Equitable Life Payment Scheme: August 2013 progress report
Published 5 September 2013
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1. Summary of payments made to date
As of 31 August 2013, the scheme has now made payments totalling £734 million to 548,359 policyholders. The figures are broken down as follows:
- 367,730 payments to individual investors have been issued totalling £493.081m.
- 33,042 first payments to With-Profits Annuitants (WPAs) have been issued by the scheme, totalling £61.646m. Subsequent annual payments totalling £110.268m have also been made to annuitants. Since the last report, routine reconciliation processes discovered that a small number of the subsequent annual annuity payments to existing WPAs had been counted as initial annuity payments to new WPAs. This means that the total number of WPAs paid by 30 April was in fact 31,568, rather than 33,032 as previously reported in May. However, the overall value of the money paid out is unaffected and the number of annuitants who have received their first payment remains at over 90%.
- 147,587 payments totalling £57.040m have been paid to those who bought their policy through their company pension scheme.
This means that the scheme has issued a further £130 million in payments since 30 April 2013.
2. Remaining individual policyholders
The scheme has gone to significant lengths to trace eligible individual policyholders. This includes electronic checking of credit histories, the electoral roll and phone book to verify addresses. The scheme also writes to the last known address of those that have failed those checks to ask that they contact the scheme and claim their payment.
Any holders of an individual investment policy or a With-Profits Annuity who have not been contacted by the scheme should call the scheme on 0300 0200 150 to confirm the eligibility of their policy and be advised of the next steps they should take.
3. Group (company pension) schemes
The Payment Scheme continues to make payments to those who bought their policy through a company pension and payments will continue over the coming months.
As reported previously, all the traced company pension schemes have been written to by the Payment Scheme, to begin the process of data exchange. To date, data exchange agreements have been completed that cover c. 95% of policyholders and data on 65% of policyholders has been provided to the scheme. The scheme is continuing to encourage trustees to send in data as soon as possible.
On receipt of data from company pension scheme trustees payments are being issued by the scheme. However there are also a number of Group (company pension) schemes that the scheme has been unable to locate. The scheme encourages members of those schemes to contact the scheme directly to progress their payment.
4. Deceased policyholders
The process of identifying, tracing and contacting the estates of deceased policyholders has been completed. Payments to all those estates that have responded to the scheme will continue over the coming months. The executors of an eligible policyholder’s estate who have not heard from the scheme can help the scheme with this process by contacting the scheme directly in writing.
5. Further reports
The next report will be published in Winter 2013 /14.