Agenda item

This report sets out Key Performance Indicators for the administration of the Local Government Pension Scheme for the three-month period up to the end of August 2022.

The Pensions Manager introduced the report and explained to members that the pension administration team had been working to prepare for the valuation. The annual allowance calculations and data quality score results would be published at the next Pension Board meeting.

The Pensions Manager informed the Board that two members of their team had left the Council in recent weeks; one staff member had retired for personal reasons and another had left for a promotion at another authority. Advertisements had been published for the positions and it was hoped that they would be filled in the near future.

In response to questions from members, officers informed the Board that:

·        Around 22,000 records which belonged to staff within the council were affected and some of those records related to staff with multiple posts. As the data for the staff working in the council had been obtained, officers could now identify the data for the staff who worked in schools within the borough, which required more detailed analysis;

·        There was potential to reach out to contractors to assist with the current workload and that last year they had engaged with their software provider to this end. The process had stalled because of the data issues with the school payroll and a lack of school payroll providers; however, now that the Council’s data had been gathered, the focus would switch to the schools’ data and officers would be open to contacting external companies for assistance in future;

·        In 2016, the council made the decision to not provide a school’s payroll service. The council separated the main council payroll onto a different system to the school’s pay roll, which was now a third-party provider that the schools employed. On the Council’s Pension system, council-run schools came under the council's employer code: this had caused issues as when they received the McCloud report all the schools were lumped together with the Council data. The Pension Manager concluded, stating that they were now in a position where they were aware of whose data belonged to the council and whose data belonged to the schools;

·        Officers hoped that there would be an improvement in the number of employees accessing the Pensions self-service area of the website over the next quarter. The Pensions Manager explained that in future, they would look to direct individuals to the website as they would be unable to help deal with all their queries;

·        The Pensions Manager received an email which stated that there were under 40 tasks left to do. The bulk of the outstanding tasks related to tracing and a generic letter had been sent to ask people to contact the team as they could not issue the deferred benefit statements to their addresses; and,

·        The next step with the dashboard was to assess the data based on the matching criteria and before implementing a regular tracing regime using resources from the software provider.

The Chair disclosed that the Board had asked for a resources plan from McCloud, at the time advised by the Pensions Manager.

RESOLVED:

• To note the Key Performance Indicators and the performance against these indicators set out in Appendix A to this report.