British Steel Pension Scheme

In 2016, it was decided that the British Steel Pension Scheme should be restructured. Members who were thinking about taking their money out of the scheme were required to take financial advice.

Around this time, up to 8,000 members (representing just over £2.8 billion of the fund) chose to transfer their benefits out of the scheme. 95% of these decisions involved BSPS members taking advice from independent financial advisors.

There have since been concerns that these members received unsuitable advice and may have made poor financial choices and lost significant sums of money as a result.

We have taken part in FCA-led events, designed to let former BSPS members know about the quality of advice they should have received and what steps they can take if they are unhappy or have any concerns they would like to be investigated.

There are time limits that affect whether we can help with a complaint. If you have any concerns about the advice you received, please contact us in the first instance and we can review whether a time limit applies to your complaint.

• If you are a former BSPS member who transferred and wants to complain, you’ll need to complain to the financial business or contact us to do so within 6 years of the advice you are complaining about. There’s more information about how to complain to the business or contacting us in sections two and three on this page.
• If you don’t raise a complaint within this time frame, we may not be able to investigate your complaint, unless you complained after 6 years had passed, but within 3 years of when you became aware (or when you should reasonably have become aware) that you had cause to complain.
• After you’ve complained to the business, it will investigate and issue a final response to your concerns. Once you’ve received that final response, you have six months from the date on the final response to refer your complaint to us.
• We may be able to consider a complaint after that six-month period, if there are exceptional circumstances that account for the delay in contacting us.
• The FCA recently sent out a letter about time limits to anyone who transferred out of the British Steel Pension Scheme in 2016.

Find out more about time limits that affect whether we can investigate a complaint.

• You can get in touch directly with the financial business that gave you advice and make a complaint to them. Or you can contact us and we can approach the business for you.
• You can look at the FCA’s Financial Services Register for information and contact details of firms and individuals that are regulated by the FCA.
• If you make a complaint directly to the business, they should respond to you within eight weeks with their final response.
• If you’re unhappy with what the business has said, or they haven’t issued their final response within 8 weeks of your complaint, you can bring your complaint to us for free and without needing to go through a claims management company. We have a step-by-step guide to making a complaint, as well as links to our online forms on our how to complain page.

• If you’ve already complained to the business and you’re not happy with the final response, you have six months from the date on the final response to refer your complaint to us. Other time limits apply to making a complaint, you can read more about them in section two on this page.
• If you haven’t received a response to your complaint within eight weeks, you can refer your complaint to us. 
• To make a complaint to us, you can use our online complaint forms or you can call our helpline.  
• We're working with both the FSCS (that handles cases where the financial business has gone out of business and can’t pay your claim) and The Pensions Ombudsman (that handles complaints about the British Steel Pension Scheme, rather than about advice given to members). So, if you’re unsure who to speak to, contact us and we’ll ensure your complaint gets to the right place.

Contact our dedicated team

If you haven’t made a complaint and would like us to do this on your behalf, or if you have any general enquiries, you can contact our dedicated team by email or call our helpline.  We have a dedicated team with specialist expertise who are dealing with complaints involving the transfers out of the BSPS.

Contact us at [email protected] so the team can provide tailored support.

The FCA’s consultation on a redress scheme

The FCA is currently consulting on a redress scheme for former BSPS members and more information about this scheme can be found on the FCA website. However, you do not need to wait for the outcome of the consultation to complain, you can still contact us directly. 

The Financial Ombudsman Service has worked closely with the FCA and other regulatory bodies to share information and insight about complaints involving the British Steel Pension Scheme and we will continue to do so to ensure that any proposals for a redress scheme will be as effective and efficient as possible.

We’ll look at what advice you were given and whether it was suitable for you at the time, taking into account your circumstances and financial objectives. 

If we think you were given unsuitable advice and your complaint should be upheld, we’ll tell the business to calculate whether you’ve suffered a financial loss. They do this by comparing the value of the benefits you would have had with the workplace pension against those you actually have in the personal pension.

If you’ve suffered a financial loss, we’ll tell the business to pay financial compensation to your pension plan, or if not possible, directly to you. We might also make an award for any distress or inconvenience you’ve been caused.

• Check FCA’s Financial Services Register for information and contact details of firms and individuals that are regulated by the FCA.
• Use FCA’s advice-checker to find out whether the advice you received was unsuitable
• Find out more information about the scheme on BSPS’s website.
• Find out more about how long you can expect it to take once you’ve sent us your complaint
• Read more about how we deal with complaints from consumers about workplace pensions