Army Preserved Pension Fiasco

Events to Completion of AFPS Form 8

This is the first of two pages that chronicle my attempts to obtain a Preserved Pension. It covers events from my initial application up to completion of AFPS Form 8. The handling of this part was by Veterans UK (the pension Administrator), whose reasonableness and helpfulness was in contrast to the conduct of Equiniti Paymaster. This page is not directly relevant to my case against Equiniti Paymaster, but nonetheless provides useful background information.

Both pages allow you to view all the relevant correspondence that I have received and sent. For letters and emails, this includes the full unedited textual content (but not necessarily details in headers and footers, such as addresses and salutations).

For faster navigation, these documents are presented as popup images. Click on thumbnail image and hold down the button to enlarge. In some cases, there is also a link to a PDF document of the correspondence.

06 June 2015
	Three months plus a week before my 60th birthday, I sent the correctly-completed APO Form 44 by DHL signed-for letter, to the address given on this form: Army Pensions Office, London Road, HA7 4PY. Several days later, I checked the tracking information; this indicated that it had been signed for on the 8th June in the name of Scott. It therefore appeared that it had been delivered correctly; in any case with this service, if it could not be delivered for any reason, I should have been notified and/or the letter returned. I did not expect an immediate response, as this was long before I was due the terminal grant, and I had no information as to how my application would be processed. Also, previous experience indicated that post was very slow.

25 September 2015
	Even in consideration of the above, I was becoming concerned by now, so obtained the DHL proof of delivery. This showed that it was actually signed for on 22 Jun 2015, but appears to have been withdrawn on 08 June and subsequently redelivered (the tracking information that I previously checked was no longer available).
	In the light of this, I sent a follow up letter. I checked that the address I was given was still valid, and found that not only the address, but the name of the organisation had changed (now Veterans UK, Mail Point 335, ..., G2 8EX). So I sent a letter to this new address, including the following additional information: four pages from my Certificate of Service a copy of my Birth Certificate proof of delivery of the original application bank details required to makepayment to my HSBC account in Mexico In this letter, I stated that post between Mexico and the UK is very slow, and invited a response by email (it became clear later that I was understating my case in saying that it could take over six weeks).

02 October 2015
	Received letter with AFPS Form 8 to be completed. I initially assumed that this was an unexpectedly early response to the follow up letter I sent, and that the original application had not reached the correct destination. It was only a while later that I noticed that this letter was dated 29 June 2015. It must thus have taken over 3 months to arrive!

05 October 2015
	At the earliest opportunity, I sent the completed AFPS Form 8 by registered post. The images here are provided for completeness only; no issues were raised in connection with this form, which resulted in the creation of an Award Letter dated three weeks later.
	This page explains why my application was delayed. In fact this page was redundant in my case, since it is required only if the delay is greater than one year. I nonetheless out of caution provided a full explanation of what had happened to date.
	Part A: Basic details, including National Insurance number (obscured for security reasons) and email address.
	Part B: Simply indicated that my pension is not subject to a sharing order, and that I wish to claim AFPS75 having reached the age of 60.
	Part C: Bank Account Details; being an overseas account, must be completed on a country-specific form to be downloaded from the given URL.
	Part D: Simply stated that I did not intend to use part of lump sum to fund additional pension contributions.
	Part E: Simply indicated that I do not have any other pensions in payment.
	Parts F (Information) and G (Declaration; signature on next page).
	Parts H (indicated my wish to correspond by email) & I (Signatures).