.

The couple, whose house in Hinckley, Leicestershire, is on the market for £340,000, have eight children and nine grandchildren through separate marriages.

Ex BT manager Alan says the firm’s behaviour is ‘immoral’.

‘I worked for the company for 20 years and now they are treating me appallingly,’ he adds.

The saga began when Alan received a letter from BT in August 2011, shortly after his retirement, stating he could take a lump sum of £217,430 and an annual pension of £36,613.

But in October last year, he received another letter stating he owed a total of £275,306 in overpayments. BT says the error occurred because the date he left the company was incorrectly recorded as March 1, 1989 — the date he joined — instead of May 31, 2009. This meant he received inflationary increases of 105 pc, instead of 1.7pc.

BT says Alan should have spotted the mistake himself as he was sent a letter with the correct pension when he left the company in 2009. But the 68-year-old says this ‘smacks of hypocrisy’ as it took the telecoms giant eight years to realise the error.

In a letter of complaint to BT, Christine wrote: ‘I have spent the last six days in tears, my husband a usually strong man is a wreck — he is not eating or sleeping well and has been in tears himself.’

Following seven weeks of negotiation, BT offered to reduce the repayment to £238,834, allowing for overpaid tax and £2,000 for ‘distress’ caused. It wrote in a letter to Alan that it ‘recognises the error was a scheme error and was not caused by you’.

Alan has appealed to the Pensions Ombudsman.

A BT spokesman said: ‘Ensuring the accuracy of payments to our members is of the utmost importance. However, on the rare occasion that we identify errors in pension payments, the Trustee of the Scheme has a legal duty to correct the error in fairness to all other Scheme members.

‘We are conscious that correcting an overpayment can have significant implications and are very sorry for the distress caused to Mr Puckey and his family.’