Agenda item

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

KPIs:

1)    There have been some improvements in the numbers since the last meeting in the last quarter (82.50% compared to 78.99% last quarter), the team has benefitted from increased resource and some projects came to an end in March.

2)    Aggregation is included in the figures with the intention of the report and the appendices is to be as transparent as possible. If Aggregation were excluded, then the quarterly performance to 31 March 24 would have been 96.57%.

3)    Appendix B provides 5 years of performance, the recent disruption to workload is evident but it is beginning to improve.

4)    Appendix C gives a list of tasks pending at the start of March 2024 and what has been achieved activity wise and what remains outstanding split by total (including reply due) and the work that can actively be worked upon. This table includes all tasks the team is processing to, over time, give the Committee an insight into what is outstanding providing an early indicator of a possible drag on future performance.

5)    The Committee were happy with the additional information presented and would welcome information about the prioritisation of work of the team and this will be reflected in future reports.

Staffing:

6)    Helpdesk is now appropriately resourced. The Pensions Administration Team is carrying one vacancy. The Fund has new robots which will carry out some lower-level less complex tasks. 

Projects:

7)    GMP: reconciliation work is mostly completed with over 2,000 pensioners in scope. Approximately 1,400 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 as required and allowing notice of change where appropriate. 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.

8)    Only 10 of the 140 employers were required to complete the end of year process and data has been received for all but one. All other employers are now submitting monthly data via i-Connect and these have been received up to March 2024 for all except one. Two statements will be produced this year: one in the previous template format and another through using the new MSS template. Officers expect to onboard the employers submitting manual returns by the end of the financial year so that all submissions can be returned via i-Connect for next year’s statements.

9)    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 members on 27 June which should highlight any issues with the system not identified through testing before launching to all members planned for 17 July.

8.2       The Committee RESOLVED to note the report.