Tracing brings £20,000 pension payouts

THOUSANDS of people have claimed up to £20,000 each from pensions they had lost track of, the government has revealed.

It said more than 350,000 people had used its pension tracing service to recover funds invested in occupation and personal pension schemes.

The free service has paid out an average lump sum of 1,900, with around 7 per cent of investors being paid a lump sum of more than 20,000 and 5 per cent getting weekly payments of more than 100. The service, which received 83,000 tracing requests in the tax year ending in April 2010, was set up in 2005 and uses a database of 200,000 pension schemes to match people to pensions they had previously paid into.