THOUSANDS of the region’s residents poised to cash in their pension pots will have as few as nine face-to-face advisers to offer help, The Northern Echo can reveal.

Radical new freedoms – allowing over-55s to withdraw their pension and spend it as they wish, rather than be forced to buy a poor-value annuity – begin in just six weeks’ time.

George Osborne vowed a legal right to “free, impartial, face-to-face advice” for anyone tempted to dip into their pots, to avoid blunders.

The pledge came amid warnings that people will blow their savings on holidays and cars – only to end up in poverty, in their old age.

Citizens Advice will run 44 delivery centres across England and Wales and provide face-to-face “Pension Wise” guidance, including in Darlington, Hambleton and North Tyneside.

The organisation plans outreach services to meet people across the region, but each centre will have only between three and seven trained staff.

Quizzed at Westminster, pensions minister Steve Webb rejected suggestions of a shortage – insisting few people were now expected to opt for face-to-face guidance.

Instead, the Liberal Democrat argued most would rather “sit on the sofa, with a mug of tea, on the phone to somebody”, to get the help they need.

Mr Webb said: “I think it’s a slightly old-fashioned notion is to say the only way to get sensible information about financial services is to sit and have a conversation with somebody.

“If you think of the world we live in now, where I’m sitting on my sofa on a Saturday evening and someone has sent me a message from their tablet to my phone on Facebook Messenger - or something like that

“That’s the way people live, most people in the demographic we are talking about. This isn’t 90 year olds – it’s 55-to 60-year-olds.”

Mr Webb said most people would get help from the Government’s free Pension Wise advisory website, which “has got everything on it”.

This week, the Association of British Insurers – which strongly supports the shake-up – nevertheless warned key questions “remain unanswered”.

Those questions include “how the Pension Wise guidance sessions will work, how they will be structured and how the session will be recorded”.

More than 300,000 people a year with defined contribution pension savings will be able to exploit the new freedoms – with a “surge” of older people expected to join in. from April 6.

Mr Webb accepted some would “make the wrong choices”, but argued most would welcome the chance to “pay off debt, give it to the kids, have the holiday of a lifetime”.

He said: “It is a legitimate choice for an individual to say ‘I would rather have cash than a steady income’, if we have explained how the system works.”