What happened to Ian Stocks' pension?

Dear readers — the recent craze for bringing back old media formats has extended to vinyl, 35mm film and even cassettes. But so far there’s been no retro revival for the true symbol of the 1980s — the floppy disc. Younger readers won’t remember the heady days of copying and pasting documents onto a 5-inch plastic square before carefully bearing it along to the other blocky computer you wanted the information on.

But the obsolescence of this once great technology is a particular problem for Ian Stocks, a man who believes crucial information about years of his pension was stored on one. What happened to it? Mollie gets the story. But first, your Tribune briefing.

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By Mollie Simpson

Ian Stocks, 62, has lived many lives. He’s been a seed merchant in rural Devon, worked for a now defunct local authority in Barnsley, and been a photographer for the police, following bobbies around as they raided articulated lorries filled to the rafters with cocaine and flying around on helicopters searching for drug warehouses. Nowadays, he describes himself as “an investigator of my own losses”.

Allow me, as briefly as possible, to regale you with the events that brought Ian to this point. Leaving school at 16, he got his first job at the South Yorkshire County Council (SYCC) in 1981, as a budding photographer. He would snap pictures of the authority’s inventory – fairly dull work, compared to the thrill of his future job with the police.

But what could have been a job for life in a large government body proved to be anything but. SYCC’s fate was a particularly ignominious one. Set up in 1974, it had been a powerful body, with functions overseeing public transport, roads and planning. It even got its own coat of arms, featuring Yorkshire roses, a black lion holding a miner’s pickaxe, and the socialist slogan emblazoned across the bottom: “Each Shall Strive for the Welfare of All”. (It also had its own flag, which could be generously described as ‘of its time’.)

But no prime minister can be in office for too long without scratching the itch to reorganise local government. The metropolitan county councils hadn’t exactly endeared themselves to Thatcher’s administration with their red hot socialist ideals. And so it was that in 1986 the SYCC was unceremoniously dumped into the dustbin of history — taking Ian’s job with it.

Still just 22, Ian moved on. He settled back in with his parents in Totnes, and ended up taking an unusual career turn into selling seeds. At the time, he wasn’t thinking loads about his pension — who does in their early twenties? That was one for later.

Fast forward 42 years to 2018, and Ian decided to take early retirement. Sitting down to tot up his pensions, he noticed a deficit that took him by surprise. He could see nothing relating to his five years behind the camera for SYCC. Assuming some sort of mistake, he reached out to the South Yorkshire Pensions Authority, who oversee the SYCC pension schemes. “They had no idea who I was”, Ian says.