The Pensions Ombudsman has admitted it has been struggling to cope with rising demand as figures show a 42% increase in investigations over five years.
In the latest annual report, published this week, the organisation laid out its performance and said it anticipated even higher strain on its services with the pension freedoms in place.

The report stated: “The organisation faces challenges in relation to increasing volumes of work.

“Over the last three years our workload has risen quite significantly. In the coming year we are predicting we will take on over 1,300 new investigations compared to 915 five years ago (a 42% increase).

“We are finding it hard to keep pace with the demand for our services within existing resourcing levels. The net effect is that it is taking us longer to deal with cases and our carry forward caseload is increasing.”

At the end of the year the ombudsman had 39 employees.

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Officials said: “We anticipate that our workload will increase further as a result of pension changes: increased flexibility on retirement; public sector pension scheme changes; and automatic enrolment which will see many more people becoming members of pension schemes.”

Officials also said that the service has to comply with the Alternative Dispute Resolution directive. This means it must provide complainants with the opportunity to make an on line application to it.

The report said: “We don’t currently provide this and need to have it in place this year. We are currently working with DWP to ensure we meet our requirements.”

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Summary of results

• Stayed within budget, with costs of £3.291m

Caseload
• There was a 21% increase in the number of enquiries received
• Took on 1,281 cases for investigation, 22% more than expected
• Completed 970 investigations. 48% of these were concluded by PO investigators and did not require an ombudsman decision
• Just over one third of cases decided by an ombudsman was upheld in full or part
• 72% of investigations took under a year to complete
• Cases about the actions of the Pension Protection Fund remained a small part of its work, with 72 new in the year (an increase of 16.7%)
• Received 177 complaints concerning alleged pension liberation (a number were determined earlier this year)

Performance
• Responded to enquiries within an average of 2 days (our target was 3 days)
• Decided whether or not to investigate a complaint in 4 weeks on average (target was 7 weeks)
• Completed investigations in an average of 9.8 months (target was 10 months)
• Completed 970 investigations compared to 1115 in 2013/14 - due, in part, to dealing with the large number of the pension liberation cases and a delay in replacing staff