Issue - meetings

Report of: Vicki Green, Pension Services Manager

The Board are invited to review the latest Administration Report as presented to the Pension Fund Committee on 6 June 2025, including the latest performance statistics for the service. 

Vicki Green, Pension Services Manager presented the Administration Report, presented to the Pension Fund Committee on 6 June 2025 which included the latest performance statistics for the service.  She advised of the following:

·       A breakdown of benefit administration work was provided and confirmed that there had been a decrease of 16% of those completed within the Service Level Agreement deadline from the previous quarter.

·       The reduction in performance was attributed to a loss of staffing, increase in annual leave and issues with the pension system requiring manual intervention.

·       The service was addressing these issues with development of software to enable greater automation of tasks to improve service and performance overall.

·       There had been an increase in telephone calls received from the previous quarter, and the team had maintained performance answering 94% of those.

·       No pension scams had been reported in the quarter, and due diligence checks were carried out correctly.

·       A new member self-service system called Engage will replace the existing version in January 2026, following calls from members identifying issues with logging into their accounts.  A further push to encourage sign up would be aligned with the project.

She further highlighted there was a high number of complex cases that would not be completed before the 31 August 2025 deadline for the McCloud project and had provided the Board with updated information prior to the meeting.  The Board was asked to comment as to whether the Fund should report a breach or request an extension of time to complete the work.  Mark Smith, Head of Pensions advised that it was important to note that the team had made very good progress, and the completion of records had increased from 57% to over 90%, mainly contributable to external factors.  He advised the Board that further work would be undertaken to determine whether any of the breaches were material. 

Following a question from the Board, Vicki Green advised that since October 2023 all calculations include a McCloud calculation, and therefore these checks were undertaken as part of final retirement calculations.

Mukhar Master, Governance and Communications Manager advised that The Pension Regulator had stated that any decision would need to be agreed through the Board, however the requirement for whether a discretion was applied was more technical and this would be communicated separately. 

Following further discussion from the Board, it was agreed that any breaches would need to be notified to The Pension Regulator as information they need to receive.  Mark Smith, Head of Pensions advised that any further information, in regard to whether the Fund would apply the discretion could be communicated via email.

The Board noted the report.

11.10

This report updates the Committee on the key administration issues including service performance measurement, the debt recovery process and any write offs agreed in the last quarter. 

The Committee is RECOMMENDED to note the amendments made to the quarterly performance statistics and member self-service statistics to provide comparison against the previous quarters throughout the last year.

Vicki Green, Pension Services Manager presented the report of the Executive Director of Resources and Section 151 Officer which updated the Committee on the key administrative issues including service performance measurement, the debt recovery process and any write offs agreed in the last quarter.  

Vicki Green provided an update on the current vacancies being carried by the team and advised that recruitment on all the existing vacancies would be carried out again and an update provided to the next Committee meeting.  Mark Smith, Head of Pensions advised the Committee that a regular amount of turnover was expected due to the size of the team, however the time taken to recruit and train new members was the main challenge experienced.  It was hoped that the internal training programme would facilitate career progression within the team to plug those gaps.

In response to a question from the Committee, Vicki Green assured Members that diligent checks were in place to ensure that any transfers out of the scheme to those not in Local Authorities are carried out, and the vigorous procedures in place would highlight any anomalies.

The Committee was RESOLVED to note the amendments made to the quarterly performance statistics and member self-service statistics to provide comparison against the previous quarters throughout the last year.