Agenda item

The report sets out the Key Performance Indictors, measured against the legal requirements for the administration of the Local Government Pension Scheme for the three-month period up to the end of April 2024.

The Pension Manager introduced the item and explained that the report covered the team’s performance from February to April 2024 and the team had continued to perform well across most areas, particularly life events. The Pension Manager stated that they had seen an improvement on their leaver KPI’s, officers had begun to see the benefit of the processes that thy had introduced at the beginning of the year.  The Pension Manager explained that the team had seen an improvement in their bulk calculation processes, due to a software update they were able to processes well over 500 cases. Officers were working on a solution with their software providers to be able to include this data in their KPI reporting.

The Pension Manager informed the Committee that they were currently busy with the end of year processes, officers had received a good response from employers, there were just two main payroll providers left to update and one payroll provider who was yet to provide the team with information. Officers hoped to receive the necessary information so that they could achieve their annual benefits statements in august.

The Pension Manager explained that in April the team had updated all of their pensioner, deferred and pensioners cases with a pension increase of 6.7% this year. Officers experienced some issues with the software this year on some of the pensioner cases, however, they were able to identify the issues before the payroll run and made the necessary manual adjustments.

The Pension Manager stated that the team had began their project to upgrade the Member self service system, they were at the technical stage and had hoped to go to the testing stage in the autumn.

In response to questions from Members officers informed the Committee that:

• Last year officers had purchased the Insights reporting tool for their software provider, this had helped as they were able to run one report and get much more detailed analysis. Officers were confident that everyone was paid the correct amounts following the manual adjustments. If there were any errors with their data then they would have been old records which needed adjusting, but the software provider was confident that the errors were simply isolated cases.
• In terms of contribution returns, the previous issue with an employer that was discussed at the Pension Committee meeting in December 2023 had been resolved. The current payroll provider issue was unusual as they had submitted the information for other schools they manage, however there was one academy trust that officers had not received information for.
• Officers would need to review some of their workflow processes to capture the new KPI’s. There had been discussions with other Councils and the software provider to see whether something could be done universally as they would all need to record the same KPI’s. Officers were unsure whether they could access data for phone records, they had discussions with members of the Council’s IT team to gain access to phone data.
• Almost over a third of the outstanding cases related to auto aggregation and interfunds, many of these were dependent on leaver calculations to be carried out. The team’s aim was to clear as many leaver cases which would enable them to focus on the aggregation cases.  Their drive to complete their leavers would help work through the backlog.
• Some cases were quite old and there were legitimate reasons for why they were still open.
• Officers were keen to investigate how AI could be of assistance to manage their workload.

Resolved:

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