The client questions HR consultants hear most — and where to send each one

Run a redundancy consultation and watch what happens. The employment-law questions dry up in ten minutes. The money questions never do. Will my payout be taxed? Should I take the enhanced pension option? What happens to my death-in-service cover if I go? You sit closest to the moment these questions become urgent, so people ask you. That is a compliment and a liability in the same breath. Advising on pensions and investments is a regulated activity under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, and the HR consultant said I should transfer is a sentence nobody wants read aloud at a tribunal or an ombudsman hearing. The skill is not knowing every answer. It is knowing which questions are factual, which are advice, and having somewhere credible to send the second kind within a day.

Facts about how things work are fair game. You can explain that the first £30,000 of a genuine termination payment is normally free of income tax, and that anything above it is not. You can explain that auto-enrolment minimums are 8% of qualifying earnings, with at least 3% from the employer. You can describe death-in-service as typically two to four times salary, usually paid through a discretionary trust, which is exactly why the expression-of-wish form matters and why an out-of-date one causes misery. You can walk someone through what a salary-sacrifice arrangement does to their payslip. What you cannot do is tip over from how it works into what you should do. The line sounds subtle. Regulators do not find it subtle at all.

Build a routing table and keep it beside the phone.

• Should I transfer my pension or take the enhanced option? A regulated financial adviser, checked on the FCA Register. For defined-benefit transfers over £30,000, advice is a legal requirement, not a courtesy.
• How do I structure my settlement for tax? An accountant, before anything is signed.
• My death-in-service nomination names my ex. An estate planner — the nomination and the will usually need updating together.
• I just want to understand my options. MoneyHelper, free and government-backed; Pension Wise for the over-50s.

Notice that none of these destinations is you. That is the point.

A vague suggestion to see someone helps nobody and gets forgotten by lunchtime. A warm introduction — named adviser, vetted credentials, a note on why — gets acted on, and the client remembers who made it happen. That memory is worth more than any answer you could have improvised. Keep the boundary documented too: a short written note that you signposted rather than advised protects you if the client later complains about the outcome. Networks such as SmartPeer exist for exactly this, tracking referrals to vetted advisers and generating a disclosure letter so the paper trail writes itself. Boring first. Clever later. The consultants who master the handover become the first call for everything, which is precisely where a practice wants to be.