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 July 2024.

The Pension Manager introduced the item and explained that the report covered the administration team's KPI’s for the period May to July 2024.

The Pension Manager stated that as this period covered the summer months, a lot of the team and employers were on annual leave; the team were mainly focused on finalising their end of year update to produce their annual benefit statements and the care revaluation.

The Pension Manager informed the Committee that the team continued to perform well on most of their KPI’s, the leaver calculations were still below average, but the team had been able to work on the more challenging leaver calculations which they were unable to perform by bulk calculations.

The Pension Manager explained that the team had been able to go out and meet with some of the Fund’s employers to make presentations on the member self-service system. The Pension Manager stated that the team had received really good feedback from the attendees, and they had held some sessions with other teams within the Council as well.

The Pension Manager informed the Committee that the team had also been working with the payroll team to improve the Oracle payroll system, and they hoped to see benefits from this with improved data coming through on their reports.

The Pension Manager explained that they had started their user acceptance testing for the new Member self-service Portal and they hoped to go live with the portal in October.

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

• During the summer period they had allocated one member of the team each week just focus on leaver calculations to continue chipping away at it. Members of the team had been handed final salary cases as they could not use automation to run those processes. The work had taken slightly longer this summer because they needed to get information from schools, employers who were also on leave.
• The team had conducted a review last week and had seen an uptick in the number of cases that they had been able to do since the start of September, so they were confident that they could level out the leavers before the valuation next March.
• The team had been on several workshops with Heywoods, the software provider, about automation. There was a lot that the team wanted to implement, but it would require the member self-service portal, so the plan was to implement the portal first and then coincide it with the changes needed for their workflow processes to fit with the new KPI reporting requirements for the annual report.
• The team wanted to use more of the capabilities of the software around automation to try and process the more standard cases, and Heywoods were looking into aggregation which was a key area for the team.
• Annual benefit statements were published before the 31st of August, and they had 100% for their active cases and just under 96% in total if they included their deferred cases. This was an improvement on last year where they had 100% for actives cases and just over 90% for deferred cases.

Resolved:

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