Transcript

Thank you. Today's meeting will be webcast live to the Internet and may be recorded by any member of the public or press present. If anyone wishes to avoid being filmed, please can you let the clerk know immediately. If you have a mobile phone or other device, can you please turn it on to silent and move it away from the microphone as it may affect the audio system and distract speakers. And the room exit signs. Should the fire alarm sign join the meeting, please make your way to the nearest and safest exit. Good morning, Mr. Page and good morning, Mr. Thomas, online. Right. Item one is membership. Welcome, Councillor Jones. Right. Item one is to note that you have replaced Councillor Prenter as the Medway Council representative on the committee and to welcome you. And also, we need to note that Councillor Blair has replaced Councillor Susan Beer as the Deva Council representative on the committee and she is expected here this morning. Apologies and substitutes. We have apologies from Mr. Yates. I'm not aware of any other apologies. And substitute. I'm not aware of any substitutes, correct? Decorations of interest, are there any decorations of interest made by members in relation to any matter on the agenda? Mr. Bartlett. Thank you. I'm an employee of Bank of New York and, therefore, I will not take part in any debate on the Insight mandate as it is an affiliate. Thank you. Thank you, Paul. Thank you very much indeed. No other decorations? Right. Item 4 is the minutes of the meeting held on the 26th of March, 2024, which you have had in the pack. Does anybody have any items arising from those minutes? In which case can I ask the committee to approve the minutes as a correct record? Great. Thank you very much. Great. And the meeting will be held on the 19th of September in this room at 10 o'clock. Right, so we now go on to the main business of the meeting, which is starting with the committee work program and the action log. And the recommendation is on page 9. Nick, would you like to introduce this? Thank you, Chair. Excuse me. Yes, good morning, everybody. This is the usual update on the work plan for the committee and the actions coming out of previous meetings that required some response. In terms of the work plan, fairly regular stuff that you will see in there, except that – and I can't quite believe this – next year the actuarial valuation is due again. So we need to start thinking about how we are going to engage with Barnet Waddingham and plan that. So we have already started that process as officers, but we will need to engage the committee in that as well. So you will note I have put that in there for December and then next year as well, because it is an ongoing process, as you know, sort of iterative in terms of the conversations we have. So that is in there. In terms of the action log, I am pleased to say that a few of the actions that have been in there as ongoing have now been concluded and that all of the other actions that were added since the last meeting are either ongoing actions or ones that have been concluded as well. So happy to take any questions on either, Chair, but that was all I was going to say. Thank you, Nick. Are there any questions or comments on this item? In which case, can I ask the committee to note the work program and the updated action log and approve the terms of reference for the Responsible Investment Working Group, which are in the papers. Agreed? Thank you very much. Item 7, Pensions and Administration. We are very lucky to have Emma Green and Gareth Wuckey here this morning to present this paper, and it starts on page 17 of your pack, I think. Emma. Thank you, Chair. There are a few items that I'd like to bring to the attention of the committee due to their importance and impact on the fund. Casework performance. The volume of cases between the 1st of February and the 30th of April remained high. Average performance increased from 79% to 85% with casework on deaths, retirements, and refunds prioritized. Recruitment. Recruitment was a little quieter in the last quarter to allow the settling in of colleagues that had acquired new roles in the previous quarter. Projects. Most notably, after much user-accepted testing, MyPensionOnline went live on the 13th of May, replacing the previous platform known as Member Self Service. MyPensionOnline provides clearer support to ski members, offers greater pension awareness to ski members, and it will be used in the summer to allow active ski members to see and print off their benefits. Statements. Work continued on developing our new telephony system. The new system is expected to go live later this summer. And the overseas proof of life verification project is being completed. Around 900 members were in scope. Approximately 80% of the verification were completed via digital authentication. The remaining 20% were completed via the return of paper forms. Overpayment recovery and write-off limits. Work progressed in this area. It is recommended that the committee approves the new pension overpayment and write-off policy provided in Appendix 1, which formalizes our current approach. The policy sets out robust governance arrangements and will facilitate informed decision making. It ensures benefits are paid to and income is collected from the right people at the right time for the right amount. In essence, it aims to avoid the internal resolution procedure where possible. Communications and support update. Over the last quarter, year-end processing and my pension online registrations have been amongst the largest demands for resource within the team. The onboarding of employers onto iConnect has also continued with CAPTA being a recent notable addition. And finally, technical and training update. Significant work has been completed in the last quarter, further to legislative changes to the lifetime allowance and annual allowance. Training within the team has been extensive, and further training is planned. Thank you. I'd be willing to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you very much, Emma. Mr. Cooper, and then Mr. Pass Robert. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank you very much, Emma, for your update. So I think recruitment and staffing is sort of a recurrent issue and I'm not criticizing, so please don't think I am. Just to ask how long is a piece of string. When do we think that the current internal promotions and recruitment are likely to start paying off in terms of service standards? That's my first question. The telephony project, I've seen it sort of mentioned before, but I actually don't understand precisely what it is and how on earth it's going to benefit ski members and the team who are dealing with the caseloads. And then thirdly, the, sorry, I've got it written down here somewhere, apologies, it was about the lifetime allowance changes. What significant, that sounds like it's a big piece of work, and I'm struggling kind of to understand why that's a big piece of work, because surely it's unraveling something rather than creating something new. So just a little bit more understanding of exactly what the implications are within the team and how much bandwidth they're taking away from other things. Sorry to chuck them all in one go, but it saves coming backwards of awards. Thank you. Chair, perhaps I could just take the first couple of those and then ask Emma and Gareth to follow on if that's okay. So the first question around the additional resource that the fund has and when is that still going to start to pay off, I think there are the two aspects to the additional resource. One is making sure that we can do things in a more digital way, so you've heard about us talk about digital by default before. We're talking about member pensions online, which is enabling people to access their pensions. But to get to that stage, we need to have the resource to get us in a position to make sure we can deliver that. The hope is that – so we've launched my pension online, sorry, in the last month. We've already had I think it's 6,500 people sign up, which is great. Now, obviously it's a relatively small proportion of the fund, but that's really good considering we haven't really properly formally launched it yet. This has been more of a soft launch. So the hope is, the plan is that the additional resource will help us get to a position where we can then start doing more things online, which will then enable the staff, the team, to deal with the more technical inquiries rather than the day-to-day stuff, which they are currently having to do because there isn't the ability for people to find that out online. The plan, therefore, is that the additional resource, which is I have to say probably been needed for 15 or 20 years and just hasn't necessarily had that focus. So I'm pleased that we've been able to do that with your support to make sure that the team is in that position. The other side of it, and you'll hear a bit about this later, is that pension dashboards are coming up. We need to – I think this is a great idea. This is something that will enable everybody in the country to be able to track any pension that they've had throughout any time in their career. We have to obviously provide information to that so that our bit of it is appropriate, and we need to make sure our bit is correct as well. And due to those demands and those timelines, we've got to do a lot of rectification to make sure that some of those records that perhaps have not necessarily been recorded entirely correct, but will be – would normally be picked up when someone's retired, we've got to make sure that's right before we get to there. So there's a number of things – I know I'm not answering the question, but my plan is within two to three years, the additional resource will start to pay off and will serve the fund well in the performance numbers. We heard from CEM earlier in the year in terms of some of the performance of the pensions administration as well as the KPIs that you've seen here, and I was pleased to do that because that gave us a baseline, if you like, as to where we need to go and how we need to be serving our members better. So that's the plan on that. On telephony, the advantage of this is that we should be able to – should – will be able to open the telephony – open the telephone lines more to enable people to contact us at a wider – a wider time period. We should be able to direct the calls – we will be able to direct the calls to specific experts, so when somebody dials in and they will then have an opportunity to press one if it's about a retirement, two if it's about a death, or three if it's about – whatever it is – and they'll be directed to the right people, it should enable us to focus our resource. It will also enable us to measure what contact we're getting and put the resource in the right place. So there's lots of benefits for us, but the hope is for the members as well it will make – it'll just make us a bit slicker and therefore serve them better. So I've probably talked for far too long. I don't know if Emma and Gareth wanted to add anything on that. And the final question, which was about lifetime allowance, I think. I thought I made some notes about lifetime allowance. I remember reading about it somewhere, saying that it was tremendously complicated for us to change into lifetime allowance. Now I cannot find where I made that note, and I can't find a reference. So I don't think it's in another section of the agenda. In fact, I'm pretty sure it isn't. But there was something about an awful lot of administration work for lifetime allowance changes, and given that the lifetime allowance has essentially been removed, I struggle to understand why that's such a significant piece of work. So my technical knowledge doesn't allow me to explain the detail, but Gareth will probably be able to help. As I understand it, at a headline level, the lifetime allowance has been abolished, as you say, but it's been replaced by something even more complicated. But I'll let Gareth comment. Yeah, so the lifetime allowance was announced to be abolished in February 2023 by the government, which like I say, on the face of it sounds lovely because it's going to disappear. But unfortunately, the government were always going to have some sort of tax regime to replace that. So that new tax regime wasn't actually really put in place until February this year with the Finance Act 2024. And that was, the new tax regime then had effect from the 6th of April this year. So that's obviously quite a short time scale from getting the legislation to actually implementing that and putting everything in place that you need to be able to actually run that tax regime. So as well as that, anybody that actually had a benefit paid under the lifetime allowance tax regime actually has to have some sort of transitional effect to bring them into the new tax regime. So it's not a case that all the lifetime allowance has disappeared. That is still relevant. We actually have to work to bring that into the new tax regime if they have a subsequent retirement. So we've had to do a lot of systems work because unfortunately our software provider hasn't been able to update our software in time. So we've got a lot of manual work that we're having to do outside of the system to accommodate all of those transitional changes and also the new tax regime itself. So that's taken a lot of staff training. We've also had to update a lot of our literature, including our website, our letters, our forms. And then staff training as well on top of that to sort of drip feed that in almost as the legislation has come through in drips and drabs. We've had to feed that into staff. We're still getting quite complex technical queries now if we've got an unusual case. We're sort of liaising with the local government association on those cases as they come up. But I'd say probably we're probably 90% there, 90% there now in terms of rolling that out. That's just the last bit, especially the software changes that we're waiting for to be able to sort of make that saving in terms of the manual work that we're having to do. Does that give you a little bit of background? Yeah it does. So I won't ask you all of the technical things you're doing because I think we'll all get a bit bored. But thank you. Appreciate that. I sat through a training session that Gareth did for the team and I certainly wasn't bored. I sat there being completely bemused about the level of detail that was in there in thinking that lifetime allowance was going so it's all going to be easy. Yes, thank you Chairman. Thank you for your report Emma. I've got three questions. The first is on page 17 1.2. You talk about average performance and I just wondered whether you could explain a bit more about how you measure performance. The second question is on page 19, paragraph 3.3 where you talk about proof of life verification and a number of people appearing to be unfound and what the implications are of that. And the final question is in your pension overpayment and write-off policy. I did try to read it quite thoroughly but I couldn't see any evidence of any requirement for root cause analysis i.e. if we've made several overpayments what are we doing to try to ensure we don't make the same overpayments again and have some sort of systematic way to attempt to reduce overpayments. Thank you Chairman. The first question around how we measure our average performance. The average performance in the report will be a high-level figure that's been averaged across a number of different subjects. So for each piece of work that comes in we attribute it as a date received and that is then tracked as the work sits there until it's completed. When it's completed it has a completion date. So within the start and end date for that we look at the length of time that piece of work took to complete and then compare that against our key performance indicator. So for instance if our key performance indicator for a benefit is 20 working days we compare how long that benefit took to get from the start to the end. That's then done for literally every piece of work in every case that we do. And a percentage between cases that were inside the KPI and outside are taken and an average taken out of those figures. So I think the figures that are in the report are sort of a high-level average of all of those individual KPIs' average percentages. Thank you. I'll pick up the question on proof of life verification. So what that means is that the ones that haven't responded to us have been suspended. We have sent emails to them, we've sent letters to them and we've also put a little note on their payslip in April. The number we have suspended is around 60 and that means that they won't get their payments currently but when we do hear from them they'll get what they wrote and previous. And then the third question was around pension over payment and right-of-policy and recourse. I'm not sure if Nick wants to pick this one up, if not, after the meeting we'll provide you with some information and get back to you on that. Reference question, are those people still alive are they? We believe they're just not responding. We don't know. The overseas pensioners, that's the tricky thing. We need them to complete the Verification of Life process either through the paper process or through the digital, and they haven't responded, so that's why they've been suspended. Okay. And on the policy, note your comments about there not being any detail in there about what we're doing about it. We do take action in terms of every time this happens but it's not detailed in there, so I think perhaps what we can do is we can give you an update and we can make sure we include it in a future version of the policy, if that's okay. Thank you. Right. If there are no other questions on this item, can I ask the Committee to note the contents of the report and approve the new pension over payment and right-of-policy? Agreed? Thank you very much. Right. Item 8, which is the update from the Pension Board, I'm very glad to say that we had the Government of the Pension Board online, Mr. Thomas. Rob, good morning, and thank you very much for coming. And the papers begin on page 40 of your PAC. Rob, over to you, I think. Thank you very much, gentlemen, and good morning, Committee. 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