Transcript

is elected at the recent AGM to chair this committee. I take a second to thank our previous chair, Councillor Farmer. First, some brief housekeeping. Please ensure your mobile phones are switched off. Those of you on Zoom are asked to keep your videos on during the meeting. All microphones are to be kept muted during the meeting, whether you're on Zoom or in the Chamber, and should only be unmuted when invited to speak. When you're finished speaking, please go back to unmute. When you wish to speak, please raise your hand. If you're on Zoom, please use the raise hand function. At the end of the item, when considering each recommendation, if you wish to propose a proposal, please make sure that is made clear. In the event that we need to carry out a formal vote, this will be by roll call, where each committee member will be asked in turn how they wish to vote. The meeting is being live streamed to the Council's website and the recording will be published to the Council's website within a day of the meeting ending. Should the live streaming fail, the meeting will continue and the recording will be available on the website. Members will be aware that we are in a pre-election period and we need to observe restrictions that apply at this time. Before we move on to the agenda, I would like to welcome Jody Williams from Audit Wales, who will be presenting the Audit Plan. Moving to the agenda, today we are focused mainly on the administration and governance issues, with several items for approval. Funding and investment matters will be discussed in more detail at the next meeting in September, but there will be a short update report which is mainly for noting. We also have a couple of items where they will be asked to confirm exclusion of the press and public. Moving on to agenda item 1, apologies. We have received apologies in advance from Councillor Gwyneth Ellis, are there any other apologies? Nope, thank you. Agenda item 2, declarations. At this point of the meeting, members should declare any potential conflicts of interest they may have in relation to the fund, which have not been already declared or held in the pension fund register. Item 7 includes a reference to the investment consultancy tender, and the consultants will be asked to leave the room then. Also item 11 of the agenda discusses the management structure, so the funding offices will be asked to leave the room for that item. Does anyone have any new declarations that have not already been included on the declaration forms? Nope, thank you. On to agenda item 3. Item 3 on the agenda is the reappointment of the Vice Chair. The appointment of the Vice Chair is the responsibility of this committee and is agreed annually in June. As members will be aware, the appointed Vice Chair will also be my deputy on the Wales Pension Partnership Joint Governance Committee. The Vice Chair has to be a Flintshire County Councillor, elected member, but all committee members vote in this matter. Do we have a proposal for any nominations of Vice Chair? I propose Ted Palmer. Do we have any other nominations? I'd personally like to propose Jason Shawcross. How do we do the vote for this? A show of hands for Councillor Palmer. Thank you. And a show of hands for Councillor Shawcross. I like myself as well, so 3-3. Is that an abstention then Steve? That's an equal vote in which case it's the Chair's decision and I will select Councillor Shawcross. Moving into item 4 minutes of the meeting of the 20th of March. Item 4 is the minutes from the March meeting. We need to confirm with these our correct record of that meeting. We will just go through page by page and we can pick up any matters arising as we go through. So it starts from page 5, page 5, page 6, page 7, page 8, page 9, page 10, and page 11. We'll accept those as the true record. Now the minutes from item 5, the minutes from the 17th of April, pages 13 to 14. Item 5 of the minutes is a special meeting in April. We need to confirm if these are a correct record of the meeting. These are the public minutes, however officers do hold a private set of minutes in more detail that can be made available on members' requests. Does anyone have any comments from page 13? Page 14? Nope. We'll accept those as a correct record of that meeting. Now we move on to item 6 of the agenda. Item 6 is Audit Wales. Councillor Palmer? Thank you, Chair. Nobody has proposed that we accept them or seconded them. Okay, we can do that. We'll move back to item 5, then. Can someone propose item 4 for the minutes of the 20th of March? Councillor Palmer? Seconded. Councillor Shawcross? All in favour? Thank you. Item 5, minutes of the 17th of April. We have a proposer. Councillor Palmer? Seconder? Councillor Shawcross? All in favour? Thank you. Thank you for that, Councillor Palmer. Item 6 is the Audit Wales External Audit Plan. Mr Bateman of the Fund Accountant will introduce this item and Jodie Williams from Audit Wales will take us through the Audit Plan. Okay, good morning, everybody. Can everyone hear me okay? Okay, I've been asked today to introduce Audit Wales who are going to take you through their plan for auditing the 23/24 accounts. You'll find these at Agenda Item 6, page 15 of your packs and attachments at Appendix 1 also. So I'll hand you over now to Jodie Williams to take you through the plan. Thank you, Dave. Good morning, everybody. I'll take you through a whistle-stop tour of our Audit Plan just with the key points. I expect that you've all had a chance to have a look at this in advance. So on to page 7, so this is about our planning materiality. It is £23,052,000. This is based on 1% of gross assets based on the 22 to 23 audited accounts. Our reporting threshold is £1,153,000 and that is calculated as 5% of materiality. So this is just our planning materiality. We will recalculate this upon receipt of the draft 23 to 24 accounts. There are also areas of specific interest to the use of the accounts. We call these material by nature. We've identified these as the related parties and key management personnel disclosure, which we have a lower materiality threshold of £1,000. So our audit work and our audit planning is currently underway. So we haven't concluded all areas of our risk assessment. However, should any significant financial statement risks, any additional ones arise, we will report these to you in future committee meetings. So the only significant risk we've identified at present is management override of controls. This is a risk which is present in all entities. It's a non-reportable risk as per our ISA, so our International Standards for Auditing Requirements. So our planned audit response for this is to test journal entries, review accounting estimates and evaluate the rationale for any significant transactions outside the normal course of business. We have two areas of focus within our audit at present based on the planning that we've undertaken to date. This is investment valuations. The investment balance as of last year's audit accounts is almost £2.2 billion. The investment portfolio is quite diverse and investment valuations are complex to value and their subjectivity and their valuation. So with them being an accounting estimate, we deem this to be a potential risk to the account. In order to address this risk, what we will do is we'll sample test investments and we'll give the investment valuations to appropriate supporting evidence. We'll also review the control assurance reports from the relevant investment fund managers for this sample, which we're going to select for testing. Another area of focus is key changes with the Clearwood Pension Fund Finance team. So with them retiring, there's going to be key changes there in the wealth of experience which she brings to the Clearwood Pension Fund and all the experience she's got with preparing the financial statements. Obviously, that's going to be a loss of the Clearwood Pension Fund. However, what we'll do to address that is we'll continue to liaise with officers, so Dave for example, to fully assess the impact, if any, on our audit approach. We'll also review the close down plans to assess if there's appropriate arrangements in place to produce the financial statements. In terms of when we'll conduct our audit, we're going to be coming in next month, so July and August is when we plan to undertake our audit work and we'll report back with our audit opinion in November. In terms of our fee, a slight increase on last year, so it's estimated to be £49,693, which is an increase of just under £3,000 compared to last year. In terms of our audit team, this remains relatively the same. So we've got Matthew Edwards, our engagement director, Michelle Phoenix, our audit manager. This is a change from last year in which we had Mike Whiteley, but Michelle has been the audit manager for the Clearwood Pension Fund in previous years and myself as audit lead and I was the audit lead last year also. And finally, we've got two potential conflicts of interest, which I need to bring to your attention. The audit leads to myself and one audit trainee. We're both deferred members of the pension fund, so this has been discussed with our law and ethics team and we've ensured that safeguards have been put in place and will continue to be put in place throughout the audit to mitigate any risks to our independence. Does anybody have any questions? Questions or comments on this agenda item? It's just really a flippant comment on the estimation and the accuracy of the £49,600. I haven't got my glasses on. £93 approximately, yes. Thank you, Chair. Apologies, can I just clarify something? So you're saying your report will come back in November, but the covering report has got hope to bring the draft, I assume, to September. So just how that works, Dave, if that's okay? Yeah, okay. Yeah, I think we had originally said we were going to aim for September, so we're still aiming to get the papers done for then. But I think you've had some recruitment issues from your side as well, which have maybe pushed it back a little bit. But we'll bring draft to September and final for November, I think. Yeah, we still plan to do the audit work in July and August, but we thought with timeframes, when we need to send the audit opinion to yourselves, with deadlines for papers, and then the review of our audit file, we thought it might be putting it a little bit fine time-wise. So we didn't want to put extra pressure if it wasn't necessary. So we said the edge on the side of caution would come to November. But hopefully the audit work will be finished ahead of September anyway. Thank you. Thanks. Any further questions or comments? No? The recommendation is to note and comment on the update, which we have done. Do we need to take a vote to accept that? Yeah, all in favour? Thank you. We will move on to Agenda Item 7. The Item 7 is Governance and Updates Consultations. There are a number of recommendations for approval. As we were discussing, the Investment Consultants Tender, in accordance with the Fund's Conflicts of Interest Policy, will now ask for Mercer to leave the meeting for this item. Alison Murray, our Independent Governance Advisor, will take us through this report once Mercer has left the room. Thank you, Chair. Good morning, everyone. So, as the name suggests, yes, the Governance Update is an update on all things governance-related. It includes all the usual items, what's happening nationally, there's a number of things coming from the Scheme Advisory Board, and other CLU fund-specific items, things like breaches of the law, and the extract from the Risk Register, which is in Appendix 8, and which you'll note allows for the new format based on the updated Risk Management Policy that was agreed in March. In addition, we also have a short report following the work that's been done in assessing the Fund's compliance with the TPR new General Code of Practice, and that's set out in Appendix 4 on page 65. So, the TPR code on page 65 of the pack, I'm not going to go through in any detail, but you'll see in the covering report that we've suggested that actually the Fund comes out pretty well, and the assessment is quite positive, and I just wanted to be clear that that is absolutely the case, and if you are looking at the appendix, it's probably quite harsh in terms of how it's marked and that the modules where we say were fully compliant. What I would suggest that you look at in that paper is underneath that text where it sets out how many questions there are in each section, and where a question isn't red or amber, then clearly it's green, and there are a lot more greens than there are reds and ambers, so it is actually quite positive. There's lots of essential actions that are marked, and actually again, a number of those are actually quick wins that relate to things that are being done, processes and procedures that perhaps the only action that needs to be done is that they're documented. So, I just wanted to make that point that actually, as I say, it is more positive than it perhaps looks at first glance. So, obviously, myself or any officers will be happy to take questions on any part of the report, but I wanted really principally to focus on the areas where you're going to be asked to make a decision and approve something. So, taking these in turn, firstly, the business plan. The Fund's business plan was, of course, only recently approved in March. We wouldn't normally expect to have that much of an update at this June committee. There are one or two items where the timing has moved slightly, and you can see that in the appendix on page 47, but what I really wanted to very briefly cover, though, is the proposed addition of a new item, a new governance item, for the Fund's business plan. And that's set out on pages 36 and 37 of the pack, and this item relates to the Wales Pension Partnership governance arrangements. So, firstly, why are we suggesting this? So, the Inter-Authority Agreement, which, as you'll all be aware, governs your relationship with WPP and constitutes the JGC, the Joint Governance Committee, etc., has been in existence for a number of years and was signed back in 2017. And, of course, since then, we've got lots of experience of implementing that and a number of reserve matters, etc. So, it is, I think, just good practice to take a step back and consider these kinds of governance documents on a regular basis. So, that's one of the reasons for perhaps thinking about it. The other thing, and I don't think I'm breaching any pre-election restrictions by saying regardless of who the next government is, there does seem to be going to be an increasing focus on pooling within the LGPS in England and Wales, looking at things like even the number of pools, the proportion of assets being pooled. And, of course, we've had guidance for the annual report and accounts requiring funds to comment on why they are holding assets outside of the pool, which will come in fully for next year. So, again, it just seems that it's quite timely to take a step back and the suggestion then is, as you can hopefully see from the paper, is for the fund to have informal discussions around whether, I don't want to preempt the outcome, but whether there are any potential enhancements to the WPP governance arrangements that you may wish to suggest. The suggestion, as you'll see, is that that is carried out quarter two, so over the next few months, to give time then for your views to be gathered and then, if you do wish to make proposals to WPP, to enable them to be made in advance of business planning for the pool for 25/26. With your permission, I was going to go through the rest of the paper, if you're happy to take comments and things at the end. The next item for approval is the updated business continuity policy. This is in paragraph 1.04 and the policy itself is on page 58 of the PAC. You may recall that the policy was initially due for review in March, but it was delayed slightly, I think, firstly to enable the business continuity plan to be finalised, but in addition to enable the policy to be updated to allow for the requirements of the new TPR, the Regulators General Code. The policy itself, as usual, when something is being brought that's been updated, you can see the additions are highlighted in yellow and suggested deleted text is striked through. I think that hopefully makes it easier to see what's changed. It does, however, make it a little bit more challenging to review it and I am very grateful to the scheme member representative for the comments he made, just suggesting a little bit of tidying up here and there. I hope that you'll be able to improve on the basis that we will do that tidying up. The main changes, really, as I say, are to allow for the business continuity plan. There's a reference in there to the crisis management team, a bit more detail about how the policy objectives are monitored. The other thing is to try and simplify the language a little bit. Since the policy was initially put in place, we've had the new communication strategy, trying very much to be a little bit less formal in the documents. Finally, as our commercial colleagues have left, as you know, the final item we wanted to cover briefly is the retender of the investment consultants contract. Just to be clear, as the independent governance advisor, as the name suggests, we are independent of the fund and other advisors. The reason that I and my colleagues are still in the room is that we are not bidding for the investment consultancy contract and it's not appropriate to be the independent advisor and the investment consultant. I just wanted to put that out there in case anyone was wondering whether I had a conflict. I don't consider that I do. Turning then to paragraph 1.05 in the pack, which is on page 39. As you'll know from previous meetings, the current contract isn't actually due to expire until the end of March next year. But as Mrs. Fielder, Deputy Head of the Fund, has very much managed that contract and laid on that procurement in previous years, it was agreed that the procurement would be brought forward to enable Deb to see that through to inclusion. Unfortunately, with new regulations and guidance and the need to take procurement advice, the tender has been launched a little later than initially anticipated. It is underway. The deadline for responses is actually tomorrow and interviews are planned for next week. That does then mean that unfortunately, Deb has not been in a position to bring a recommendation for your approval to this meeting. What is being proposed is that the process in terms of the scoring etc will be completed before Deb retires. In order for those bidding to be informed of the decision in a timely fashion, and noting too that Deb will have retired and therefore will not be available at the September committee meeting, the proposal is that you delegate the finalisation of the appointment of that contract to fund officers and in particular, Deb as Deputy Head of the Fund and with the Corporate Finance Manager. Just for clarity, we are not terminating the investment advisor's contract early, we are just selecting their replacement earlier. I think Deb is going to answer that, if that's okay, sorry Steve. Because we are in the extension phase, so it was a three plus a two, so we could have a crossover which would be desirable anyway with the new consultant and the incumbent as a handover period for three months anyway. I think that was all I was going to say anyway, so thank you Chair. Anybody have any further questions or comments? If we look to the recommendations for this item then, to consider the update and provide any comments which we have done, to approve the addition of a governance item relating to the world's pension partnership to the Fund's 2024-25 business plan, to approve the updated business continuity plan, to agree that the committee delegate the selection appointment dismissal as required of the Fund's investment consultants to the Deputy Head of Food Pension Fund and the Corporate Finance Manager following the completion of interviews and associated scoring. Is anyone not happy to approve these? All in favour? Thank you, that moves, thank you Anderson. Could we ask... We move to item eight of the agenda. This is the administration communications update. Karen Williams will present this report. Thank you Chair, I'll just wait for everybody to come back in. Okay, thank you. So, as you can see, all the usual agenda items and appendices are included in my administration communications report, including the new style risk register that Alison referred to in the governance update. In addition to the usual updates, I have a couple of items requiring approval and also some areas that I'd like to provide some further information on how things have progressed since the time of writing. Happy to take any questions as they go along or at the end. So, first item is Business Plan, item 101, page 7, page 104 of the pack, sorry, and it's A7 on that page, which is the implementation of the communications strategy. So, following the realisation of the number of phone calls that we had into the office, which I updated the committee on at the last meeting, where it was 22,000, 24,000, if everybody remembers those figures. We've looked into the potential of having a telephony service within the administration team to help direct members more efficiently towards the correct team that they're wanting to engage with, and also to help us monitor those phone calls appropriately. For us to have this, we spoke with colleagues in IT, and we had to submit a business case to the Digital Strategy Board for approval. So that was submitted, I attended the meeting last week, and thankfully that business case was approved. So I don't currently have any timescales, and I need to scope the level of work and costs with IT and other colleagues within the council that currently use a similar service, but I'm really pleased that we have the approval for that and hopefully I'll be able to bring some more information to you at the next meeting. Moving on to the usual MacLeod update, which is item 102 on page 105 of the pack. In my normal update, I'd refer to the fact that we were awaiting further guidance from DLUC following its consultation on its draft statutory guidance on the MacLeod implementation. That was provided to a selected group of LGPS stakeholders. So since the time of writing, DLUC have now published the MacLeod implementation statutory guidance as of Monday of this week. So apologies, I haven't fully got my head around that guidance yet. I was out of the office yesterday, but that's top of my reading list. But the guidance does aim to achieve a consistent application of the remedy across the LGPS and provide guidance on certain technical issues, of which there are many. The main highlight that I've taken from the guidance, albeit from my brief reading, is that the guidance says that the legislation may allow an administrator and authority to determine that the MacLeod implementation phase shall be regarded as extending to the 31st of August 26 for specific members or classes of members. While such cases have yet to be determined, and the detail of the legislation is still to be known, this will come as a welcome relief for a number of administrators based on the amount of groups that we're part of and the struggles and complexity that MacLeod has brought across the administration as a whole. What does this mean for the Clue of Pension fund? As I've mentioned previously, the sheer size and complexity of the MacLeod programme has taken us a bit of a shock. We thought we got to grips with it, but as we got further and further into the programme, it's just become more complex and time consuming. But I don't intend to push the timescale out just because the legislation says we might. So in terms of our project plan, from my point of view, that remains unchanged and we do want to get this completed as soon as possible. So I will continue to provide the usual updates to committee as we go along, and the usual programme management group meetings will happen and updates to steering group will continue. Moving on to Pension Dashboard, which is 1.03, and this is one of the items that we've asked for approval on. So if committee members remember, it was a national initiative, so Pension Dashboard is a national initiative for all pension pots to be accessible to view in one place. The project for the Clue of Pension fund includes data cleansing, testing, onboarding onto the ecosystem to display all of this member information and deciding on the matching criteria to enable the fund to display that information to members of the public. All of this with the deadline of the 31st of October 2025. The tasks for this now fall within the recently resourced project team, with support from other key offices and advisors, as detailed in Appendix 5, this making up a project management group. In order to complete these milestones efficiently and effectively as possible, I'm asking the committee to delegate any key decisions to be made in relation to the Pension Dashboard, including those outlined in Appendix 5, to the PMG, so the project management group. Subject to the head of Clue Pension Fund and myself, Pension Administration Manager, being present with any of those decisions are being made. Yet again, this is another large piece of work that falls outside, business as usual, albeit it isn't expected to be as complicated as Macleod, but watch this space. The next item is the second item that needs actual approval as well, which is the update to the administration strategy. So as you're aware, we undertake a three year review of the administration strategy and it's been deemed that this year that much of the existing strategy remains fit for purpose. And furthermore, fundamental review will take place with consideration to any potential changes that might need once we've had the publication of the good governance recommendations. So therefore, the committee are asked to approve some minor changes. Those high level ones are the general membership and employer statistics, noting that the existing structure will need to be updated to include Debbie leaving. We've had some new requirements that were jointly introduced by SITFA, DLOC and SAB for this year's annual report, which I know we've mentioned in previous updates. From an administrative perspective, most of these changes will be incorporated in this year's annual report. And for those that we can't report on because we didn't have the data, we weren't reporting the data to be able to include in this year's report. We are now putting systems in place to be able to collect that data so they will be included in next year's annual report. You'll also note that the administration strategy refers to some charges that we may pass on to employers and the corresponding updates relate to those charges in the Statement of Administrating Authority Discretionary Policy, so the two are linked together. The charges will only come into force if an employer has performed poorly, which has resulted in extra resource costs to the fund, so we want to pass those charges on to the employer. And any interest charges will relate to any late contributions of payments, so that's not something we currently do, but it was picked up in previous audits where we've had an escalation policy and we've escalated things, but we haven't actually gone as far as the charging to the employer. So we wanted to put something in place which allows us to get to that point if the occasion arises. It's not something we want to do, but we needed to have the structure in place if we needed to get to that point. And finally, the last thing that I wanted to add more information around was resource, so item 2.01 and page 113 in the pack. You'll notice that we had a payroll officer vacancy, it was just to let you know that we only had one applicant for that role and they didn't meet the essential criteria, so that role will be going back out to advert. And we currently still have two members off on long term sick with a further two members that are due to be off for routine operations, so it's just to let you know that resource will be impacted. But we will continue to monitor resource and prioritise cases that have a legal timescale and have the biggest impact on member experience. But yes, tough times with training and everything else. Happy to take any questions. Any questions? Just in the bulk of the report, it was constantly referring to the single employer with a single employee, causing slight difficulties in getting information to us in a timely manner. I presume that that is being mitigated heavily. Yes, we are in the throes of testing some new reports that we've been developing. So we have our normal KPI reports that allow us to identify any areas where the Clue Pension Fund are not hitting their targets, so that we can address our own internal resource. What we've been developing further off the back of those is to help us identify certain employers that are not performing and in what areas they're not performing, so we can escalate that to the employers and help them. If we're not communicating to them what they're doing wrong, we can't expect them to fix it. So these reports will enable us to identify those challenges better and help to assist our employers. So yes, we are working towards mitigating those risks. We have an employer that is in the process of joining the employee liaison teams. That was one of our more problematic employers. They are now allowing us access to their payroll system, so we are working with their IT department to get that functionality in place, training our internal colleagues to be able to get the data that we need to help improve that. So yes, the employer liaison team has proved itself to be a really valuable asset to the Clue Pension Fund actually, because a lot of the issues we had with employers are now resolved off the back of having that team in place. Thanks Steve. Councillor Wedley. Thank you Chair. Yeah, question about the dashboard. There are two questions really. Is our timescale typical of a fund of our size in terms of, you know, a fund like ours already on the dashboard and out here or is the timescale very typical? And the second question is, I suspect the dashboard will have a life of its own in terms of implementation. So what is the likelihood that once we're part of that dashboard, there will be a number of iterations of quality and scale for end users? So that means there will be a continuous project after the date of implementation. Thank you. In terms of other funds, I'm on a number of groups to identify where all the funds are up to with the dashboard programme in itself. We're not behind. We're ahead of the game in terms of data cleansing. We've already started working on data cleansing and we're in the process of talking with procurement colleagues in terms of appointing an integrated service provider. There are a couple of options, but ideally we would like to stay with our pension software provider because it just makes it easier in terms of process and speed and efficiency. That's one of the reasons why the decision making has been brought to you today to delegate the decision so that I can actually proceed with the appointment of the ISP. Nobody from a public sector fund that I've been talking to has actually onboarded onto the ecosystem yet that functionality isn't actually there. It's still being tested. We have volunteered to be a test site with our pension software provider if we do indeed go down that route of appointing them as our ISP to help with testing and to go down the member matching criteria as to what works best for our fund because each fund's data, you'd be surprised how differently we hold our data. So we have to be mindful that what works for one fund won't necessarily work for us. So we are volunteered to be a test site for that so that we can be involved in the decision making processes. In terms of it becoming business as usual afterwards, that's kind of why we're putting the resource into the project now by instigating a data cleansing project, thoroughly looking through the member matching criteria so that when we do go live, I'm hoping there will be a peak. I think we'd be naive to assume that we won't notice any difference, but I'm hoping if we've got the member matching criteria right and we've done our work through the data cleansing exercise, there will be a peak in member activity because there will be national campaigns where members are aware of this and they want to go on and have a look. I'm hoping after the peak of the initial traffic, it will then settle to become a business as usual activity. We will continue with our data cleansing exercises as we do now through member tracing activities. I am hopeful that it will eventually evolve into a business as usual where members just log on as they do with our member self-service portal, to be honest. Thank you very much. Thank you. Any other questions or comments? The recommendations for this item are to consider and update and provide any comments which we have done, to consider and approve the proposed amendments to the administration strategy and statements of administering authorities discretion policies and delegate any final minor changes, to consider the update relating to the implementation of the national pensions dashboard requirements and approve the delegation of key decisions to the project management group. Is anyone not happy to approve these? All in favour? Thank you. We have now begun to agenda item 9 funding and investment performance updates. The recommendation for this item is to consider the updates and provide feedback on the contents and format of the new summary report. That's pages 193 to 199 from your report back. Does anyone have any comments or questions on this report? No? We will leave that as accepted and move on to item 10. The remaining reports are exempt items and therefore I propose we exclude these to the press and public. Can I get a mover and seconder to agree to exclude the press and public please? Ted? Jason? All in favour? If we could stop the live streaming then please. Finally item 13 is for future meeting dates for everyone to note. They are shown on page 3 of your meeting pack. I will bring the meeting now to a close. Thank you all for your participation but before we finish I'd like to note that this is the deputy head of the fund Mrs. Fielder's last committee meeting before her retirement. I believe she's been working with the fund for nearly 25 years and we have a lot to thank her for particularly in her role on investments and finance and the work that she's done with WPP on our behalf. Would anyone like to say a few words? Any committee members? I mean from my personal perspective I've never met anybody like Deb. Well I've met a few people like Deb but they're very rare in local government and I think that I said we were communicating an email and I talked about the investment that was made when I joined this committee. The investment that Deb made in me and the investment that I made in Deb and that that investment has been repaid over and over and over again. As I said at the, I can't remember which one it was, I'm not a man, a very emotional man but on the day she leaves I will blub. I'd like to thank Deb for all the work she's put in, 27 and a half years there's some stretch there and I certainly when I was chair and through the vice chair relied very much on Deb. In fact I used to call Karen and Deb my conscience because that's how we got through it all and she will be a great loss to this committee and they choose to follow but I'd like to wish Deb all the best in Spain, I'm sure you'll have a good time there anyway. Just to reiterate what Dave has said, Deb is certainly a character and a character I will never forget, thank you. I think everybody knows I'm going to miss Deb Sloads, I think I've described it as losing my left and right arm, she's always been there for me in my role over the last 24 years so I'll get emotional shortly as well and want to shed a tear. Well thank you, thank you chair. Thank you, on behalf of the committee we wish Miss Fielder well in whatever she's doing next. The next meeting is on the 11th September which we will again be in a hybrid format. Please note that this will be an afternoon meeting instead of our usual time, governance training is scheduled for the morning. Before we finish I'd like to remind you of today's training session which will begin here in the chamber after a short break. Thank you for your attendance. Oh sorry, the training has moved over to the Deling room and will be linked in the Deling room after a short break. Councillor Bama. Just to let the committee know that I will be staying for the best part of it but I have a planning committee meeting at two o'clock, I'll have to leave to join that, thank you. Thanks guys for that, thank you for your attendance everyone. [BLANK_AUDIO]