Why will it value me £3,000 to take simply £9,000 tax-free from my pension?

When my boiler packed up last month, it was inconvenient to put it mildly – but fortunately I had tax-free cash stashed in my pension ready for just such an eventuality. I have £120,000 in a Self-Invested Personal Pension (Sipp) with investment platform AJ Bell, which I have built up over 20 years of careful saving.

As am I older than 55, pension rules permit me to take out substantial amounts of tax-free cash as one lump sum – or smaller amounts whenever I choose.

I told AJ Bell I wanted to withdraw £9,000. I expected a fee of around £100 and for the cash to appear in my linked current account within a couple of days. How wrong I was.

Initially, I was told the matter would be dealt with quickly and was being labelled ‘high priority’. But after a frustrating saga of 17 email exchanges in 11 days, I was told the bad news.

Before it could pay out my £9,000, it said I had to arrange and pay for a legal document. I looked into how much it would cost me to get it. The answer? At least £3,000.

AJ Bell was insisting I pay £3,000 to access £9,000 of my own money.

Hard to get: AJ Bell wanted £3,000 to access £9,000

It turns out the reason is that I own two, small commercial properties within my Sipp. These are a convenience store and a T-shirt shop in Cardiff that I bought using my Sipp around ten years ago to provide me with a small income. They are currently worth around £200,000 together and pay me an income of around £20,000 a year.

The beauty of holding them in a Sipp is that the income accrues tax free. It is only when I withdraw it for my own use that it is subject to income tax.

They had proved a good investment. But now suddenly they were preventing me from accessing tax-free cash that I really needed.

Because of pension regulations, I was told, I needed to organise and pay for new valuations of both properties before I could receive my money. This, I was led to believe, was standard procedure.

The valuations would cost me at least £3,000 because of the complex legal nature of the properties.

It was, I told AJ Bell, like a bank saying to a customer, ‘You have £20,000 in your current account but we won’t give you a penny until you pay £1,500 for a survey of your own home’.

But this argument cut no ice. Rules were rules. It was the typical ‘computer says no’ argument so many companies fall back on.

When you take tax-free cash from a pension, the first 25 per cent is tax free and the remainder may attract tax. Your pension provider needs to know how much your total pot is worth so that it can calculate how much is tax free. Working out the value of a pension pot is relatively straightforward when it contains just funds, shares and cash. But it’s more complicated when it includes commercial properties that need to be valued.

However, my Sipp also contained £60,000 in easily accessible cash in addition to the two commercial properties. Surely, to take out £9,000 of tax-free cash, AJ Bell could just assign a further £27,000 of taxable cash (three times the tax-free sum) without having to get a full valuation of the Sipp.

So I complained. Three decades of presenting TV shows for the BBC and ITV about poor service and overcharging meant I was never going to take this sort of thing lying down.

I did what every customer should and refused to take no for an answer. I told AJ Bell I would be complaining to the Pensions Ombudsman – I will have to wait for the company to look into my complaint first, however – and that I would be writing this article.

Two days later, I got an email saying the position had changed. Managers had looked at my case and decided I didn’t need the expensive surveys. AJ Bell said: ‘Initially, valuations were requested to ensure accurate calculations for your tax-free cash and compliance with HMRC regulations.’

However, because I had recently made a £30,000 cash payment into my Sipp, AJ Bell could now ‘match its recorded value and avoid the need for valuations’. The e-mail continued: ‘We wouldn’t ordinarily do this as it would likely negatively impact the amount of tax-free cash you would receive. We, therefore, went outside of our procedure given you did not want to obtain a property valuation.’

This sort of burdensome regulation governing commercial properties needs to change. Tens of thousands of pensioners own commercial properties via their Sipps.

Currently, a strict reading of the rules requires administrators to tell customers they must pay for expensive surveys every time they want tax-free cash.

This is an overabundance of caution in my view and nearly always completely unnecessary.

It won’t surprise you to learn I plan to leave AJ Bell. But I will heed the advice of Jenny Ross, of Which? Pension, who says: ‘If you want to transfer your Sipp to another provider, the new provider will manage the transfer on your behalf. But bear in mind that some providers charge exit fees if you move elsewhere. But you may think this is a price worth paying.’

This experience with AJ Bell is the last straw. For the last five years, I’ve looked on in horror at its rocketing charges.

In that time, my annual fees have gone from just over £1,600 to nearly £2,500 – an increase of 60 per cent. That sum includes nearly £1,500 for ‘property administration fees’ as AJ Bell collects the rent on two small shops owned by my Sipp in Cardiff, £340 in ‘quarterly administration fees’, £320 in ‘off panel administration fees’ (this is what I pay for the privilege of having instructed AJ Bell to invest in a tracker fund), £180 in ‘income drawdown fees’ and £130 in miscellaneous one-off charges.

IPM, a Sipp administrator based in Hertfordshire, would charge £800 annually for exactly the same service – a saving of more than 60 per cent.

And that includes any property administration fees IPM would require before letting me access tax-free cash. Other companies which offer a similar service include Investec and Dentons.

Revealingly, it seems it is not just me who is unhappy about the regulatory burden of holding commercial property in Sipps.

Even AJ Bell itself announced it would no longer be willing to administrate newly purchased commercial properties.

The reason, according to Nick Reeve, editor at Pensions Expert, is the increasingly problematic, bureaucratic expensive and time-consuming rules designed to stop scams.

He says: ‘This is because some unscrupulous people could be flogging commercial property as a way of ripping people off.’

In the meantime, I’m moving my Sipp as soon as I’m able. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, AJ Bell: it tolls for thee.