Hartley Pensions Client Support Group

ShareSoc has established this group to support clients of Hartley Pensions who are experiencing difficulties in recovering their SIPPs. If you would like our support, or to help other Hartley clients, please join this Support Group.

Objectives

The objectives of this group are:

  1. To provide assistance to former Hartley Pensions clients who are experiencing difficulties
  2. To liaise with the FCA to try to prevent similar issues arising in future

Background

Hartley Pensions is a manager of SIPP and SASS pension schemes, with over 16,000 clients. The firm was placed in Administration in July 2022, with UHY appointed as Administrators. This resulted in restrictions being placed on client access to their pension schemes. Those restrictions currently remain in place.

ShareSoc was asked to intervene by one of our members in early 2023. Following liaison with the FCA and the Administrators, ShareSoc director Mark Bentley was appointed to an informal client committee established by the Administrators, alongside a number of clients and client representatives.

Most of the committee’s work has focussed on the issue of costs incurred by the Administrators and Hartley from the Administration process and from the transfer of client accounts to a new solvent manager, and on how those costs would be recovered. The Administrators proposed obtaining a court order to recover the costs via an “Exit and Administration Charge” to be applied to SIPP accounts. ShareSoc believed that these costs should be covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS), as they were a consequence of Hartley being placed in Administration. Throughout 2023 the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) denied responsibility for these costs. Eventually, in early 2024, the FSCS conceded that it was liable for the costs.

This should have cleared the path for SIPPs to be transferred to other managers; however, the process of effecting the transfers has been extremely slow and we continue to press for a resolution.

Support Group

Throughout this process, ShareSoc has been assisting Hartley clients on an informal basis. We have now formed an official ShareSoc support group for Hartley clients.

We have set up a private electronic forum for members of the support group who are full members of ShareSoc (you need to be logged in to our website before attempting to access the forum), to discuss matters of concern. If you are not already a member, you can join us by completing the form below.

We have also set up a Facebook group which Hartley clients who are not full members of ShareSoc can join.

Note that we can only provide individual assistance/responses to full members of ShareSoc, as our resources are limited.

Join

To join the Hartley Pensions Client Support Group, please complete the form below. You need to be a member of ShareSoc to join the group, but can join as a free associate member, if you do not wish to pay an annual subscription. Please note that, even though ShareSoc’s directors are unpaid volunteers, we rely on full member subscriptions and donations to fund our operations and to operate effectively. The benefits of membership are explained here: https://www.sharesoc.org/membership/.

If you are already a member of ShareSoc, you will find it easiest to complete the form if you login first (if not already logged in). If you are a member and are not able to login, you will find instructions here.