Martin Lewis spent ten minutes of his ITV show this week telling the country there’s £31bn of unclaimed pension money sitting in schemes around the UK, with the average lost pot worth just under £10,000. The framing, naturally for a consumer show, was that savers should go and find their old pots.
The framing the pensions industry should be having is the inverse: why has so much of this money become “lost” in the first place, and what does it mean for schemes when, supposedly within the next year, every member of the public will be able to sit down with the MoneyHelper dashboard and try to find it?
Because the awkward truth is that pots aren’t really lost. They’re sitting exactly where they’ve always been – on the same admin system, in the same scheme, with the same trustees responsible for them. What’s been lost is the connection between the record and the human. That’s a scheme-side problem, not a consumer-side one.
October 2026 isn’t a deadline. It’s a public exam.
The Pensions Dashboards Programme connection deadline is 31 October 2026. Every pension provider and scheme in scope must, by that date, be connected to the dashboards ecosystem and able to respond to “Find” and “View” requests. Public access – the Dashboard Available Point – is supposedly to follow, with the government yet to confirm a firm date.
Connection is the easy bit. What happens after connection is where the operational pressure builds.
When a saver searches a dashboard, their identity is verified through GOV.UK One Login and a “find request” is broadcast to every connected scheme with a set of personal data – name (current and previous), date of birth, address (current and previous), National Insurance number, and any contact details provided. Each scheme runs that request against its own records and replies with one of three outcomes:
- Match – yes, we hold a pension for this person
- No match – we have no record of this person
- Possible match – we might have something, but we can’t be sure
That third category is where most schemes are about to discover their data problem in public. A possible match isn’t a clean answer. It’s a frustrated member chasing the scheme by phone, an admin team trying to resolve identity questions at volume, and, if the volumes get noticed, a regulator asking why your match rates look the way they do.
The Pensions Regulator has already said it will monitor possible match rates and investigate where they look unusually high. Schemes that haven’t actively cleansed their member data are walking into that exam with the answers half-finished.
Why “lost” pensions get lost
There are three drivers behind a record going stale, and all three sit within the scheme’s operational reality, not the saver’s.
- The member moves house and doesn’t tell anyone. Around 10% of UK adults move home each year. Compound that across a deferred member’s working life – 15, 20, 30 years out of contact – and the address on file is, statistically, almost never current.
- Names change. Marriage, divorce, deed poll. The “Sarah Johnson” on file is now “Sarah Patel”, and her name doesn’t match the one she enters into the dashboard.
- The employer disappears. Mergers, acquisitions, rebrands, wind-ups. The member remembers working for “Acme Engineering Ltd” but your scheme has them filed under the legal entity that bought Acme in 2008.
LCP looked at this in detail in their A Match Made in Heaven? research and concluded – bluntly – that scheme data goes off, and older scheme data goes off more. Even data for active members can be significantly out of date. For deferred members the scheme is no longer regularly contacting, the picture is materially worse.
The result, in operational terms, is the gone-away flag. And here’s the bit pension ops leads sometimes underestimate: a gone-away flag is not neutral housekeeping. It’s missing data.
Gone-away is missing data, full stop
The Pensions Regulator’s scheme member data quality guidance is unambiguous. An address – including postcode – should be present for all members. “Gone away”, “unknown” or any equivalent flag should be treated as missing data when measuring your common data score.
Common data scores feed directly into trustees’ regulatory reporting, into the scheme return, and into how TPR judges the quality of administration. They also increasingly feed into how prepared a scheme is to engage with the de-risking market – insurers pricing buy-ins and buy-outs are openly factoring data quality into premiums, because data uncertainty is liability uncertainty.
So a high gone-away percentage isn’t just a comms inconvenience. It’s a number that:
- Drags down the common data score the trustees report on
- Inflates possible match volumes when dashboards go live
- Wastes spend on every annual benefit statement, wake-up pack and statutory communication
- Reduces the scheme’s standing in any de-risking conversation
- Sits awkwardly in front of any new trustee or actuary doing diligence
The maths nobody puts on a slide
Most operational cases for tracing get made on regulatory grounds. The financial case is just as strong.
Take a scheme with 50,000 deferred members. Industry experience puts gone-away rates on a typical deferred book between 5% and 12%, with mature DB schemes often at the upper end. Use 8% as a conservative middle.
That’s 4,000 gone-away records. Each member typically receives at least one statutory communication a year. Print, fulfilment and postage realistically lands at around £1.20 per pack:
4,000 records × £1.20 = £4,800 a year, going straight into the bin.
That’s before wake-up packs, ad-hoc tracing requests, possible match resolution post-dashboards, member-facing complaints, and any buy-out delay caused by data uncertainty. Run the same maths on a 500,000-member scheme and the bin number gains another zero. And it repeats every year for as long as the records sit unconnected.
What “good” looks like in the next six months
If the gone-away conversation hasn’t yet had a proper budget attached to it, the next six months are the window where it stops being optional.
- Quantify the problem. Pull the gone-away count off your admin system. Split by status (deferred, pensioner, active), age band, and date last contacted. The deferred 45-60 cohort is usually the largest single risk – long enough out of touch to have moved, close enough to retirement to be first onto the dashboard.
- Run a bulk tracing exercise. A bulk file submitted to a regulated tracing partner returns verified current addresses on 70-85% of records on a no-trace-no-fee basis, typically within 5-10 working days.
- Enrich beyond the address. Verified mobile numbers, landlines and email addresses transform what’s possible on the comms side – fewer printed packs, more digital engagement, faster member response on dashboard queries.
- Build the maintenance loop. A one-off exercise solves today’s gone-aways. The 10% annual move rate rebuilds the file if you don’t have an ongoing process. Refresh annually, or in advance of major comms cycles.
- Stress-test your matching criteria. Cleaner data means tighter matching can be used safely, which means fewer possible matches and less manual resolution post-October.
The issue in a nutshell
Martin Lewis is doing the pensions industry a favour by surfacing the £30bn number on national TV. The favour is uncomfortable: it puts the question of why those pots became unfindable squarely in front of the public, and by extension in front of trustees and regulators.
Schemes that take the next six months seriously will land at 31 October with their data in order, possible match rates manageable, and members able to find what they’re owed without picking up the phone. Schemes that don’t will discover the problem in real time, in front of the saver, with the regulator watching.
It’s the cheapest version of this work to do it now. It gets more expensive – financially, operationally, reputationally – every month it gets pushed back.
About UK Tracing. UK Tracing is part of STA Group and provides regulated, GDPR-compliant tracing and data enrichment services to UK pension schemes, providers and administrators. We process bulk files of any size on a no-trace-no-fee basis, with full audit trails on every match. To talk through your gone-away position before October 2026, book a 20-minute scoping call.
