Jargon bafflles pensions professionals

THEY are the other kind of personal financial advisers - specialists who give up some of their time to help out people confused by the complexity of the pensions industry.

Kim Gubler is one. In professional life she is a management and pensions consultant, based in Milton Keynes, whose clients are occupational pensions providers.

Today, though, she is in the Victoria offices of OPAS, the publicly funded pensions advisory service. It is the job of OPAS to help people who have problems with State, stakeholder, personal or occupational pensions, free of charge.

OPAS also acts as a conciliation service and settles some disputes. But much of the work involves helping people through the industry's gobbledegook so that they can make informed decisions.

Gubler is one of about 30 volunteer pensions professionals who help the service's paid staff answer calls on the OPAS pensions helpline (currently 020 7233 8080 but, from 25 March, 0845 6012923). The new number charges calls at local rate, no matter where in the country they come from, and should appear on all pensions documents.

'Calls to the OPAS helpline have been costing members of the public more and more as pensions grow ever more complex - the problems need longer phone calls to sort out, and many people who call are on low incomes,' said Gubler.

'We in the pensions industry are often not terribly good at communicating. People of all ages and abilities receive something as routine as a benefit statement and can't understand it because too many pensions providers can only write or speak in jargon. Sometimes we have to ask callers to send in a document that's puzzling them. You read it, and you think, even I'm having to think what the pensions provider means by this.'

OPAS chief executive Malcolm McLean said: 'Complexity in the pension system is now at ridiculous levels.' He has told a Government simplification review, now under way, that there should be a cull. The public would be better served if the 20-plus types of pension scheme were reduced to three: occupational defined benefit, occupational defined contribution and stakeholder.

Meanwhile, Gubler and her fellow volunteers do what they can to sort out the mess. She said: 'I can handle about 20 calls an hour - I try to do what I can and pop into OPAS when I have an hour or two between morning and afternoon meetings in London.'

The number of calls to the hotline has doubled to more than 30,000 in the past five years and could soon increase even more rapidly when the Government forces pensions providers to send scheme members regular projections of their likely payouts.

Pensions are now news, said Gubler. 'Pre-Maxwell, if you were at a party and said you were in the pensions business they'd run a mile - now, even before Equitable Life, they get terribly interested.'

There may be neither fee nor commission for the volunteers, but there is a dividend. 'Pensions is a rewarding profession, both in satisfaction and financially, and it's good to put something back - but in doing so, we even get a reward for that: this voluntary work keeps me, the pensions professional, in touch with reality. It stops me losing touch with the customers, what worries them, how things go wrong, and how it can be avoided.'