'It’s off the record' is a journalistic cliché. This is what a reporter will assure you where no evidence trail appears in print.
But is too much 'off the record' when it comes to data? During my 40 years in financial services, I have come across thousands of cases where records were incorrect. More alarmingly, some were never even kept in the first place.
Even today platform transfers can go awry with incomplete data, as advisers know all too well.
This lack of basic financial hygiene has led to hundreds of thousands of people, and women in particular, receiving incorrect state pensions. And a few employees have even been cheated out of their full company pension.
Worse still, according to the Pensions Policy Institute an eye-watering £26.6bn in 2022 was held in lost pension pots, with an average loss pot size of nearly £10,000, largely because pension providers’ records are out of date.
Of course, there are extenuating circumstances. High unemployment levels during the pandemic led to large numbers leaving jobs with pension schemes, creating a wave of lost pots. Moving house, marriage and divorce all add to the record keeping hiatuses.
Roughly one in 10 people change their address every year – a Herculean task to keep up to date.
In 2021, 5.9mn people in England and Wales changed address from the previous year – 10.1 per cent of usual residents.
Some even change not only their address but their country of residence; 1.2mn people migrated into the UK and 557,000 people emigrated from it, leaving a net migration figure of 606,000 as of the end of June 2022.
People get married and divorced. Indeed, marriage seems to be making a comeback since Covid – I have been to more weddings this year than in the past 20 years.
There were 219,850 marriages in total in England and Wales in 2020 but sadly, in 2021 there were 113,505 divorces granted in England and Wales (roughly one in two).
No wonder financial institutions struggle, but with tech could they not to do better?
Tech – help or hindrance
But is tech a help or hindrance? Who can now read their work on all old Amstrad computers from just four decades ago? How often do modern footnotes no long work because the link is broken and the work taken down?
I regularly write content for magazines and financial services companies – all so ephemeral. When the website is sold, or the work it is out of date, it is often taken down and lost – not even archived.
Occasionally, something needs updating; it is interesting to see the different treatment financial services firms give my work. Some religiously record the time of the change. Most do not. So, there is no record of the first draft of history.
At least with paper and parchment, there is a record – perhaps Ed Miliband who was mocked at the time for his "Ed Stone" was not so idiotic.
