Your £40,000 pot of gold is safe at last by Tony Hetherington
T.R. writes: I worked for a small partnership which went out of business years ago. I was in its pension scheme and also contributed to a linked Additional Voluntary Contribution plan. Early this year, I contacted Aviva but was told the trust deed was lost. This is not my problem, but Aviva declines to let me access my own money.
THE partnership that employed you went out of business in 2003. You transferred your entitlement under its pension scheme to a different company, and that is not a problem, but you left your AVC savings with Aviva – and this is where things get complicated.
Aviva has not lost the trust deed for the pension plan. I doubt if it would have had it in the first place. Your employer’s pension scheme had two trustees who were connected to the business, but the prof essi onal administrators were National Provident Institution and they would have held the records. But NPI itself is no longer with us. It is now part of Phoenix Life.
The trustees ordered the windingup of the main pension scheme, but they appear to have completely overlooked your AVC, for which they were responsible. Legally, a pension scheme cannot be terminated while it still has assets, and those assets included your AVC fund. In effect then, although NPI records show that the scheme finally closed down in 2006, really it was not closed down at all.
I have been negotiating through this pensions quagmire with Aviva and Phoenix since last March. There was a breakthrough when Phoenix ruled that reinstating the original trust deed was not necessary. As the closure was defective, all that was needed was for the trustees to consent to Aviva paying out your AVC money.
Phoenix refused to name the trustees, though in fact I discovered them and traced them to addresses in Kent. Phoenix then told me that it saw all this as Aviva’s problem, and it was up to Aviva to persuade the trustees to behave responsibly.
I disagree, but Aviva did take on the task. One problem was that Phoenix had already told HM Revenue that the pension scheme was closed. And Aviva added: ‘Our objective was to obtain the scheme rules which would have set out how payment from the AVC should be made, but these were not forthcoming from Phoenix.’
Nonetheless, Aviva has succeeded. It contacted the trustees and got their consent to release your AVC money. A spokesperson told me that its only aim was to get your money to you. Aviva was conscious of the length of time this took, and was grateful for your patience. And the end result? Your AVC top-up fund has grown to more than £40,000, and this is now released by Aviva and under your control.