Agenda item

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 addresses not being known. All of the common data for the modified 2015 data was complete and 25 per cent of the scheme specific information was missing for 2015 modified members, although Helen Scargill clarified this only related to three individuals. Barnaby Briggs and Tony Morgan said they were both happy to assist with helping to supply missing information if possible. Helen Scargill said that West Yorkshire are just data processors for Warwickshire, therefore the information belongs to Warwickshire. Information regarding members where addresses were not up to date could be shared with Warwickshire to see if members could be traced. Responding to a question from the Chair, Helen Scargill said the overall scores were towards the lower end compared with other clients. However she said many of the issues related to conflicting start dates for members of the modified scheme and this did not represent a cause for alarm as this would not affect the calculation of benefits. It was acknowledged some authorities would pass their data as being acceptable as the missing data did not make a material difference to its accuracy, whereas West Yorkshire Pension Fund would not pass it even if there was a small difference in the data.

The Chair noted that, according to the data, the number of members had dropped from 1,400 to 1,100. Helen Scargill explained this was from duplicates from more than one data set being merged together, and 1,100 was now the correct membership number.

Members noted the contents of the report.