Issue - meetings

Administration Activity and Performance Report

Meeting: 08/06/2020 - Staff and Pensions Committee (Item 6)

6 Administration Activity and Performance Report pdf icon PDF 525 KB

Minutes:

Liz Firmstone, Service Manager (Transformation), presented the report. In 2019 a governance review was carried out on the Pension Administration Service (PAS) to improve its management. 54 actions on how to improve the service were produced from this with 36 being completed and four more actions will be finished by early July 2020; some of the outstanding actions are not due yet. Liz Firmstone stated that they are currently finalising the results of the internal audits that were carried out over the last year. She continued that the team have successfully reduced outstanding queries by half despite the current circumstances and that the indexation increases to pensions were all implemented on time. The team are currently obtaining information from the employers for the year end so that annual benefit statements can be issues to the scheme members. Statements have already been issued to deferred members.

Liz Firmstone continued that at the beginning of 2019-2020 there were a lot of vacancies and the PAS went through a service redesign which had increased capacity within the team. The service has reviewed its Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and has proposed a revised set for adoption from 2020/21, consistent with industry standards for approval by the committee.

It was clarified that if a deadline is missed for data being submitted by an employer, then this is classified as a breach. If employers repeatedly miss deadlines these cases are escalated, and employers are contacted to identify issues and offer assistance; PAS is keeping under review the impact Covid-19 is having on employer performance.

Liz Firmstone concluded that the PAS has a new I-Connect project which allows the service to obtain information straight from their employer’s payroll into the pension system which is effective at resolving issues and improves data quality. It will be distributed in three to four phases starting in the autumn of 2020. 

 

The Chair endorsed the work of the PAS for reducing their high volume of queries.

 

Following a query from Councillor Stevens, Liz Firmstone stated that 100% is a statutory target for the KPIs and some of these are unreachable; for example the “Retirements Lump Sums”, the service cannot make payments until notified by the employer that the employee has retired but the service is not normally informed until after the employee had left. Liz Firmstone reiterated that 2019/2020 was when the service had many vacancies and the numbers had improved for the 2020/2021 year as posts have been filled. She stated that they could now achieve the local targets set out as shown in Appendix 2.

Andrew Felton, Assistant Director (Finance), added that the trending performance had improved; for example, for one of the KPIs 89% had been achieved in the last four months although the overall annual performance was 69% due to lower performance earlier in the year, and the extra staff capacity will push this higher.

In response to Councillor Horner, Liz Firmstone said that the service should be able to achieve near 100% of the KPI  ...  view the full minutes text for item 6