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Pension Committee |
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Date: |
25 September 2025 |
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By: |
Chief Finance Officer |
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Title: |
Communications Report |
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Purpose:
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This report provides an update on Fund Communication. |
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RECOMMENDATION: The Pension Committee is recommended to note the report.
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1. Background
1.1 This report is presented to the Pension Committee to provide an update on the Communication activity of the Fund.
1.2 The Fund has a Communications Strategy (updated in June 2025) which defines the main methods of communication provided for key stakeholders.
2. Scheme Member training
2.1 The communications team continue to work closely with the Employer Engagement team in putting together a booking process, promotion via Scheme employers, updating scripts, YouTube videos and sending out and collating feedback.
2.2 The Employer Engagement team will be repeating the 3-part member level training series in October 2025. Each of the three sessions will be run twice. Training dates for 2026 are now on the website.
3. East Sussex Pension Assistant (ESPA)
3.1 The Communications team have been integral in building a knowledge base of over 200 questions and answers as part of a new digital assistant (this will sit on designated pages of the website as an automated tool to support member queries). The project is now moving onto user acceptance testing.
4. Employer Forum
4.1 The agenda for the 2025 Employer Forum (face to face) has been finalised. To date there are approximately 63 registrations (including Fund staff). Further promotion will happen.
5. East Sussex Pension Fund main website
5.1 The website continues to be updated with relevant and engaging information for members and employers. The following guides have been updated: HR guide, Payroll guide, annual allowance fact sheet, Councillors’ guide.
5.2 The Communications team continue to monitor the website (including all PDF documents) to check accessibility. The primary tool used is ‘Silktide,’ a web governance platform that helps improve website quality and user experience by identifying and fixing issues related to accessibility. A snapshot of the Silktide results (as of 15 August 2025) is shown below.
5.3 Website analytics data are detailed in Appendix 1.
5.4 Security improvements have been added to our website including Snyk Enterprise, reporting and analysis. This provides proactive, integrated security throughout the website development process. There have been minor upgrades to Umbraco (the Content management system – to the latest available). This was to address potential security vulnerabilities identified as part of routine monitoring.
6 Border to Coast Pensions Partnership pooling communications
6.1 The Communications team delivered a full communications plan to support the ‘Border to Coast’ pooling preference (working closely with West Sussex).
Communications included:
- An internal email to all East Sussex County Council (ESCC) staff
- An email to all employers in the Fund
- Call to actions on the homepage, investment, employer pages of the website
- An official statement on the website (which the above linked to)
7 Annual Benefit Statements 2025
7.1 All communications (letters or emails) were issued by 31/8/2025 for the 2025 Annual Benefit Statement (ABS) exercise. There were twenty-four individual templates to reflect members’ McCloud status (for example if they don’t qualify/do qualify with an uplift etc). Where possible, members were pointed to the online ABS on ‘My Pension’ – the member self-service website.
8 ‘My Pension’ - member self-service website
8.1 An updated version of ‘My Pension’ went live on the 17 July 2024. Shown below (as of 8th of September 2025) are current registration levels:
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Type of member |
On Engage (number) |
% registered for ‘My Pension’ |
Old MSS % registered |
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Contributing |
10750 |
50.7% |
51 |
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No longer contributing |
8234 |
37.6% |
46 |
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Pensioners |
8114 |
61.7% |
50 |
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Widow/dependant |
587 |
36.3% |
19 |
Since the launch of the annual benefit statement communications, an extra 1,705 members have registered (at 9.9.25) with further sign-ups expected.
9 Pension Awareness Campaign 2025
9.1 Pension Awareness* Day is a time for people to reflect on personal retirement goals and understand the significance of engaging with one's pension scheme. The Fund built a bespoke website page to promote the campaign.
10 Conclusion and reasons for recommendation
10.1 The Pension Committee is recommended to note the updates provided in the report.
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IAN GUTSELL |
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Chief Finance Officer |
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Contact Officer: |
Susan Greenwood, Head of Pensions |
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Email: |
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