Agenda item

This is a performance report for the Brent Pension Board as part of its remit to oversee the administration of the Brent Pension Fund.  The report includes commentary on performance indicators, administrative updates and recent developments.

The Board received a performance report as part of its remit to oversee the administration of the Brent Pension Fund.  The report included commentary on performance indicators, administrative updates and recent developments.

Ravinder Jassar (Head of Finance) provided the updates.  Members heard that an annual benefit statement (ABS) was issued to all members identified on the year end returns from employers by the statutory deadline of 31 August 2018 for active members within the scheme apart from a small number of records where either data was missing or queries from year end returns had not been resolved in time. The vast majority of these employers were schools that were closed over the summer months and could not respond to Capita’s queries in time for the scheduled print run in mid-August.  Given the change in administrator during this period, each of the outstanding queries had been logged and case files transferred to LPP.  LPP would be working with the relevant employers to resolve the remaining outstanding queries to enable them to issue a manual statement of benefits to those members.

In relation to deferred members, an ABS was sent to all members where an up to date address was held.  Last year 1,478 records did not have an up to date address and so did not receive an ABS.  The scheme manager then procured the services of a specialist tracing company, Target, who were successful in finding the new addresses of over 75% of those members.  There remained 364 deferred members where an up to date address could not be found and so did not receive an ABS in this year’s ABS rollout.  Those members were proving more difficult to find and so further, more extensive, search options were being explored with both Target and LPP.   As Target suspected that some of these members may have moved overseas and/or deceased, this exercise could be somewhat expensive. For reasons set out within the report it was considered that the less than 100% ABS would not constitute a material breach to warrant reporting to The Pension Regulator (TPR).

Mr Jassar then reported on the successful smooth transition to LPP on 1^st  October 2018 when the service went live as planned. Monthly contract performance meetings had since been arranged where performance against agreed service level agreements (for example time taken to process joiners, transfers in/out, retirements, deaths, refunds, etc.) would be monitored and reported to the Pension Board on a quarterly basis.      The Annual Scheme return 2017/18 Scheme Return for the Brent Pension Fund was submitted to TPR ahead of the statutory deadline of 6 November 2018.

He then reported that back in August 2018,  the TPR had written to the scheme manager informing him that they would be conducting an in depth engagement to discuss governance and administration of the scheme. To this end, he emphasised the need for members’ training to ensure that members had the skills, knowledge and understanding to support the scheme in running properly.  Mr Jassar undertook to send a link to TPR’s free online learning programme (the Trustee toolkit) which all members of the Pension Board were expected to complete.

In welcoming the report, members thanked officers for the smooth transition of the administration service to LLP whose officers had, thus far, demonstrated efficiency in resolving queries.

RESOLVED:

That the report from the Chief Finance Officer on Pensions Administration – monitoring and contract arrangements be noted.