Legalities and paperwork

Daughter and I are spending a few days with parents in Yorkshire. They're encouraging and helping me to sort out legal power of attorney for someone. Do you realise what a pain this legal procedure now is! There's a twenty six page document to complete with signatures from at least three different people. No wonder the radio had a File on Four enquiry about it a few weeks ago. It's almost more trouble than it's worth because the people who most need to set one up have trouble accessing, reading and absorbing all the information that they have to know in order to protect themselves.

You can find out about it from the Office of the Public Guardian.

Pensions again

Husband has a similar pension at Unisys to R's at EDS, so he started asking questions yesterday. CR, presumably in the same role as JB at EDS, said that this change was as a result of the Finance Act 2004 and she believed it would apply to the Unisys Pension Scheme.

Not satisfied with that, husband had already started talking to his colleagues, who have similar pension arrangements, and haven't been told that anything is changing. Similarly, son talked to friends at school, who were as indignant as him.

JB rang me this morning to say that it was 'good news'. Son can keep the pension up to 25. It only impacts on people who are not yet receiving a pension.

However, there are still issues:

• people (e.g. at EDS & at Unisys) running pensions haven't told the pensioners nor the prospective pensioners


• people paying into their pensions will have a reduced deal for their dependants


• EDS, if I hadn't queried it, might have carried on refusing to pay after the age of 23.
  

So where do we go from here?