Issue - meetings

The item was introduced by Vicky Jenks, who reminded members that administration for the Fund had moved to the West Yorkshire Fund from 1 April. There had been some minor issues but the transition had generally gone well, and the teams were aware of their expectations and responsibilities and staff at the West Yorkshire Fund had been quick to raise queries when needed. The major ongoing project was to identify the correct information in instances where there were inconsistencies between the details held by payroll and administration. This would look at whether any records were being paid incorrectly, and what the correct figure should be. This would be retrospectively as well as going forward.

Helen Scargill (West Yorkshire Pension Fund) said all of Warwickshire’s annual benefit statements had been processed and all but one had been released by 31 August, and the year end return had been completed. The one that had missed the deadline had been due to a payroll issue with a previous Fire and Rescue Authority that the scheme member worked for before transferring to Warwickshire. Helen Scargill said there had been some issues in terms of required data content and quality but the situation was now improving and the returns were being completed on a monthly basis. An update would be provided at the next meeting.

Regarding pension saving statements, Helen Scargill said there had been 18 instances of scheme members breaching the allowance threshold in the previous tax year. Of these, 15 had been notified before the 6 October deadline and the remainder needed confirmation of pay before the final calculation could be carried out. However this would not result in a breach for missing the deadline as the legislation stated it could be completed within three months of receiving all the required financial information.

Members were told that the West Yorkshire Fund had recently recruited a new pension administration representative, although there had been a desire to recruit two. This allowed an existing representative to take a new role focusing on Fire Pension administration. Training could be offered to anyone in Fire and Rescue Services who handled pensions materials. Helen Scargill informed members that a full disaster recovery exercise took place on 14 September and this had been successful. A report was being compiled by the Fund’s Head of IT and would be made available to Warwickshire when complete.

When the annual benefit statements were issued, members were also informed there was information regarding pensions available online. This included the My Pensions portal, with a guide being sent to members on how to register and navigate the website.

Helen Scargill said there were two types of data held by the Pension Administrator. Common data referred to things such as date of birth or National Insurance number, whereas specific data related to details that were solely relevant to the fire scheme and pensions history. There was quite a lot of missing information from the 2006 data, although this was mainly from the scheme members’ home  ...  view the full minutes text for item 3