Transcript

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. Around the room are 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. Good morning. Thank you very much. Item 1 is membership -- welcome Councillor Jones. Item 1 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 Medway 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. 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. 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? The date of the next 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. 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'll 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're going to engage with the Barnet Waddingham and plan that. So we've already started that process as officers, but we'll need to engage the Committee in that as well. So you'll note I've put that in there for December and then next year as well, because it's an ongoing process, as you know, sort of iterative in terms of the conversations we have. So that's in there. In terms of the Action Log, I'm 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? Right. 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 Administration. We are very lucky to have Emma Green and Gareth Wicke 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 would like to bring to the attention of the Committee due to their importance and impact on the Fund. Case Work 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, my pension online went live on the 13th of July, replacing the previous platform known as Member Self Service. My pension online 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 has been 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 resources in 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. Parzible. 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 positions and recruitment are likely to start paying off in terms of service standards? That's my first question. And 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 scheme members and the team who are dealing with caseloads. And then thirdly, the -- sorry, I've got it written down here somewhere -- the -- 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 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 six and a half thousand 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 most 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 has, 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 and 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 had not necessarily been recorded entirely correct, but 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 see in 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 we'll be able to open the telephone lines more to enable people to contact us at 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 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, we're 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 haven'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, and 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 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. 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, I appreciate that. I've sat through a training session that Gareth did for the team and I certainly wasn't bored, but I sat there completely bemused about the level of detail that was in there in thinking that the 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. First question, please, Chair. 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. For each piece of work that comes in, we attribute it at the date received, and that is then tracked as the work sits there until it's completed, and when it's completed it has a completion date. So within the start and the end date for that, we look at the length of time that 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 write-off 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, too. 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. 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 write-off 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 have the Chairman of the Pension Board online, Mr. Thomas, Rob, good morning, and thank you very much for coming. The papers begin on page 40 of your PAC. Rob, over to you, I think. Thank you very much, Chairman, and thank you for the Committee. Yes, as you've heard, the Chair, the update from our meeting is in your agenda, but just to see if we're bringing it to light on the Whistleshot Tour. In terms of part one of the meeting, we have the Government's update and we are obviously aware of all the kind of changes that are usually knocking around, and indeed the final of the new Government might be in post after the 4th of July. One of the things that we will be doing is preparing to do a letter from the local government minister who works for LGDS, the Ministry of Forestry, passing funds set out there, to assist with efficiencies in the management, governments and administrations of the LGDS, and in particular, two responses. One is how will your fund will complete the process of potential assets falling to deliver benefits of scale, and secondly, how will you ensure your LGDS fund will be efficiently run, including consideration of governance and benefits of greater scale. And then after, I think, more than two pages, response has to be returned on the 19th of July, and the team will be working with Access colleagues and others, and we'll be doing that in due course, and we hope to have a response progress back at the next board meeting. Otherwise, we also have an update on the accounts, so on the 23th and 24th, as you will probably be aware, there's a £3 million cost on the £3 million fund. I understand £4 million is actually on the investment management costs. £4 million additional is spent on from APN and governments, but overall, a good result, I think. So next slide, so what I have is the audit plan. You'll probably be clear that Brock Bolton has been appointed for the five years, since 10th through the 28th, and we had a fair overview about the audit plan that they are going to do, and the same meeting with the team will be committed in that way, but surely it hasn't already begun, but yeah, that's a smooth process. Otherwise, my attention to this administration, I appreciate you just discussing that, but we've got the dashboard bits and what the team has been doing on that. It was slightly reduced by consideration at this time, just we've got some of the data accuracy and consistency, and whilst that might sound slightly negative, actually, it was an internal issue that was found, raised, and actually it will help improve the training and the administration to think something of that sort of positive out of that, and indeed, we do just consider the overpaying of the market policy, so I don't think we can add anything further there. Otherwise, at the final part in part one, the session of the meeting was in regards to the investment update, all the good work that's going on, and it was only a minute to say that with regards to the responsible investment group, as you're probably familiar, there was the opportunity for Paul to have an observer, and our nominee was Vice-Chairman Joe Parsons, who may be familiar, who previously served on the committee and had actually already been attending this meeting, so yeah, great talk to Joe Parsons for continuing that work. And then moving on to part two of the meeting, which obviously, between the press and public, I'll be slightly limited in what I can say, but what I'm going to do about the issue is we considered the cyber security, the members of the committee will probably recall the training session we had towards the end of last year, obviously it's an incredibly important area for us to be aware of, and the sector as a whole, as with all cyber security matters, it will always be challenging, and it's about mitigation, and what happens when these things do occur, but yeah, obviously the pension fund is obviously incredibly mindful of this risk that we face at this moment in time. Otherwise, if I find a few things for me, we had to research at our meeting to make it a bit of a slight issue that hasn't been available due to the chain going into the KCC system or the bits and pieces, but we have really affirmed our commitment that it will come to deeply in full time, which is our chart providing you with the steps that we need to see in full. One of the issues that I actually asked about last time was regard to the rest of the net zero of the pension fund as a whole, as you would call our net zero commitment. The likelihood was rated as one, and I was just kind of kicking the cards on that as it were, and I think James helped me push back to say this is about net zero as a whole, climate as a whole as a whole, this is merely about time, and by the 2050 commitment, and actually there's plenty of time for mitigation to be done, so I thought that would help us to understand about the success of the risks on that one. Otherwise, then, just finally, the governments, before the governments matters, you may recall that there was a good discussion at the pension board, and Steve is in the last few to come to some of the work we're doing there, just essentially about the onboarding of the employers saying you can't save too much, but obviously a lot of work is going on, and we'll hear back next time as to how we're going to continue to streamline and process that and ensure that new employers are coming forward on a timely basis and that there aren't any sort of follow-up issues for future pensioners. Otherwise, we've noted an update on the cloud-based sort of replication as well, so yeah, what's going on with the committee, all the board as well, I think there was a training session that was meant to be happening on the second of July, that has now been the first way into October, and I'm sure board members will be in attendance as well as committee members as well, so yeah, what's going on, so I think Steve's got a lot of thought, hope that helps children, but yeah, thank you very much. Thank you, Rob, that's very comprehensive and very helpful. Thank you very much. I don't know if there are any comments or any questions from anybody. I can't see anybody, any. So without more ado, I think we're going to thank you, Chairman of the Pension Board, thank you very much for all the work you do and all the work the Pension Board members do. There's quite a lot of overlap between our two committees, and I'm glad it's very important that we work together, which I think we are doing, and thank you very much. So can I ask members to note the update from the Pension Board? Thank you. All I was going to add, and thank you, Mr. Thomas, for that update, all I was going to add, particularly in response to Mr. Passmore's question earlier about the key performance indicators on the pension administration, the way in which we look at things at the moment, is to try and have the Board complementing the work of the committee, so we're not both going through the same papers each time, because that would be pointless. There are clearly some things that overlap, and there are clearly some things that Mr. Thomas has spoken about that we're considering today. On pension administration, for example, the Board get a much more detailed dashboard of performance, which enables them to have a bit more time to go through that in detail. Very happy to share that with anybody that's interested. The way we've viewed it is that we do that at the Board, and then the committee gets a summary of that, rather than the full level of detail, just to try and manage both at the time best. But I just wanted to mention that, because obviously what you see is the headlines. The Board see an awful lot more detail. Thank you. Thank you, Nick. Right, I think that's been noted. So thank you, Rob, very much. And we will now go on to Item 9, which is a responsible investment update, pages 45 to 64. Yes, thank you, Chair, and good morning, everyone. So this is an update on the Fund's responsible investment activities since your last meeting. The principal focus of work has been around updating the responsible investment policy that the Fund has, which was an item that the committee and the Responsible Investment Working Group set out in its work plan for the year. And really, we think it's due for review, because it was established four years ago now, and the Fund's approach has evolved, and a lot of work has been done in this area since. Just a word on process. We took the existing policy, and we undertook a peer review against other LGPS funds to see how our policy compares. We also considered some best practice guidance from the PRI, which is one of the world's leading proponents of responsible investment best practice. The results of that exercise essentially showed some gaps and some potential areas for improvement, and we set about updating the policy to take account of some of that. I should say that the finished product, as it sits before you today, I think it's less about changing the Fund's approach in this area and more about more clearly communicating all of the good work that we actually do. So what we're left with is a more comprehensive policy, but hopefully one that's still accessible to readers and stakeholders, which as well as stating our objectives and beliefs in this area, also sets out how we actually incorporate responsive investment into the investment process, and how we carry out all important stewardship activities. The policy's been designed in concert with the Responsible Investment Working Group, and we've also consulted the board, as Mr. Thomas just mentioned, and it's now presented for approval. Just a couple of other brief comments aside from the RI policy. The Working Group has also received updates on responsive investment developments at the pool at Access since your last meeting, including a presentation from PERC, who are a firm who are advising the pool on its RI reporting and stewardship activities. So that was a very timely and helpful update. More recently, the group has received an update from the Local Authority Pension Fund Forum and an update from officers on the results of the PRI annual assessment, which is really an opportunity for us to, again, do some gap analysis and understand where our standing is and potential areas for improvement, although not necessarily things we have to do. Finally, the report includes some stats on voting, as per usual, and an engagement example from Perford, one of our appointed managers. And the engagement example from Perford, it's a very good example of how stewardship works in practice for the fund. So this example documents how one of Perford's holdings, a firm called Comfort Del Go, who are involved in the transportation sector, and they're one of the highest carbon emitters in Perford's portfolio. It talks about how Perford have engaged with that firm to understand how they're managing climate risk and what mitigations they've put in place. So I thought that was quite a useful and timely example in the context of the revised responsive investment policy. Happy to take any questions on any of the content of the report. Chairman, thank you. I just wanted to add a couple of points to James's comments, and yes, this has rightly been to the working group and has been debated. That is the policy, so the responsible investment policy. But I just wanted to draw colleagues' attention to the last paragraph in terms of monitoring and review. This is going to be an annual review, so this is not something that is static. And we know that this is moving quite rapidly, and so we have a chance every year to review the responsible investment policy. And so I wanted members, first of all, to know that it comes with my support to approve. And in particular, we need to keep on top of this and not just allow it just to be static. It is dynamic, and we need to make sure that we're moving at the right pace. Thank you. Thank you, Nick, Mr Chairman of the RA Group. Thank you very much, and thank you for the work that you do in chairing the group and also the work that the officers do. It's a very important aspect of our work. Thank you very much. I don't see any other -- Could I just ask James whether the chart shown on page 48, the total return given there, at 0.18, is that correct figure? It seems a little low. It's a stock lending figure. Apologies, Mr Das, just getting to the right page. This is to do with the securities lending. Yes, securities lending. It seems to be lending an awful -- quite a reasonably high percentage of securities, and the total return there looks to be -- I just wonder whether that's a -- is that correct? Yes, I mean, those -- It's only for the quarter as well. I think, Chair, the number that's shown is the average amount of stock on loan, as you say. It's -- that's the sort of level that you get, I guess. Yes, well, I don't have a way of checking it this morning, but we've got to work on the basis that it is, yes. We can confirm that, then? We can confirm the arrangements and the rates, et cetera, but those are the figures for the quarter, as Nick says, yes. Thank you very much. Can I ask members to note the report and to approve the revised responsible investment policy of Appendix 1? Agreed? Agreed. Thank you. Item 10, investment performance and asset allocation update. Now, some of this will be covered in the investment strategy implementation in the closed session, but James Sangita, can I ask you, effectively, to introduce this report? Certainly, Chair. I was going to keep my comments brief to avoid duplicating them in the next item, as you say. I've got three things. The asset allocation table is shown in this report, and as you'll see, the portfolio is now aligned with the Strategic Asset Allocation Weights, which is really important from a risk management point of view, and is a result of the orderly implementation of the new strategy. The report talks about performance as well, and on an absolute level, the performance has been positive recently, but actually, relative to the benchmark, it's been negative. I think that partly reflects the characteristics of where performance came from in 2023 in general. As we've discussed in this group before, there's been a market rally that's been extremely concentrated in a select number of stocks. Now, this is obviously performance at a point in time. The fund does not have an investment objective to outperform the benchmark every year, and as a long-term investor, we can tolerate that short-term underperformance with an expectation over the longer term, it delivers superior expected returns. I won't offer any further comments on that now, but we obviously have some more detailed work coming up in the next part of the agenda. Before I conclude, I know Sangeeta just wanted to mention some additional comments around the fund's cash flow, which is included in this paper too. Thank you, James. I just wanted to draw the Committee's attention to the chart on page 69, which demonstrates that the fund is operationally cash neutral, but the cash balance has trended down in the past year, mainly due to the drawdowns and current commitments from private equity managers. And as the members will remember, we've made another commitment to Harbour West in the March Committee, and as a result, we are likely to see further reduction in our cash balance this year. So the table on the next page is estimating that we will need another 43 million of cash balance probably to meet our drawdown commitments, and we are hoping to be able to draw upon the 170 million of cash we are holding from the proceeds of redemption from the perfect fund. So, in the near term, we are hoping to be able to utilize that cash balance to meet our immediate drawdowns, but we are also hoping to do a liquidity analysis, which we will bring to the Committee in September, which will take into account our further commitments that we need to make in the long run to maintain our allocation to private equity, but also the amount of cash which will be required for the collateral in the equity protection program. So, I just wanted to bring this to the attention of the Committee in terms of where we are on the cash balances currently and how we plan to take this forward. Thank you. Happy to take any questions. Thank you very much, Sangeeta, and thank you, James. Has anybody got any comments on this item? In which case, can I ask the Committee to note the report and to agree that no rebalancing is undertaken? Agreed? Right. If everybody is happy, I think we will move straight into Part 2. So, the motion to exclude the press and the public, that the press and the public be excluded from the meeting for the following business on the grounds that it involves the likely disclosure of exempt information as defined in Paragraph 3 of Part 1 of Schedule 12(a) of the Act. Paragraph 3, information relating to the financial or business affairs of any particular person, including the authority holding that information. Agreed? Thank you. Right.