There is a strange blind spot in workplace financial wellbeing.
Employers will pay for webinars, apps, guides and lunchtime sessions designed to help people build savings from scratch, while saying nothing about the 3.3 million lost pension pots - worth an estimated £31 billion - that employees have already saved and then lost track of.
The Pensions Policy Institute puts the average lost pot at £9,470. For most working people that is more than their entire emergency savings fund.
It is money they earned, money their employers contributed to, and money that is currently doing nothing for anyone.
No financial education programme on the market can match the effect on someone's financial resilience of discovering nearly ten grand they had forgotten they owned.
Why employees lose track of their pension pots
The uncomfortable part for employers is that the workplace created this problem.
Auto-enrolment mints a new pension pot with every payslip change, and careers have never involved more payslip changes.
The Department for Work and Pensions says there are now 13 million small pots holding £1,000 or less, with around a million more created every year, and shuffling all that paper costs the pensions industry some £225 million annually in needless admin.
Add in house moves, name changes, providers rebranding and companies being bought and sold, and the result is a system that scatters people's money by design and then leaves them to reassemble it on their own.
The pensions dashboard won't launch until 2027/28
The stock answer is that government fixes are on the way, and one day they might be.
The pensions dashboard, first promised in 2016, requires schemes to connect by 31 October 2026, but the Money and Pensions Service has confirmed the public-facing MoneyHelper dashboard is not expected to launch until the 2027/28 financial year.
The Pension Schemes Bill will eventually sweep small pots into a single consolidator, but that reform is not expected to be up and running until towards the end of the decade.
An employer pointing staff towards either is pointing them towards something they can’t use yet.
How employers can help staff trace lost pensions
The employers taking lost pensions seriously are doing the work themselves, and finding it costs almost nothing.
The government's free Pension Tracing Service only needs the name of a former employer or provider to get started.
HR teams hold the single most useful piece of information for any pension trace - the employment history - and can tell any current employee exactly which scheme their contributions go into, something a surprising number of people cannot name.
Offboarding is the other cheap fix.
A leaver who walks out the door with their scheme name, provider and policy number written down is a leaver who will not be phoning around in twenty years trying to piece it back together.
Some employers now run pension amnesty sessions, an hour where people bring in old paperwork and leave with a list of providers to contact.
None of this requires a procurement exercise.
One caution is worth building in.
Finding a pot and consolidating it are different decisions.
Older pensions sometimes carry valuable guarantees or exit charges, and merging everything into one plan is not automatically the right call for everyone.
The employer's job is to help people locate what they own and understand what they hold, and then let them take proper guidance on what to do with it.
An employee who knows where all their money is plans with real numbers rather than guesses, and worries less about a future they can finally see.
Employers spend heavily trying to manufacture that sense of security through benefits and content.
A good chunk of it is already sitting in dormant pots with their employees' names on it, waiting to be claimed.
Written by Caroline Chell
Head of Communications
