Nest member waits two years to recover £80 in missed contributions

The woman, known only as Mrs E, was also awarded £8.04 to make up for lost investment and £500 “to recognise the significant distress and inconvenience this matter has caused”, according to the ombudsman’s report.

Problems began in March 2018 when Mrs E’s employer, 3 A’s Leisure, auto-enrolled her into an account with Nest. Upon checking her account some time later, Mrs E discovered that contributions were not being made by her employer.

You would certainly have expected to see some kind of regulatory intervention

Jane Kola, Arc Pensions Law

Having complained to her employer in writing she then contacted The Pensions Advisory Service, and subsequently the ombudsman’s early resolution team, seeking to resolve the problem.

After a long and confused chain of correspondence between Mrs E, her employer, Nest and the ERT, the ombudsman was left with no choice but to intervene to end the dispute.

Delays called into question

That the whole process took two years to come to a resolution left open questions about the role of the Pensions Regulator, which master trusts are legally obliged to inform in the event that employers miss contributions. TPR was not mentioned in the ombudsman’s report and Pensions Expert was unable to find any mention of the employer in TPR’s published material.

A Nest spokesperson said: "We have a process for reporting employers who do not make pension contributions on time and we follow the same procedure regarding member payments for every employer using Nest.

"Making pension contributions is a legal requirement and we are committed to making sure employers are compliant and members receive the contributions in their accounts that they have worked to earn."

Jane Kola, partner at Arc Pensions Law, said that while the situation Mrs E found herself in was not unusual, the process should not have taken two years to resolve.

“I would have expected the regulator to have been talking to the employer about its auto-enrolment duties, and pressuring it to put things right,” she said. “The regulator has fined a lot of employers for failing to get this right, and it’s a bit surprising that the regulator doesn’t appear to have been particularly interested in it.”

“It may be that they have [been more active], but it’s not clear,” she said, adding that “you would certainly have expected to see some kind of regulatory intervention.”

Details still unclear

The ombudsman’s report said that Mrs E had made a number of serious allegations against her employer, and that these are the subject of ongoing investigation by the relevant authorities, which may explain the lack of published action by the regulator.

TPR had not responded to a request for comment by the time of publication.