Agenda item

8.              Pensions Administration Report

8.1       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:

KPIs

1)    There have been some improvements in the numbers since the last meeting, the team has benefitted from increased resource and some projects came to an end in March. On the KPI basis, excluding item 9 (aggregations/combining’s) the average result for Jan to Mar 2024 was 96.57%.

2)    The intention of the report and the appendices is to be as transparent as possible with additional appendices provided to the Board to demonstrate how much work is processed by the team and volumes of outstanding tasks; RM agreed to meet with PP to discuss the reporting requirements ahead of the next meeting.

Helpdesk

3)    This has been a challenging period with the team moving in house and resources focused training the new starters and therefore a full year’s breakdown of KPI information has been provided at this meeting. Performance has been back on track since May and officers will look to restyle and condense the KPI reporting to a single page going forwards.

Staff

4)    Helpdesk is now appropriately resourced. PAT recently appointed a new apprentice and now have  3 apprentices. PAT is carrying one vacancy but content to allow new staff to bed in as the recent backlog has been cleared and the Fund has some new robots which will carry out lower level tasks, so staff will need to be trained accordingly as they will take on checking work.

Projects

5)    GMP: reconciliation work is mostly completed with over 2000 pensioners in scope. Pensioners under the GMP age have had their records updated to show the new GMP and non-GMP split of pension in payment. Changes for pensioners over GMP age result in over and underpayments being materialised. Overpayments to date have been written off and pensioners were given three months’ notice of the new lower payments being implemented   in June. A small number of cases were held back for further investigation and will be adjusted in the next few weeks. The team have received five complaints as a result of the GMP rectification- these complaints have been responded to, however the Fund  may receive further concerns when payments start to reduce. Mercers have largely completed their work on the project but may be required to redo some reconciliation work on a batch of 300 cases that were held back temporarily until the Fund can determine on a case by case basis whether the HMRC or Fund data is correct. Further work is outstanding for the deferred members but the more complex pensioners are mostly complete.

6)    The Member Self-Service (MSS) project to improve functionality and increase security of the system is in progress with testing well underway.  The Fund aims to pilot the service with ESCC staff on 27 June which should highlight any issues with the system not identified through testing before launching to all members on 17 July. It was noted that Trevor was invited to have an early look at the new system and carry out some testing as a Board member representative.

7)    McCloud data returns have been submitted by all active scheme employers. With the exception of BHCC, the data has been validated by a Heywood tool and Officers have resolved all but 400 of the 4,200 queries raised. The remainder are with employers. Work has also been undertaken to collect data from employers with no active members. Data has been received from 60% of these and chasers for the remainder is ongoing. The Fund have had to postpone transfer requests for members in scope for McCloud as there is no Altair calculation functionality.  The LGA has produced a template for McCloud non-Club cases and Officers are currently testing this.

8.2       The Board noted the good position of the Fund and thanked officers are their continued hard work.

8.3       The Board RESOLVED to note the report.