Vicky Jenks (Pensions Admin Delivery Lead) introduced the report and confirmed that the Home Office had released guidance documents for fire authorities. Members of fire schemes who had not transferred into the care scheme from the 1^st April 2015 would have been able to retire from their final salary scheme. The instruction from the Home Office was to calculate the benefits based on their legacy schemes and ignore that they moved across the care scheme and calculated the benefits so that they are not detrimentally affected by having to wait for the change in regulations on the 1^st April 2022. Legal advice was sought from Warwickshire County Council and the Scheme Advisory Board. The approach will be to follow the guidance where possible for individuals and set out clear instructions for members to show what had been done and why. If this guidance could not be applied to a specific case, then that member will be informed. 

Following Councillor Dirveiks’ concerns with the workload, Vicky Jenks noted that there were not a lot of members in the fire pension schemes but there was a concern that the change in the scheme could influence fire officers to retire now. There was an ongoing McCloud project with additional resources that could be used to help with the fire schemes.  

In response to the Chair, Vicky Jenks clarified that no additional staff will be brought in to help with this scheme, but the Pensions Administration team reshuffled so more officers were available to help with fire queries; 27 cases affected by the guidance have been identified.  

Following a query from Councillor Gifford, Vicky Jenks replied that there are different elements included in calculating the benefits, so the payroll team will collect the data needed to calculate this. However, the pension team had a system to work out the benefits calculation which reduced the manual time needed for each calculation. It will take about a day to get the information from the pension and payroll teams for each case. 

In response to Councillor Horner, Vicky Jenks stated that the guidance received was just one element of the McCloud work.  There will be a separate project to manage this and additional resources will be available throughout.

Resolved:

That the Staff and Pensions Committee note and comment on the report