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 7 March 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 7 March 2025 which included the latest performance statistics for the service.  She highlighted the following:

·       A breakdown of the benefit administration work completed in the last quarter was shown in Annex 1.

·       There was an increase to that quarter, but this was in line with usual practice at the start of the new school academic year.

·       The telephone statistics will be built into the performance statistics; however, no issues had been raised to date.

·       There had been 18 informal complaints and details of those were included within the report.

·       The contract has been signed for the Pension Dashboard and would be in place before the statutory required date of October 2025.

·       Huge progress had been made on the McCloud Project on the OCC Status 1 and 4 cases.  Following completion of this stage, work would commence on those outstanding cases.

·       An update on outstanding vacancies within the team was provided.

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 decision made on the Fire Remedy project by the delegated Manager on behalf of the Pension Fund Committee.

Vicki Green, Pension Services Manager presented the report of the Executive Director for Resources and Section 151 Officer which updated the Committee on the key administration issues including service performance measurement, the debt recovery process and any write offs agreed in the last quarter.  She provided additional information regarding the increase in new cases of benefit administration work which was usual for this time of year due to new starters.

She also advised that 3.5% of employer monthly returns had not been vetted, however the workload had been distributed across the remaining team to be completed.  It was also noted that there had been improvements to quality of checks, training and the monitoring of workload and performance to mitigate these issues going forward.

The Committee requested that subsequent reports show comparisons to the previous quarters to identify changes to any of the statistics presented in the report.  (ACTION)

The Committee raised concerns that the team were carrying 2 Senior Administrator vacancies and 3 Administrator vacancies, and noted that this be flagged for review when moving into the new Committee following the May elections.

The Committee were RESOLVED to note the decision made on the Fire Remedy project by the delegated Manager on behalf of the Pension Fund Committee.