Premier Children Services Investment enters administration: What we know so far

If you’ve invested your cash or pension into Premier Children’s Services (often called PCS) and you haven’t yet heard the news, you might want to sit down (if you’re not already).

On the 15^th of November 2016, the board of Premier Children’s Services met to discuss the best options to deal with the “financial difficulties” faced by the firm. From the meetings minutes, it is clear that the decision was made to appoint Stephen Gerard Clancy and Stephen Muncaster of Duff and Phelps as administrators.

But what does this mean?

Well, you can’t really put it any simpler than one large SIPP provider put it:

“Please be aware that, given the circumstances, no further payments are now expected from PCS. Therefore, if you were anticipating any sort of capital or interest payment into your SIPP which has not been received by 15 November 2016, it is unlikely that this will be paid”.

In short, any returns you were expecting from you Premier Children Services investment are unlikely to arrive – the company is unlikely to have the cash to pay them:

“The company is or is likely to become unable to pay its debts”

If everything had gone to plan with the way in which Premier Children Services investments were always sold, then it shouldn’t come as any surprise to investors when we say that this was always a high risk and unregulated investment.

What this means is, that because PCS is not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, it is considered a high-risk investment, with no help from the Financial Ombudsman or the FSCS compensation pot should something like this happen!

Were you told this when you went into the investment?

More to the point, your financial adviser had responsibilities to undertake when giving you advice on PCS, ensuring that you fit the criterion to go into such an investment, like being:

• A High Net-Worth individual earning over £100,000 per year
• A Sophisticated investor with lots of investment experience

If you weren’t either of these things and weren’t told about the risk, then you could be a victim of the large scale Pension Mis-selling scandal!

Mis-sold SIPPS

While everybody knows about PPI (lets face it, you don’t seem to be able to get away from PPI), thousands may have been mis-sold their pension investments without realising!

Often, this is where you end up transferring your old pension into a new one, often a Self-Invested Personal Pension which can hold either regulated or unregulated investments.

If you have a SIPP with Premier Children Services as one of the investments, then you could be one of those that has been mis-sold!

Making a claim

Finding out if you can make a claim is simple: Just fill in the form on the right to request a free call-back to assess your advice!

You’re under no obligation to continue, this is just a free check to see if you’ve been mis-sold.

If our specialists confirm your suspicions and it DOES look like you’ve been mis-sold, we may invite you to begin a no upfront cost claim against the advice you receive, with the potential to rescue your Premier Children Services investment.

For more information on making a Premier Children Services claim, head over to our mis-sold PCS claim page!

Please note: you have an initial cooling off period of 14 days, if you cancel outside of this period you may be charged for the work carried out and if we have already submitted your claim, which results in an offer of compensation subsequently being made, we will charge our full fee as per our T&Cs – our fee is 20% + VAT – a total of 24%.