Issue - meetings

43.1     The Board considered a report providing an update on matters relating to Pensions Administration activities and Paul Punter (PP) drew the Board’s attention to the following points:

Projects

1)    McCloud: officers have imported the data into the system for active members which has driven up the numbers of queries however officers are confident they can be resolved in bulk. BHCC data has been received and significant progress is being made in processing this.

2)    Pensions Dashboard: officers good plans in place with Heywoods to work with them to onboard to the dashboard, more information will come to Board next year. The allocated LGPS onboard date is October 2025.

3)    Mortality checks: work has been very effective with only suspended 6 pensions.

4)    Annual Allowance: everything was completed on time, with only one individual liable for extra tax.

5)    Much of the PAT printing and postage services were switched from CFH Docmail Ltd to in-house on 1 September 2023. The remainder of the printing and postage have now migrated from 1 September 2024.    

Helpdesk

6)    The Fund aims to achieve a gold standard service provision for the Pensions Helpdesk and the results are included in Appendix 5. From April 2024 the Helpdesk has been delivered by an in-house team within PAT. Due to the transition into an in-house team the reportable information relating to service delivery has reduced. The roll out of the telephony upgrade is awaited and then new statistics will be available to the Board.

KPIs

7)    The volume numbers of tasks received are extraordinarily high compared to the historical position and are unstainable. There are several factors impacting this which includes:

-        The change of approach to monthly data collection allows us to receive member leaving data much quicker and we are finding that late pay (e.g. overtime/holiday pay) is resulting in recalculation.

-        Most of the i-Connect employer receive late annual pay awards and these are resulting in thousands of recalculations for all types of leavers.

-        BHCC data has be received in bulk for the last two years; felt this impact during quarter 3.

-        The move to digitalisation resulted in thousands of pensioners wanting to retain paper communications.

-        The switch to the upgraded Member Self Service portal has in July resulted in thousands of support calls and password resets.

8)    The Pensions Administration Team is fully resourced and includes interim support for the BHCC work, now supplemented by a small number of robots, are working tirelessly to try to keep up with a growing backlog.

9)    To aid visibility of the work being undertaken by the PAT team Appendix 4 provides a high-level view of performance achieved (as presented to Board/Committee) over a number of years.

43.2     TR asked whether employees on higher tax rate are making enquiries about accessing their pensions earlier or in part due to the changes in staffing models within Local Authorities. Officers confirmed that there has been some increased redundancy activity and whilst it is more complex  ...  view the full minutes text for item 43