Like many this week I was taken aback at the scale of the BSPS pension transfer scandal redress. It’s huge and just the tip of an iceberg.

The FCA has set up a scheme to pay out an estimated £71.2m in redress to the victims of the British Steel Pension Scheme pension transfer scandal.

However many of these poor people will not get redress until the end of 2023 at the earliest, that’s way too long but that is not the worst aspect of the whole sorry saga from the advice sector's point of view.

The most disappointing, and perturbing, aspect is the sheer scale of the problem finally revealed this week by the FCA. I'm sure I'm not alone in believing the cost could go much higher than £71m.

What was most shocking was that there were no less than 343 firms involved in giving advice to BSPS members and 46% of the advice BSPS members received was “unsuitable." That's an atrocious level of bad advice. Nearly almost 1 in 2 BSPS members failed to get the right advice.

Literally dozens of advice firms moved in like vultures to rip off the BSP members, there’s no other way of describing it.

They took advantage of people who mostly knew little about the intricacies of the pension transfer market.

The figures do not necessarily mean that half of the BSPS advice firms gave bad advice, I’m sure many gave good advice, but the scale of the bad advice was appalling.

Some 1,400 BSPS members were mis-advised, according to the FCA.

As a result many saw their dream retirement reduced to a nightmare by a cavalcade of greedy advice firms, many of who have gone bust, throwing the burden of sorting out their mess on the many hard working financial advisers and Financial Planners who have the misfortune to fund the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.

I also believe BSPS has a case to answer here. It’s naive and frankly poor decision to allow members to be left to the mercy of a bunch of greedy advisers warrants serious re-examining.

The FCA is now busy beefing up its pension transfer regulation but many will say the horse has bolted on this one. So could a BSPS case happen again? - you bet it could.

I cannot see any reason why, in similar circumstances, the same rip offs could not happen again. If there is any comfort it is “once bitten, twice shy” and at least the regulators are better able to spot the early warning signs.

If anyone in the financial advice sector wonders why consumers do not trust them in bigger numbers it is just this sort of case. Many bona fide advisers will say that the BSPS advisers are a different breed and have nothing to do with them. There is truth in this but unfortunately the British public do not see it that way.

The BSPS case has done incalculable harm to the reputation of financial advice in the UK and fundamental change is needed, not another redress scheme. The FCA report must be the catalyst for long term change and the vultures must be kept away from the vulnerable and inexperienced.

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Kevin O’Donnell is editor of Financial Planning Today and a journalist with 40 years of experience in finance, business and mainstream news. This topical comment on the Financial Planning news appears most weeks, usually on Fridays but occasionally other days. Follow @FPT_Kevin • If you have not yet registered for Financial Planning Today as a subscriber please do so now. It's free to sign up.