Summary of the Ombudsman’s determination and reasons
The complaint should be upheld against the NIPB because they have failed to take steps to establish whether or not Mr X is in receipt of the correct level of benefit.
– Pension Ombudsman determination PO-7548
The Pensions Ombudsman has power to investigate and determine complaints of maladministration in connection with occupational and personal pension schemes. The power can be exercised in relation to complaints against the trustees or managers of a scheme but also in relation to complaints against a person concerned with the administration of the scheme.
When there is a complaint or dispute, the complainant must (in the majority of cases) first try to sort it out with those responsible for the management of the pension scheme. In the case of injury awards the responsible person is the police pension authority. Often it is the delegated senior manager, such as the director of human resources, who deals with the internal dispute resolution procedure.
There has been a large amount of decisions made by the Pensions Ombudsman regarding maladministration of police injury awards and we at IODPA have collated the determinations into a single repository.
You can find the page on the category section on the right of the each page.
As new decisions are published we will keep the list updated. We will also keep using the search functionality on the Pension Ombudsman website to discover those decisions that have at first been missed.
The Pension Ombudsman often summarises case-law in an accessible and plain-speaking manner. It is also revealing to note the same police forces that keep appearing in the determinations.
Soon we hope to add a small description to each decision to identify the matter at the heart of the complaint to make it easier for the reader to determine relevancy. This will be done as and when we have available time.
OMG … how many decisions! Don’t these police forces have a clue what they’re doing? This must be most of the workload for the ombudsman. Do you have any figures to show the number of complaints other injury schemes get for a comparison?
Trawling the PO website is a bit of a pain to get pure numbers. Other injury benefit schemes the PO has made decisions on include the fire service (near identical Regulations concern OK ng onduty), NHS and civil service. It’s not just the numbers that are high for the police, it’s the fact it’s often the same matters coming up again and again. More shameful when you factor in the amount of judicial reviews that underline the police injury benefit Regulations. No other scheme comes close. But we’ll task a member to look at fire service injury benefit PO decisions just to see the difference. Expect a blog on this soon