Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many and what proportion of Defined Contribution pension savers that have not received regulated financial advice had a telephone appointment with the Pension Wise guidance service before accessing their pension benefits in the last 12 months.

Data on the number of Defined Contribution (DC) contract-based pots accessed without financial advice, but after taking Pension Wise guidance can be found in Tables 10-13 in FCA’s retirement income market data 2018/19 release: https://www.fca.org.uk/data/retirement-income-market-data. This data is not broken down by appointment type and as it does not include the trust-based DC market, does not cover the entire DC decumulation market.

We do not hold data on the proportion of Defined Contribution savers that this represents, as people may have multiple pots and may not seek advice or guidance on each pot.

The Money and Pensions Service publish information on the number of Pension Wise appointments delivered by appointment type in their Pension Wise service evaluation report 2018/19: https://moneyandpensionsservice.org.uk/2020/01/24/pension-wise-service-evaluation-2018-19-experiences-and-outcomes-of-customers/