Agenda item

45.1       The Committee considered a report introduced by Paul Punter who drew the Committee’s attention to the following points:

Projects

1)    McCloud: officers have inputted 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 progress is being made in processing this. Non active member data has been received.
 

2)    Take up of Member self-service has been disappointing and increasing registration numbers will be an area of focus for officers throughout 2025.

3)    Pensions Dashboard: The LGPS are required to connect to the Pensions Dashboard by October 2025 and officers are working closely with Heywoods to ensure this is achieved. More information and a training session will be provided to the Board/Committee next year.
 

4)    Mortality checks for 600 overseas pensioners is complete with only six pensioners having their pension suspended.

5)    23/24 Annual Allowance: Everything was completed on time, with only one individual liable for extra tax.

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 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 Committee.

KPIs

7)    The volume of tasks received are extraordinarily high compared to the historical position and the KPI’s are below the level that officers would wish to achieve. There are several factors impacting this which includes:

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

-       Most of the i-Connect employers have been giving late annual pay awards and these are resulting in thousands of recalculations for all types of leavers. Previously employers did not provide this.

8)    BHCC data has been received in bulk for the last two years; the result is thousands of member movements being requested at once rather than being spread over the year. The Pensions Administration Team is fully resourced and includes interim support for the BHCC work, now supplemented by a small number of robotic routines. PAT are working tirelessly to try to keep up with a growing backlog. There have been historical issues with PAT not properly pausing tasks when data/information is required from third parties. Human errors still occur but are much diminished. 

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. Officers will consider what KPI reporting targets should look like in future in Spring once the BHCC data issues are resolved.

45.2       Officers were reassured that members are not raising complaints or concerns about service or timely responses but agreed that some consideration may be needed in terms of quality measures in the New Year. Officers confirmed that resource levels are appropriate and that whilst the Pension Dashboard will mean that there will be some extra work generated, some tasks will be better spread out in future and will be more manageable as a result. 

45.3       The Committee agreed that it would be beneficial for the issues with the BHCC data to be resolved, the progress of which will be reported to the Pensions Administration working group, before taking a view on the levels at which the KPIs are set and agreed with the view of the Pension Board that they do not consider that there has been a drop in performance and recognised the work completed by officers and the improved reporting.

45.4       The Committee RESOLVED to note the report.