Do you know if you’re eligible for enhanced annuity rates or impaired life annuity rates? Rates that can really boost your pension annuity income. For all the criticism of the ways in which poor value pension annuities are foisted on unsuspecting retirees, we are yet to see a legal challenge on the matter. Interesting, though, because a successful claim might open the floodgates for compensation for misguided pension annuity purchases for hundreds of thousands of retirees. Picture this: a retiree successfully argues before the ombudsman that their pension plan provider failed to communicate the importance and the opportunity of taking the open market option (OMO). Or a disgruntled retiree decides that scheme trustees failed to highlight the potential retirement income uplift his kidney transplant entitled him to.
Apparently, the pensions ombudsman Tony King, when asked how he has dealt with claims relating to individuals given unsuitable pension annuities, said that he has never come across a single case. Not one retiree has claimed that he or she could have had an enhanced annuity or an impaired life annuity instead of the conventional one they got. Maybe no one has claimed to date because those same people who are unlikely to know their rights when it comes to taking state benefits are even less likely to be too sure of what they can do when they retire. But it would take just one individual from a price comparison website to find an unhealthy recently retired person and help them make a claim to the pensions ombudsman. There is really no guarantee such a claim would work, but for an average pension fund of around £30,000, a retirement income uplift of a third could mean compensation in the region of £10,000, making it worth the effort.
