DWP breaks silence after pensioners have payments reduced by £12,750
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has broken its silence after hundreds of people had their pension payments significantly reduced. A 78-year-old steelworker who stopped working in 2002, having given 40 years of service, was told there was a "significant shortfall" in his pension scheme.
John Benson, who worked for Allied Steel and Wire (ASW) in Cardiff, was told the company was in such a bad way financially that there'd be a significant shortfall in the pension scheme by as much as 85 per cent - an eye-watering figure.
John said: “So many people, even journalists, have come to me since saying: ‘How on earth can this have happened John? Surely your pension is sacrosanct.’ That’s what I thought too. Honestly it nearly killed me. I nearly lost my marriage fighting this.
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"I’ve been hell to live with.” John recalled: “Don’t get me wrong, they were fantastic people litter-picking with me for the council – really good down-to-earth people. But I never thought I’d end up there when I should have been retired. I thought I was set for life. I should have had a fantastic retirement.
"I should have supported my grandchildren through university and taken them out and helped them and taken my family on holidays but I couldn’t. When I sit and think about it all it’s heartbreaking. It’s been my life now for 22 years.
"What have I done, what have we done, to deserve this? We don’t deserve this. We did nothing wrong and we played by the rules. That was our money that was paid in willingly and trustingly every month. I knew that working in the steel industry there was a possibility I could lose my job. But to lose my pension?”
He explained: “In the early days I was going up to London to have meetings with politicians at Westminster and they wouldn’t pay me any expenses so I was going up there on the 4am train because it was the cheapest and the one I could afford. I was getting into London at 7am and having to hang around all day to have a meeting. We did everything. We’ve campaigned all over the UK and we got some of our money back but it turned out we were shafted then too.”
His pension, as it stands, will always be £13,750 annually – £12,750 less than what he would ordinarily have been owed had ASW not gone bust. He said: "In reality I’m owed £26,500 annually. That’s what my pension would have been had ASW continued operating. So I’m owed more than £200,000. We quickly realised the deal we got wasn’t a good one. It was really hard to take."
“I’m not giving up. I can’t give up. Too many colleagues who fought so hard have died without seeing that money. I’m still fighting not just for me but for their memories and for their families. They were fantastic people – always there. I've got to see this through for them now too.”
The DWP said: “It is important to ensure the pension protection system remains financially sustainable while we carefully balance our duty to the public purse and support those who would have been worse off if the FAS were not available. The FAS was never designed to provide a complete replacement of lost pensions.
"The scheme ensures that most members get standard assistance based on 90% of the pension benefits they accrued when their scheme started to wind up.”