Agenda item

The Acting Pensions Manager presented the report.

He said that on 29^th April a document had been received containing 22 sets of guidance from the Government Actuary’s Department, a number of which required changes to be backdated. Implementation of some these would require changes to software. There would be a delay of several months before the Fund’s software supplier would be able to install the updates. The impact is on an area of administration work where there was already a backlog, namely transfers in and out of the Fund. On 16th March as part of the Chancellors Budget the Government announced a change to the SCAPE rate, which impacts on transfers in and out and on those buying additional pension benefits. Quotes could not be produced automatically at present. Very lengthy manual calculations were sometimes necessary in order to produce quotes.

He reported on software improvements in the pipeline, which would allow the production of more informative performance reports containing local and national benchmarking figures.

He drew attention to the data breach described in paragraph 8.5 of the report. The Head of Business, Finance and Pensions said that the breach had been due to human error; certain aspects of process had been changed, so that a similar breach should not occur in the future. The Chair said that he had seen the report on the data breach, which had been thoroughly investigated and it was not material. The report could be copied to Members if they wished to see it.

A Member asked whether, given the complexity of calculating quotes and the increased possibility of error, whether the Fund would be bound by an erroneous quote. The Head of Business, Finance and Pensions said that it would, unless there was something fundamentally wrong with the information provided by the scheme member; quotes were checked before they were confirmed. The Chair said that if the administrators of the Fund knew there was an error, they should correct that error, whether the consequences were positive or negative for the pensioner.

A Member raised the issue of the provision of information to the Fund by academies. The Acting Pensions Manager said officers were in dialogue with all employers about the timely provision of accurate information. The Chair said that the Board would certainly consider the issue of employer data in the future. He expected that there would be an exceptions report arising from the valuation process, which would give details of any employers who had not provided the data that they were required to.

RESOLVED to note:

1.  Performance Indicators and Customer Satisfaction feedback for 3 months to 30 April 2016.

2.  Progress on the Data Improvement Plan.