I decided to take early retirement in 1999 when I was unable to continue work in a rather demanding job because of ill health and have been in receipt of a company pension since that time.

I have recently been told by the new administrators of my pension that part of my pension was a bridging pension that should have ended when I reached 65 in 2012 and consequently my pension has been reduced.

I cannot recall agreeing to the bridging pension and do not believe I would have as the benefits are outweighed by the disadvantages. (I don’t need to go into too much detail but in short, for ever £1 extra I received prior to age 65, I now loose £4). I have asked the company to provide documentary evidence of my agreement to the bridging pension but all they have sent is an unsigned quotation from the previous administrators.

My question is what should I do now? I took a lower paid job in 1999 until I reached state retirement age however if I had been aware of this predicament, I would have elected to continue working for a few more years.

I am not trying to wriggle out of any agreement I may have signed (time and memory plays tricks) but money is tight now and I don’t want to just roll over and accept what they say.

You are going to need better advice than you will probably get from an online forum. To my knowledge from my own company pension, if you take money out of the pension below 60, it is dealt with slightly differently. Although the scheme allows money to be taken from the pension from 55 year of age, because the scheme retirement age is 60, there is a penalty for accessing the pension earlier. When you then reach 60, you will get less, because you have taken from the pension already. There could well be tax rules that apply as well, about how the pension contributions were dealt with and drawing down early could affect the tax treatment situation.

Here is a link to the http://www.pensionsadvisoryservice.org.uk/

Hello there.

My understanding is that a bridging pension is often paid up to age 65 to 'bridge' the gap between the scheme pension and the amount of State pension. Once State pension starts to be paid, you would expect it to stop. Do you think this is what happened?

HB

My point is that the administrators have stated that I chose to receive a bridging pension which suggests that I would have been given an option not too.

Whatever scheme I agreed at the time of my retirement, can the administrators enforce a ruling without providing a copy of the agreement signed by myself?

If I have been receiving a bridging pension because of an administrative error then I quite agree that this should be repaid but do not want to suffer the penalties of now having to repay 4 x the amount of the bridging pension if I did not agree to this.

All the original paperwork has been mislaid during 2 house moves since my retirement however subsequent statements from the trustees do not itemise any part of my pension as a bridging pension.

Hope this makes sense.

Think you should consider submitting a Data Protection Subject Access Request to the Pension fund administrators who handled this 'bridging pension'.

As you say, I think they would have had to get you to sign something, after relevant advice had been offered to you.