Report attached. 

Contact:  Vicky Jenks (01743 252192)

The Board considered the report of the Pensions Administration Manager which provided Board Members with the latest administration and regulatory updates affecting the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS).

The Pensions Administration Manager introduced and amplified her report which updated Members on the work undertaken by the pensions administration team including Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and progress on projects including McCloud, Pension Dashboards and my Pension Online.  It also provided an update from the Scheme Advisory Board.

The Pensions Administration Manager drew attention to Appendix A which set out how the team were performing in relation to the 16 KPIs for the period 1 April 2024 to 30 September 2024 with 95% being the target.  Appendix A also set out a comparison between quarters, as requested by the Pensions Committee.  She reported that the customer target was ambitious compared to the legal target and were set within their Administration Strategy which was due to be reviewed within the next 6 months when they would look to align the customer target more closely to the legal targets.  She reported that many of the workflows were achieving close to or above 95% of the legal target and where they were not, they were looking to recruit two new Pensions Assistants to work on achieving those targets.

The Pensions Administration Manager informed the meeting that the Cyber Security Policy had been signed off by the Pensions Committee in June.  It had been tested in September via the Council’s Risk Assessment team alongside their Business Continuity Plan and their Business Impact Analysis and Service Recovery Plan.  The plans had been tweaked slightly but they were happy that there were robust processes in place.

She updated Members in relation to the ‘My Pensions Online’ portal which had been upgraded in October.  A soft launch had been undertaken with pensioners via a newsletter in order to gauge the types of questions they might get asked.  This allowed them to tweak the information available on the website including instructions for registering.  The next communication would be to those members who were already registered to let them know that they would have to transfer their account to the new facility.  She went on to explain why a phased approach had been taken.

Turning to McCloud, the Pensions Administration Manager reported that this work was ongoing, and they were currently looking to create the work plan for the rectification cases (those members who left the Pension Fund during the remedy period and needed an underpin applying to their benefits).  She explained that there were some cases where work could not be undertaken due to outstanding software developments to be delivered in the next 12 to 18 months along with outstanding guidance.

In relation to the Pension Dashboard, the Board were informed that they had signed up for their ISP connection to allow their software to connect to the system and would be implemented in January 2025 ready to go live by October 2025.  The team were currently undertaking a data matching/partial matching exercise to hopefully reduce the number of enquiries received by the team.  The biggest problem area was around members addresses and they were looking to procure a tracing service to keep addresses updated.

In response to a query in relation to recruitment, the Pensions Administration Manager confirmed that the posts currently being recruited to were for an additional 

two Pensions Assistants.  In addition, additional hours have been added to the communications teams.  There was also another vacant post that they wished to recruit to, and this would be for a ‘floating’ Pensions Assistant to work across all three teams.

It was commented that it was difficult to see on the table in Appendix A how the volume of work was changing over quarters. In response, the Pensions Administration Manager explained that the Pensions Committee had asked for more information about the ongoing work in each quarter, which was why they had created the line chart.  She reported that the KPI table would also be changing going forward to show the quarterly figures.

In terms of prioritisation of workloads, the Pensions Administration Manager discussed how the work was split out by the operations team, which was currently done on a multifunctional, alpha split prioritising retirements to ensure benefits were paid out which did mean that transfers slipped however going forward they needed to think about how to better prioritise the work including auto allocation according to availability.

Looking at the Pensions Dashboard, it was requested that the ‘go live’ dates be included on the project updates.  The meeting was informed that the time scales were set in legislation and that the go-live date for all pension schemes to be connected and members being able to log on to a dashboard and see their pension information was October 2026. In response to a further query, the Pensions Administration Manager explained that the timescales for pensions schemes was phased at intervals between October 2025 and October 2026.  During this time, they would do some testing to ensure that members could get on etc.  The Government would give them a six-month lead in time at which time communications would be rolled out to Members.

In response to a query, the Pensions Administration Manager confirmed that in relation to the ‘initial letters acknowledging deaths’ KPI, there could be some complications with certain cases, sometime just a delay in calculating the value of the benefits due to some anomaly on their record or it could just be a case of a pensioner who had been in payment for a long time as some information was still held on microfiche so it could be difficult to find the information.  There was a project in place to get the microfiche records digitised which would make the process quicker.

RESOLVED:  To note the contents of the report.