"It won’t affect me…"

Insurance Nightmare Number Two

… or how to die cold and poor in a future when everyone is assumed to have made their own private provision

You start a new job. The company has a non-contributory pension scheme and a few days after you join you’re invited to see their employee advisor, who says it’s just a formality for all new staff to take out a personal pension contract, which the company will pay into.

Three weeks later, the contract papers arrive for you to check and sign. They list you as "Female, aged 45" and show your statutory retirement date as your sixtieth birthday.

You sign the papers and, apart from the annual statements, you more or less forget that you’ve got a personal pension plan … except when news reports tell of the gradual and deliberate erosion of the state pension by successive governments trying to rid themselves of the burden called SERPS … and then you just feel smugly glad that YOU, at least, are all signed up with your own scheme.

Fifteen years pass and suddenly there’s a bit of a stir. Your pension company has begun the steps to start paying you your pension and finds that the Inland Revenue objects to their calculations. According to them you have to be treated as a "male", so your pension breaks the strict legislation governing rates and tax relief … and the company tells you that it could sue you for fraud, but will settle, instead, for just returning the contributions made over the years .. without the tax relief and interest.

The next five years will mean you working when everyone expects you should have retired .. and preparing, as best you can, to live on the state provision reserved for those who’ve failed to make their own provision. In the twenty-first century, people relying on state pensions have replaced "single mothers" as the nation’s metaphor for social irresponsibility.

A horror story ? … Exaggeration ? … Well, maybe you will get lucky. Maybe someone will query the anomaly between your pension records and your National Insurance records sooner rather than later, and give you some time to build up something to live off. If not, however, the famous "customer’s obligation to inform the company of any relevant information affecting the policy" means that pension companies are quite within their rights to take the sort of action described.

Maybe they won’t .. but are you that much of a gambler?

Again, therefore, if you’re one of those who cheerfully tells their transsexual friends that they "had no problem with getting a pension, the guy just put down that I’m a woman", please please get some advice. And if you’re considering getting a pension then make sure the salesperson puts your details in writing, so that the company knows your special legal position, or get in touch with Jim Sealey, who has sympathetic contacts in many of the top-name companies, who’ll deal with your application in a considerate and informed way.

After all, isn’t that the worst part ? … Having to deal with somebody whom you suspect won’t understand your feeling of being stripped of your identity by brutally indifferent bureaucracy?