Good afternoon Kelly,
Thank you for taking the time to leave your feedback. We are sorry for the frustration caused by your experience and appreciate the opportunity to clarify and respond.
Your trace remained open while we pursued a final response from a workplace pension provider linked to your employment history. The delay occurred because we were awaiting a response from this provider, despite follow-ups. Unfortunately, responses from some public-sector providers can take longer than expected, which can impact our usual completion timeframe.
For clarity, there are a small number of public-sector pension providers that historically do not respond to third-party tracing requests. In these cases, we do not submit enquiries directly, as experience shows they will not provide information. Instead, we include their contact details within the final trace results so individuals can approach them directly. This information would have been shared once the trace was closed.
While your trace was still open, we continued to pursue the final outstanding response rather than closing it prematurely. We appreciate, however, that this meant you were waiting longer for clarity, and we are sorry that this was not communicated more clearly at the time.
We are taking your feedback on board and will be amending our process so that, at the outset of a trace, we clearly indicate any providers that are known to be non-responsive to third parties and provide their contact details immediately. At the same time, we will continue to actively reach out to providers that do respond. There are only a handful of providers that fall into this category, and while this is outside of our control, how and when we share this information is something we can improve.
We are also sorry that your interaction with our call handler did not feel as helpful or personal as it should have been. Our staff are genuine people who aim to be supportive and clear, and we have historically received very positive feedback. That said, we will review this experience internally to understand where communication could have been improved.
We would also like to clarify that while our pension tracing service is provided at no charge, it is not a government service. This is clearly stated on our website, in our FAQs, and via an on-screen message that must be acknowledged before a trace can be submitted. Our service operates independently and predates the government’s Pension Tracing Service.
Thank you again for raising your concerns. Feedback such as this helps us improve how we communicate and support people using the service.
Kind regards,
The Pension Tracing Service Team
