Savings Re-United
There is a reported £5billion in savings, pensions, endowments and shares that have been left unclaimed - at a time when UK debt is at its highest level. There are a number of reasons for unclaimed money: people move house, divorces, paperwork gets lost, financial companies get taken over more than once.
How can people get their money back?
Over £500million lies dormant (for over 15 years) in bank accounts. The Government wants to put this money into a central fund and put it towards good causes. Some banks and building societies are trying to get the money back to rightful owners. Nationwide, for example, is writing to 24,000 members with dormant accounts. Halifax has managed to find owners of accounts totalling £6million so far.
Hundreds of millions of pounds of shares and dividends lie unclaimed, the biggest section being people who never claimed money after a demutualisation. One example is Standard Life, for whom over 210,000 customers have not claimed shares since its stock market listing in 2006. Marks & Spencer is working with a tracing agency, Trust Research Services to try and put £3m of unclaimed dividends where it belongs.
There are several billion pounds worth of long-term savings held by insurers, occupational pension schemes and fund managers that have become disconnected from their original owners. As many companies have changed their name or been taken over, finding these historic assets can be tricky. The Association of British Insurers will try to track down new names for old companies, although it has no formal register of name changes. Another option is the Unclaimed Assets Register (UAR), a searching service run by credit data company Experian. This can help with lost unit trusts, pensions and life assurance, and most of the big insurers have signed up. They say they get up to 30,000 enquiries each year, with two out of three being made by executors of a will. There is an £18 search fee, covering multiple addresses for an individual, including maiden names and married names as appropriate. Searches on the UAR meet with about a one in six success rate. People who think they might be owed a pension by a former employer but have lost contact can try to get an up-to-date address for that firm through the Government's Pension Tracing Service.
National Savings & Investments reckons it has around £466m lying unclaimed in savings accounts, with another £30m of Premium Bond prizes sitting uncollected. Six years ago NS&I set up a tracing service, and since then 43,000 people have collected over £42m.
One woman traced a £5 account set up for her when she was a child, and it had matured to £447. "The process was slick," she said. "It took less than three weeks from me first getting in touch. I've decided to leave the money there for the moment."
The tracing service can be found at NSandI. There is a separate online service to check for outstanding prizes from Premium Bonds, but you will need the numbers.
Published on November 9, 2007
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