Issue - meetings

The Committee considered and noted the update.

Mrs Williams noted the following significant points regarding the administration and communications update:

-       Annual pension regulator scores, which measure common and scheme specific data that the Fund hold against specific tolerances, had been confirmed. The common data score was 98% (previously this was 92%). The scheme specific data measure score was 97% (previously 68% when this was first introduced). As clearly identified, there has been excellent improvement in those areas. However, improvements going forward may plateau given the impact of business as usual and the nature of the remaining scores sometimes making them less important to update, but the scores are expected to remain high.

-       There continues to be long delays in Prudential’s services for members who have requested money to be released. However, there was a slight improvement and Mrs Williams is monitoring these issues regularly.

-       A new service was recently introduced in relation to the Annual Allowance and Life Time Allowance tax charges where Mercer hosted a scheme member webinar on this topic and members found the session extremely useful. The Fund is happy with the content and format of the session. It is hoped that members’ understanding will improve and expectations of the Fund to provide advice/guidance will reduce.

-       Resource implications were outlined in paragraph 2.01, in particular the vacancies within the administration team. The Fund were working a further round of trying to recruit within the operations team but unfortunately, no positions were filled in the McCloud team.

-       These vacancies, alongside the ongoing training and annual leave, would have an impact on KPIs and therefore, a dip in KPIs in the next quarter may be expected.

RESOLVED:

The Committee considered and noted the update.