Former miners could be sitting on thousands in lost savings

pension funds

Solicitors Corries said they had acted for a number of men in the Fife and Dalkeith areas who were badly advised to leave employer-run pension schemes

Former Scot miners who transferred pension funds after being made redundant could be sitting on tens of thousands of pounds in unclaimed compensation.

Glasgow and Yorkshire-based solicitors Corries said they had acted for a number of men in the Fife and Dalkeith areas who were badly advised to leave employer-run pension schemes with good benefits.

Bruce Corrie, who specialises in employment law, said miners were particularly badly affected because they were made redundant in the late 1980s at a time when very little training was required to work in financial services.

However, he said the problem was not unique to miners and the firm has acted on behalf of former steel workers who were employed at Ravenscraig in North Lanarkshire. It was quite shocking what happened. Everything is a lot better these days but at that time there was very little training required to work in financial services.

Typically what happened was a miner lost his job and would be persuaded to become a financial advisor and would get a day’s training and be sent into the pit village to persuade all their friends to sign up for it, he said. Of course they were much younger men then and they weren’t thinking ahead to the future.

When people get made redundant they become distrustful of their employer and, particularly amongst the miners there was a lot of unrest, they just didn’t want anything to do with British Coal, he said.

Mr Corrie said a lot of workers’ pensions were re-instated following a UK government review in 1994, which forced companies to re-admit former employees into schemes.

He said a lot of them were but some weren’t and there was variety of reasons for that, they had moved home or they had emigrated or just didn’t get the letter. In some cases they weren’t even sent the letters.

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