ITEM

NOTES

ACTION / OWNER

1

Welcomes, Apologies & Conflicts of Interest:

The Chair welcomed everyone to the meeting, apologies had been received in advance of the meeting from CC Tim De Meyer, Peter Appleton & Carwyn Hughes. 

Ricardo Herrera-Delgado was welcomed to the Board, who was substituting for Peter Appleton. 

The meeting was declared quorate and balanced.

No conflicts were declared.  The Board were reminded that the Conflicts of Interest Declaration Forms were due for 2023/2024.  RL would be sending these out for completion in the next few days.

ITEM

NOTES

ACTION / OWNER

2

Minutes / Actions from previous meeting:

The minutes were accepted as a true reflection of the meeting with no changes made.

Joint Pension Board Actions:

Action 2022-29: Work Plan – GMP Reconciliation error rate project for Sussex Police - the first stage is now complete; a report is being prepared with the findings and will be shared in the next few weeks - OPEN.

PM/CG

Action 2023-02:  XPS Quarterly Report – Amend the cases by month section of the quarterly report to say Deferred Benefits notifications, to make this clearer – XPS are looking to overhaul the reports to make the more bespoke, this amendment will be included - OPEN.

PM

Action 2023-10:  Portal Error – The Board were assured that the error was fixed within the test environment, it will be going live in about 10 days, when the lump sum commutation values should be visible and will make the benefit statements consistent which how they have been produced in the past. – OPEN.

PM

Action 2023-17:  To review the internal process and procedure re Death in Service – Ongoing - OPEN.

AP

Action 2023-19:  Evans & Ashcroft baseline information – still waiting for the scanning process to be completed.  Concerns were raised over the length of time this has taken and the possibility of compensation payment request being received were discussed.  PM was not sure if there was a national stance on this and will find out what other Forces are doing and update the Board at the next meeting - OPEN.

PM

Action 2023-21 (Awayday): Review of Internal Dispute Resolution Process to decide who will make the second stage decision going forwards – see item 4 on this agenda – Closed.

Action 2023-22 (Awayday): Pension Opt Outs – Now a standing agenda item - Closed.

Action 2023-26: Retirement Process Timeline - not yet completed, will share with the Board as soon as available.

Action 2023-27 – Pension Administrator Summary - Provide a position statement – A detailed position statement from November 2023 had been shared with the Board and an updated statement will be available in the next month, this will also be shared with the Board.  XPS have also published another document on their website, in response to an FOI request, which sets out the journey so far in their handling of the Remedy - Open

PM

ITEM

NOTES

ACTION / OWNER

2 Cont.

Action 2023-28:  Review of Board TOR & Governing Policies and Procedures considering TPR EDI Guidance - To review the Board documents to see how EDI might fit – see item 8 of this agenda - Closed

Action 2023-29: Employee Side Feedback - Add Annual Tax Workshop to the workplan -completed – Closed.

3

Pension Administrator Summary:

Work is ongoing within XPS to improve the team and management of the team; to get the structure model correct.  Development of automated systems continues in the background to reduce dependency on Haywood, one of which will provide a solution for pension calculations, this will be ready in a test environment in the next few weeks.   

The positive relationship with XPS was acknowledged by the Board and, that it would take time for XPS to embed the changes they have made.  The impact on the workload of the Surrey/Sussex Police Pensions Team was also acknowledged and their response to this was praised by the Board.

Quarterly Reports:

The quarterly Performance Delivery Reports were reviewed by the Board.  A concern was raised over the accuracy of the figures as the registration for self service for those over 65 is currently showing in the report at 0%, which could not be right.

The Board noted the complaints in the report, it was agreed that not all contact was necessarily a complaint and was usually quickly dealt with, but that overall dissatisfaction may not be being recorded.  XPS do try to manage the expectations of scheme members by setting a timeframe for providing information in their response emails, following up with further emails if the final response is to be delayed for some reason.

Contact with the Surrey/Sussex Pensions Team was discussed and how it was recorded.  The Team confirmed it does track escalations/complaints and the internal dispute resolution process.

.

Action 2024-01:  Quarterly Reports – check the accuracy of the figures.

XPS and the Association Representatives to look at capturing feedback from the scheme members.

To look at a more formal way of logging contact with the Surrey/Sussex Pensions Team in place to capture demand and provide feedback to the Board.

PM

PM/MO/ & RC

AP

ITEM

NOTES

ACTION / OWNER

3 Cont.

Data & Dashboard Update:

It was noted that this is a complex national project, making sure the data is Dashboard ready would need to be resourced both from XPS and both Forces.  The Board noted the Pensions Dashboard Report provided by XPS to their clients to help them get Dashboard ready and focused on the Trustee Checklist.  The Surrey/Sussex Pensions Team confirmed they were aware of the checklist and didn’t have too many concerns at this point in time but would be setting up working groups to deal with the tasks ahead when better resourced.

It was confirmed that the Dashboard Connection Readiness Report, which would summerise the view data, would be available mid-2024.  It will show whether there is sufficient information, and whether the tools and checks that are in place, will verify that data.  Tolerances and parameters are being built into a testing took which will suggest whether the information held is consistent and what they would expect to see.

4

Pension Remedy:

The Board were informed that 29 retirements will have been processed since 1^st of January 2024 (6 for Surrey and 23 for Sussex). There are currently 16 remedy retirements in train for the rest of 2024.

Added pensions – 11 officers have been identified as having paid added pensions, (1 active and 10 retired or deferred) work is ongoing to return the money to them, for the retired or deferred scheme members this will be picked when their cohort goes through the remedy period.

Contingent decisions – work is ongoing to finalise the process, the decision had been taken to include the Internal Dispute Resolution Process in the Contingent Decision Guidance, this is to ensure that the process is not resource intensive and is consistent, resilient and robust.  The NPCC is finalising guidance that each Force will use as a basis for the process, and targeted communication will go out to individuals who have been identified as being potentially entitled to apply for a contingent decision.  The Board will have sight of the guidance and communication and a briefing session will be arranged for Board Members so that there is a shared understanding of the process, which will enable the Association Representatives to be able to help their members should they be contacted with any queries.  The Board will be kept informed of progress.

NPCC Police Pensions Bulletin 4 – The Board noted their responsibilities highlighted in this report.

ITEM

NOTES

ACTION / OWNER

4 Cont.

Ill Health Updates – The 29 people who were on the 1987 scheme and were ill health retired during the remedy period have been contacted for consent for the SMP to carry out a review of the original decision made.  So far 8 have given permission for review, 3 have requested more time to consider and the rest have not yet responded.

Scheme Sanction Charges – both Forces are working to identify those officers where sanction charges have been incorrectly deducted, reviewing all retirements between January 2011 to April 23^rd 2023.  Communications on this subject has been issued via NARPO and the Federation as well as internally to active scheme members.  The Board will be updated when final numbers and costs are known.

It was confirmed that those members who choose to put their remedy period back into their legacy scheme and repay their contributions will have 14 years in which to repay the difference or they can take it from their lump sum upon retirement. There may be tax implications for some officers and the HMRC and the Home Office are providing some guidance information on what officers need to do and the impact it may have.

The Superintendent’s Association Representative informed the Board that they had invited the National Police Superintendent’s Association to come and give a talk to their members, on this issue as it was felt there was a lot of misunderstanding in relation to the repayments.

5

Scheme Membership:

The Sussex Superintendent’s Association representative assured the Board that they have it as standing agenda item at their branch meeting, which are well attended by their members, and are held quarterly.  The Secretary from the National Superintendent’s Association Executive will be coming to speak in person to the members on the 14^th of May and the Sussex Federation Representative on the Pension Board would be invited to attend.

It was confirmed there is a Recruitment event in Sussex on the 25^th of March where a session on the benefits of the pension will be given.

The Sussex Federation representative confirmed that it was a standing item on the agenda for the new recruitment induction, and that he was trying to get it included in the Freshers fair that the Treasurer is currently organising, the Pensions Team would be invited to attend to advertise the scheme.

The Surrey Federation Representative confirmed they were doing all they could to promote the scheme but that the cost of living was having an impact on officer decisions.

ITEM

NOTES

ACTION / OWNER

6

Employee Side Feedback:

The Pensions Team are carrying out some analysis on opt outs, they have had a report for Sussex and are just running the report for Surrey which they will be sharing with the Board.  The opt out survey that was completed last year has encouraged a national survey to be arranged by NPCC Pensions.  The team will be sharing the opt out data and survey format and data with the other forces on a reciprocal basis and it will be interesting to see the national trends that emerge.

XPS have also been tracking the national picture with the lowest opt out rates being about 2% and the highest being just over 10%.

It was noted that the pension is a key element of the pay the rewards package with the employer paying in 36% towards the future pension liabilities.  It was also noted that another key benefit of being a member of police officer pension scheme is that it offers death in service benefits and life and ill health insurance which can be supplied to mortgage providers to cover loan liabilities saving taking out separate policies where applicable.

The Pensions Team are putting together a presentation on the benefits of the scheme, and this will be shared with the Association representatives to share with their members.

7

Risk Register:

4.4 Sustainability of the Pension Board and Pensions Team – the Board were asked if the wanted to review the risk scoring in light of the People Services change program phase two, and the ECO single Scheme Manager review.  The Board agreed that as phase two of the program had not yet started, they needed a recommendation as to what this might look like.  This will be picked up again at the next meeting.

4.5 Immediate Detriment – as the legislation has now been published it was agreed that this item on the risk register could be removed.

Pension Saving Statements – Scheme Pays - as there had been several questions about this from scheme members about this subject should this be added to the risk register? It was noted that this could be an operational rather than an organisational risk. 

Action 2024-02: To consider the issue outside of the meeting and add to the Risk Register if appropriate.

AR, AP, JL, CG

ITEM

NOTES

ACTION / OWNER

8

Review of Board Policies and Procedures re EDI:

The Pensions Regulator (TPR) issued guidance last year to promote the benefits of EDI to Pension Boards. The Board Policies and Procedures had been reviewed by the Chair and slight changes made to the following:

·         Terms of Reference

·         Knowledge & Understanding

·         Code of Conduct

The amended TOR will now be sent to the Scheme Managers for their approval and all Board Policies and Procedures will come to the next meeting for their annual review.

9

Internal Dispute Resolution Procedure:

As discussed in item 4, this will now form part of the Contingent Decision process, the Policy and Procedure will be shared with the Board once it has been completed.

Action 2024-03: Share copy of Contingent Decision Policy & Procedure with the Board as soon as it becomes available

JL,CG

10

Review of Reported Breaches for Surrey & Sussex Police:

No breaches had been reported in this period.

11

Surrey/Sussex Work Plan/Timeline:

Opt outs – as discussed in item 6, this work is ongoing.

Evans & Ashcroft – the scanning project should be completed in March/April.

The annual tax workshop had been added to the Work Plan.

Guaranteed Minimum Penson Reconciliation (GMP) – still waiting for the error rate analysis for Surrey Police.

Data Scoring – preparing for the Dashboard includes measuring the data held about scheme members and including it in the annual returns, this work is ongoing.

Discretions Policy – draft policy had been issued which is to be amended following feedback but also looking at the wider picture as there is a consensus amongst the Forces that a consistent national approach is needed, this work is ongoing.

GMP Equalization – the work is ongoing.

Dashboard from the Home Office – the work is ongoing.

A question was asked regarding the newsletter that scheme members used to receive. It was confirmed that the newsletter used to be provided by Equinity.  XPS do not currently provide but can assist if required.  The P60 slips and the statements of pension increases are sent out in their 3 in 1 letter and this will include an explanation about the GMP.

ITEM

NOTES

ACTION / OWNER

12

Pension Board Training Log:

The chair noted the new members that have completed their training and encouraged those who have yet to complete to do so before the next meeting.

13

AOB:

The chair informed the Board that this was his last meeting as the chair for this year, Kelvin Menon would be chairing in 2024/2025.  The Board thanked Iain for his professional chairing of the Board over the last year.  Iain expressed his thanks to the team who have fully supported the Board.

14

Date of next meeting:

The date of the next meeting is the 5^th of June 2024.

The Chair thanked everyone for their time.

ITEM

NOTES

ACTION / OWNER

1

Welcomes, Apologies & Conflicts of Interest:

The Chair welcomed everyone to the meeting, apologies had been received in advance of the meeting from Peter Appleton, Daisanne Summersfield, Adrian Rutherford, Miles Ockwell, Simon Lambert, Tim De Meyer, and Jo Shiner.  John Moyles was attending the meeting to represent Peter Appleton and Jo Banks was due to attend to represent Miles Ockwell but was unable to join due to operational commitments.

As only 7 Members of the Board were in attendance, the meeting was declared not quorate or balanced and would continue as an informal meeting and notes would be taken.

No conflicts were declared.

ITEM

NOTES

ACTION / OWNER

2

Action 2023-15: Email the two Scheme Managers to let them know that the formal meeting had not gone ahead as planned and to ascertain if they wished the Board to hold another formal meeting in this financial year in order that they may meet their obligation of holding 4 formal public meetings a year.

IM

Minutes / Action from Previous Meeting:

The minutes were accepted as a true reflection of the meeting with no changes made.

Joint Pension Board Actions:

Action 2022-29: Work Plan - Surrey’s data is complete, Sussex’s is not yet available and is being worked on, the report will be shared outside of the Board meeting - OPEN.

CG

Action 2023-02:  XPS Quarterly Report – Amend the cases by month section of the quarterly report to say Deferred Benefits notifications, to make this clearer - no changes to the standard reports to date - OPEN.

PM

Action 2023-07:  Liaise with PM & GB to obtain a form of wording that accurately reflect the discussion, amend the minutes, and correct the attendee list prior to publication – attendee list corrected, form of words agreed with the Chair, minutes amended and published – Closed.

Action 2023-08:  Risk Area 1.5 Pension Administration Transfer - Update the Risk Register to remove this specific risk and adsorb into business as usual. – Completed - Closed

Action 2023 09 - Transfer Project Plan Closure document – a summary to be provided for the archives – Summary provided – Closed.

Action 2023-10:  Pension Administrator Summary - Concerns had been raised that if the salary showing in the portal was not correct, how could Officers have faith in the information provided?

PM explained that the salary figure within the portal came from the Scheme Year End Return, for this last financial year it would have been the salary from April 2022 to March 2023 and would include any salary increases in September 2022, so a proportion is calculated at the old rate and a proportion calculated at the new rate from September onwards. This would also include any incremental rise, which follow the date that the Officer joined or was promoted, and the date for this rise would be different for each Officer.  Therefore, figure showing in the portal is the average pensionable pay rather than the spot pay or current pay that the Officer sees on their pay slip. When the Officer accesses the portal, they can enter their current salary to see the estimated benefit calculation. 

A new system is to be introduced soon; this would allow for a monthly update to each Officers pay to be fed into the portal.  Once this system is in place, the portal will show the current cumulative pensionable pay for each person. 

PM

.

Check the FAQs on the portal and information within the User Guide to see if there is a clear explanation as to how the salary figure is calculated.  Send a link to the Board.

PM

ITEM

NOTES

ACTION / OWNER

2 Cont.

Action 2023-11:  Pension Administrator Summary - the wording to be corrected before the minutes are published – form of words agreed with the Chair and minutes published - Closed

Action 2023-12:  Report on Scheme Membership Opt Out Rates - Opt out Survey Feedback to be shared with the SAB Chair and Scheme Manager Steering Group – will be shared following the Away Day - Closed

Action 2023-13:  Report on Scheme Membership Opt Out Rates - Arrange a Pension Board Awayday – Arranged for the 3^rd of October 2023 - Closed

Action 2023-14:  The training log is to be updated with the NPCC and LGA training – Log updated - Closed

3

Pension Administrator Summary:

The reports for Surrey and Sussex were reviewed. 

PM explained that there is now a new Administration Manager at XPS called Jane Webb who is responsible for producing the reports.

Process changes have taken place to allow the taxation required by the HMRC for lump sum payments that are greater than £268,275, these are taxed at the marginal rate PAYE tax amount.

XPS continue to have conversations with the NPCC around the remedy and the implementation of this and are speaking to their software providers to ascertain what they can or can’t offer in terms of automation for calculations as of the 1^st of October.

XPS have improved their breach awareness, refreshed their staff training on data management, data breach avoidance and good practice within the office.  They have also improved the ID verification process when speaking to customers.  They have also recently achieved accreditation against the Pension Administration Standards Association (PASA) Pensions Administration Standards.  There is an IT integrated function within XPS who are extremely proactive in the protection of data which includes independent penetration testing of all their websites.

All XPS staff are fully vetted by Warwickshire Police to NPPV Level 3 and there is an AAF audit which talks about and verifies their data protection processes.

XPS are moving away from using NI numbers as an identifier, each customer now has a system generated unique pension reference number and four pieces of information are required from the customer for identity verification.  It was agreed that customers needed to be aware that they were going to be asked for this additional information when contacting XPS.

The statistics in relation to people signing up to the portal had remained static, and help was requested from the Employer side Pension Board Members to actively encourage their members to sign up.  The representative were more than happy to facilitate this

ITEM

NOTES

ACTION/ OWNER

3 Cont.

Action 2023-16:  Check the website information re what customer verification information required and update if necessary.

PM

Bring a report on what XPS do in relation to data protection to the next Board meeting. 

PM

Work with the Board Members who represent the scheme membership to enable better communication and encourage sign up to the use of the portal.

PM/TB/

DM/RC

A question was raised regarding feedback received and what XPS do with this as members had given feedback via the portal but got no response.  PM confirmed that their Contact Centre do monitor the types of feedback they get, if there is a spike in feedback or queries on a particular subject they do put something on the main website in the news or latest information section www.myownpension.co.uk.  The call handlers were trained to help members set themselves up on the portal using the verification the member had received and can see the portal from the member side to assist with each step if necessary.  XPS are keen to promote the digital first approach as there were benefits to both sides.

Common data - Members with a fail rate of 91.19% for Surrey and 96.22% for Sussex, it is unclear if this is a legacy data issue, discussions were ongoing with the software provider Haywoods who will be providing a service looking at mortality screening, address cleansing and proof of life certificates based on biometrics.  It was confirmed that information on Scheme Members is submitted to the National Fraud Database every two years, anyone who appears on their list, as potentially may have passed, but are still in receipt of a pension, are investigated individually.

Performance – The scores for Surrey and Sussex were very similar, the process time for general queries and estimate times had fallen in the last quarter.  It was confirmed that the priority within the XPS team was to process the benefit payments to scheme members on time and correctly.  As general queries and estimates did not have a payment attached to them, and due to spikes in the workload, these types of queries sometimes took a back seat.

The Police Pensions Team confirmed it is looking at what recourse they have under the contract when KPI targets are not met consistently.

Complaints – the process for reporting a death in service was discussed, PM confirmed there is a 5-day turnaround for this and there are processes and forms in place to make this as quick and efficient process as possible, but that XPS were reliant on receiving the relevant information in a timely manner.

Action 2023-17:  To review the internal process and procedure re Death in Service to see if any improvements can be made.

JL/CG/CH

Benefit Statements – these had been issued on time and were available online and communications had been sent out.  There had been an issue with some of the statements which weren’t showing correctly, they were not wrong just didn’t have the full information on them, this had been logged with Haywoods and new statements would be issued to those effected.

ITEM

NOTES

ACTION/ OWNER

3 Cont.

A question was asked whether the statements issued met the legal obligation in terms of advice, the written content that is meant to accompany an annual benefit statement, not just the financial figures that are conveyed.

Action 2023-18:  Check the disclosure regulations and the Pensions Regulator information to see what should be included with the annual benefit statement against what is published on the website and feed back to the Board

PM

Evans & Ashcroft – CG confirmed that for Sussex it is complete, the information had been correct and there had been no overpayments.  For Surrey they were still waiting for a bit more information for a few members.  It was confirmed that there is now a baseline of information held but there is a danger it would fall into disrepair if it were not properly maintained.  Are the Pensions Team still reliant on the scheme members informing them of any changes to benefits received?

Action 2023-19:  Baseline information - To investigate the process and report back to the Board

CG

The scanning process is making good progress No decision had yet been made regarding any files whereby the scans don’t reveal any further information, but it had been reassuring that Sussex’s had revealed no overpayments.

4

Employee Side Feedback:

This was a new topic on the agenda to enable the Scheme Member representative to give oral feedback to the Board at each meeting. 

It was felt that scheme members were submitting feedback into the portal but not getting a response.  PM confirmed that this feedback generated an email into the Contact Centre and the number of emails has grown significantly recently, mainly due to communication going out around pensions.  More people within the team were now working on the emails and the backlog should reduce in a very short space of time.

The Surrey Federation is working to increase engagement with officers, promoting the importance of the scheme - a market stall is to be set up in the Surrey Police HQ Canteen and the Pensions Team have agreed to come along and answer any queries on the day.

Surrey NARPO scheme members had been generally very positive regarding the service XPS were providing but there had been two cases recently regarding widows’ pensions that had appeared not to have been resolved in a timely manner.  PM confirmed that no formal complaint had been recorded by XPS in either case and both were now resolved, any dissatisfaction about a particular topic whether through social media or via the Contact Centre were responded to as quickly and compassionately as possible, but to link him in on any cases the Board representative became aware of.  As XPS were now out of the ‘honeymoon period’ expectations of the scheme members would be higher.

The agreed system for monthly NARPO subscription payments and the signing up of new members was working very well, the whole process had been streamlined and a vast improvement on the old method.

5

Risk and Issue Register:

The Board reviewed the Risk Register. As we are still waiting for the Remedy legislation to be published, no changes were made at this time.

ITEM

NOTES

ACTION/ OWNER

6

Surrey/Sussex Police Pensions 2023 Internal Audit Report:

An Internal Audit review of the pensions contract management processes had been undertaken by Southern Internal Audit Partnership.  The report gave the highest rating of assurance (Substantial) with no management actions or areas for improvement identified.  The Police Pensions Team were thanked for the hard work that they completed prior to the contact being issued.

7

Awayday:

The date for the Pension Board Awayday was confirmed as the 3^rd of October and the agenda for the day was reviewed.  The Chair confirmed the focus of the day would be The Pensions Regulator (TPR) EDI overview and guidance and TPR information on the Dashboard. Representatives from TPR office had been invited to attend the day.  A representative from the NPCC would also be attending to give an update on the current Remedy situation.

8

Pension Remedy:

The Board noted the update paper, a question was asked re the flyer for retired officers which is being created by the NPCC.  A draft version of the flyer had been shared recently with the NARPO representative and this had raised some concerns, the flyer appeared to contain misleading information and assume a certain level of knowledge that some scheme members may not possess, it was felt that this would lead to many mores queries if the flyer was not more explicit.  It was confirmed that this feedback had been passed to the NPCC.

9

Review of Reported Breaches:

No breaches had been reported in the last quarter.  It was confirmed that any FOI requests were dealt with by either the Surrey or Sussex FOI Teams, depending on which organisation had received the original request.  The Police and Crime Commissioner’s office for either Surrey or Sussex would respond to any requests received by them in relation to pension forfeitures.

10

Work Plan:

The Board noted the plan, it was confirmed that the subject of the GMP equalization had been discussed at the National NARPO meeting, the consensus from other NARPO Representative from across the country had been that remedy had taken the priority over GMP.

11

Budged Expenditure Report:

The Board noted the report which recommended a small increase in the Board’s budget for conferences, training and expenses in the next financial year, the Board accepted the recommendation.

Action 2023-20: Discuss the Budget for 2024/2025 outside of this meeting.

JM/DS

12

Annual Report to SAB:

It was confirmed that the Annual report on the work of the Board had been approved by the Scheme Manager and sent to the Scheme Advisory Board Chair at the end of July as required.

ITEM

NOTES

ACTION/ OWNER

13

Pension Board Training:

The log was reviewed. There were no updates to add. The awareness training on EDI and Dashboards will be added to the log following the Awayday.

14

AOB:

None

15

Date of next meeting:

The next meeting was confirmed as the 30^th of November 2023 and that the meetings would continue to be held on Teams for the time being.

ITEM

NOTES

ACTION / OWNER

1

Welcomes, Apologies & Conflicts of Interest:

IM welcomed everyone to the meeting and explained that he had taken over as Chair from KM for this next financial year.   The meeting was declared quorate but would not be balanced once KM & CH were able to join. 

Apologies had been received prior to the meeting from Danielle Mead, Tom Budd, CC Jo Shiner, CC Tim De Meyer.

DS introduced the Surrey Police Pensions team attending the meeting and gave apologies for JL & MQ who were not able to attend.

No conflicts were declared.

ITEM

NOTES

ACTION / OWNER

2

CH joined the meeting at this point

Minutes / Action from Previous Meeting:

Item 4 - The minutes of the 21st of February were discussed; Item 4 - it was felt that the minutes did not accurately reflect the discussion re the widow’s complaint, the wording will be agreed outside of this meeting and the minutes corrected prior to publication.  One other error in the list of attendees was also noted and will also be corrected.

Action 2023-07:  Liaise with PM & GB to obtain a form of wording that accurately reflect the discussion, amend the minutes and correct the attendee list prior to publication.

RL

Joint Pension Board Actions:

Action 2022-16: Scheme Membership Opt Out Rates – see item 5 of this Agenda - Closed

Action 2022-18 – Data Breach – As there had been no response from Equinity, the Board agreed that as this was a minor breach which was reported at the time and the address had been contacted asking for the statement to be returned, the Board agreed this action could be closed - Closed

Action 2022-28: Pension Remedy- now a standing agenda item - Closed

Action 2022-29: Work Plan - Share GMP reconciliation error rate information re Surrey / Sussex member data with the Board once it becomes available - data is not yet available, being worked on and will be discussed at the next project meeting with XPS - OPEN.

CG

Action 2023 01:  Risk & Issue Register – Risk Area 2.3 – the Risk Register had been amended to reflect the comments- Closed.

KM joined the meeting at this point.

Action 2023-02:  XPS Quarterly Report – Amend the cases by month section of the quarterly report to say Deferred Benefits notifications, to make this clearer - PM explained that these are a standard set of reports, will be working towards changing the reports in the future and will consult with the Board re any proposed changes.

PM

Action 2023 03:  Pension Remedy Share the Comms Plan with the Board – this had been shared - closed

Action 2023-04 – Scheme Member Opt out rates – an updated paper to come back to the Board– see item 5 of this agenda – Closed.

Action 2023-05 –Refund and interest payment – the refund in full and interest payment had been received – Closed

Action 2023-06 –Pension Team contact details to be sent to the Board – details sent – Closed

ITEM

NOTES

ACTIONS

/ OWNER

3

Risk and Issue Register:

The Board reviewed the Risk Register and noted the minor changes / updates that had been made since the last meeting.

Risk Area 1.5 –Pension Administration Transfer – As we are now 6 months on from the successful transfer, the Board agreed that this specific risk could now be discharged and removed from the register and absorbed into business as usual. 

PM confirmed that all outstanding work from the transfer had been completed.  There had been a spike in the workload in the last quarter which had caused a small number of cases that had not been completed within the KPI target.  The spike in the workload had been due to pensions increases, member self-service portal letters being sent out etc., this did not affect any cases that involved deaths, payments or benefits as these are treated as a priority but related to general queries, transfer requests, statements, divorce calculations etc.  XPS are working hard to clear the backlog.

A concern was raised re data accuracy relating to transferees into the Surrey/Sussex pension scheme and did this need to be added as a risk to the Risk Register?  The Board were assured that the Pensions team were aware of the problem, particularly in relation to senior level transfers where these issues appeared to occur more often.  The Pensions Team are currently running a mini project to look at the issues, it has also been identified as something that will need to be looked at in more detail as part of the pension remedy reconciliations.

The paper file scanning project had now been completed, historic data is available to XPS so that when the member record is being checked following an event, a transfer, retirement, death etc., the historic data will be easily available to be checked and included in the calculations.  XPS will also be checking that any cash transfers into the scheme had been recorded correctly.

Through the NPCC, it had been agreed that administrators will work together to make sure that any future transfer information will be current and up to date.  As part of their workflow process, XPS will check directly with the officer and actively peruse the transfer statement.

Action 2023-08:  Risk Area 1.5 Pension Administration Transfer - Update the Risk Register to remove this specific risk and adsorb into business as usual.

CG

Action 2023 09 - Transfer Project Plan Closure document – a summary to be provided for the archives.

CG

1.4 Member Communications – it was noted that when communication relating to the annual benefit statement is to be released, information on the Tax regulations changes to annual and lifetime allowances will need to be included to clarify that it won’t impact the previous financial year.  This would hopefully help to reduce any confusion over this.

ITEM

NOTES

ACTIONS

/ OWNER

4

Pension Administrator Summary:

The reports for Surrey and Sussex were reviewed. 

The annual allowance threshold had been increased in the budget from £40k to £60k, this has been picked up and would be applied to the pension saving statements that are due to be send out, although the increase was welcomed, the CPI inflation rate increase of 10.1% will also be applied to member benefits, it remains to be seen who will be affected by the allowance increase this time around.  This is currently being looked at by the XPS technical team and a briefing note to explain what has happened and who it will affect will be issued.   XPS will also be updating their website with new examples to which will take into account the new threshold limit.

Lifetime allowance – this was also increased in the budget, now £268k, if a member does have a lump sum option of more than £268K, the lump sum will be issued as usual on the day, or the day after the retirement date, but there is a requirement from the HMRC to tax any excess amount, this payment would have a marginal tax rate or personal tax rate applied and is paid on the normal pension pay date.  XPS will follow up with a briefing note to the Pensions Team to explain how this affects their process and how they are to communicate the changes to members.  The lump sum commutation rates changed recently, any offers that had been made will be, or have already been, revised and reissued.

XPS Portal– the take up for Surrey and Sussex had been above the national average and was expected to continue to grow between now and the end of August when the benefit statements are issued.  XPS will be issuing communications to active members to encourage sign up and will also issue deferred member statements where the data permits, which should increase the sign up with that member group as well.

A query was raised re an apparent error on the portal which appeared to quote maximum commutations at any time between now and 30 years, PM explained that it may be that the member was looking at the wrong line of service on the record, they needed to be in the correct record to get the correct calculation out of the system.

Action 2023-10:  Run tests to see if the information is displaying on the portal is as expected and if not will rectify immediately.

PM

Common Data Scoring – PM explained the various data test scores and the various reasons why someone may fail the test, XPS do correct as many issues as possible to make the data held as accurate as possible, but that some ‘fails’ my never be cleared out of the system, i.e., if a child was receiving a pension but had no NI number, or if a person has a title that the system does not recognise, this type of fail will always register as a fail.

ITEM

NOTES

ACTIONS

/ OWNER

Completed cases overview – There were some cases which had not met the KPI targets.  The reason for the delays related to the spike in the workload, the XPS team were working as hard as possible to clear the backlog.  XPS have an automatic response which will be looked at to see if it needs to be changed.  The Pensions Team confirmed that this was being monitored closely, to help manage member expectations, information had gone out via the internal forum to active members and via the rep bodies for deferred members. Regular engagement sessions with XPS were taking place to monitor and address this issue.  Rep bodies are requested to continue to escalate any issues brought to them by their members to the joint Pensions Team so that they can track it and make sure it is being dealt with.

Pension increase queries – it was confirmed that a lot of these queries relate to how the pension increase is applied, the interaction with the GMP with the substantive police pension, which is why XPS break this down, but this may still lead to queries.

Completed Cases by month – Death in service – one case was showing as late, this case had been completed but for some reason had not been closed within the system. 

What the report does not show is how many days any cases not completed inside the target had been delayed by.  PM confirmed that when the report is redesigned in the future, it would be possible to include this information.

Sussex, widows’ complaint –The Board were advised that Equinity had been informed of the death in good time, this was shortly before the transfer date, but had not communicated this information to XPS.  It had since been confirmed that there had been no overpayment, the widow’s pension is now being paid and XPS Contact Centre staff had been spoken to.  A letter will be sent to the complainant to confirm that no overpayment had been made, no demand for repayment would be made and a few lines would be included to confirm how the complaint had been resolved.

Action 2023-11:  It was felt that the minutes of the last meeting did not accurately reflect the situation with this complaint – the wording is to be corrected before the minutes are published

RL/PM /GB

5

Report on Scheme Membership Opt Out Rates:

The Chair thanked the Pensions Team for the report and the details of the survey responses which had been very informative.  It was confirmed that as this was a public meeting, anyone who wanted to attend the meeting can attend and should contact RL.  The Board noted that some of the feedback in the survey was outside of their control as they do not have discretion to change the scheme.  It was agreed that the raw data needed to be analysed in more detail to see where the problems lie, this would enable the board to make informed decisions or put forward sensible suggestions.  It was noted that some people who join the service do not do so with the intention of staying in for the full 30 years, there is also some distrust as people feel they may invest a lot of money into the scheme and then the government change the rules.

ITEM

NOTES

ACTIONS

/ OWNER

Item 5 Cont.

The Scheme Advisory Board (SAB) currently have a consultation out re some potential changes to police pensions.   It was confirmed that Officers are not leaving the service in droves in comparison to industry standards, so turnover is still low.  The Pensions Team are going to review the gender, age and when in service people are opting out of the scheme.  It was agreed that Improvements could be made to the onboarding process for new recruits to explain the value of the pension in more detail.  It was noted that automatic reenrolment has just taken place so it would be interesting to see if anyone opted out again within the next few months.

It was confirmed that the percentage rate for opt outs, 4.2% for Surrey and 8% for Sussex, was based a snapshot in time, (March 2023).

The Federation confirmed that they talk to the new recruits on day one of their induction and as part of this session did hand out details of the scheme, it was agreed that it may be helpful to build on this by having another session later in the induction week with someone from the Pensions Team in attendance, to be able answer any more detailed questions. 

It was confirmed that work is still ongoing in relation to the possible increase in the SE allowance.

XPS are creating a video to help sell the story of the scheme which would also help to allow officers to make an informed choice.  

A 50/50 split option had been highlighted nationally and is being discussed.

A Strategic Options paper had come to the last Board meeting, the Board agreed they wished to discuss the survey results and the options paper in more detail outside of this meeting.

Action 2023-12:  Opt out Survey Feedback to be shared with the SAB Chair and Scheme Manager Steering Group

CG

Action 2023-13:  Arrange a Pension Board Away Day

RL

6

Review of The Pensions Regulator Governing Body ED&I Guidance published 28/03/2023

The Board agreed that more discussion on this subject was required, this guidance would be included on the agenda for the Pension Board Away Day and any Board policies and procedures that needed to be updated in relation to this guidance would be reviewed at the same time.  Any changes to the policies and procedures would then be brought back to the next Board meeting for formal adoption.

ITEM

NOTES

ACTIONS

/ OWNER

7

Penson Remedy:

It was confirmed that a letter had been sent, on behalf of both Scheme Mangers for Surrey and Sussex and the Joint Pension Board Chair, in relation to the police pension scheme retrospective remedy. 

DS has been working closely with the SAB and the National Police Chief Constable’s (NPCC) Scheme Manager Steering Group, this along with the NPCC pension chats which involve all 43 forces, is narrowing down the issues and themes to be respond to and is highlighting what is important.  There are 3 consultations going around at this moment in time from the NPCC, the SAB and one of the rep bodies, these will dictate the detail of what is needed to be done to rectify the pension remedy and to put the processes and steps in place to enable this to happen.  High level detail of the number of scheme members effected had been shared with the Board prior to the meeting, the member data has been worked on to make sure data is as accurate as possible.  There are 8683 individuals affected by the remedy, the rectification of the age discrimination for protected members, 3845 Surrey and 4848.   This work will start in earnest October and as much work as possible is being done now to make sure that as much as possible can be done in an automated way and get this right.

A virtual presentation had been given to officers regarding the Pension Remedy, this is the first stage in a long process and the Pensions Team will be arranging to do something similar for retired and deferred members to enable them to make informed decisions going forwards.

XPS are finishing their high-level plan, which will inform the Pensions Teams work plans/tasks and activities going forwards.  There are complex issues that need to be addressed, tax positions, interest etc.  XPS have been excellent in providing help and advice to the Pensions Team, data is key, particularly for when the Pension Dashboard when it is launched.

On the 26^th of April XPS had held a meeting, inviting the 32 Forces for whom they administer their pension schemes, this was to gauge where the Forces were and what support XPS can give them.  The Surrey/Sussex team are working hard, paying a lot of attention to the detail, and were engaged in all forums.

It was noted that £35m is the overall estimated cost of putting this right, the Board were not aware of any additional resources coming from government to cover these costs.   

The Chair thanked the Pension Team and XPS for their work on this.

8

Pension Board Terms of Reference, Policies and Procedures:

The Members had no comments on the papers.  It was confirmed that the Scheme Managers have sight of these documents and are asked to approve the TOR annually.  These documents will be reviewed at the Away Day, and any changes that are made will be brought back to the next meeting.

ITEM

NOTES

ACTION / OWNER

9

Review of Reported Breaches:

No breaches had been reported in the last quarter.

10

Work Plan:

CG spoke to the report and confirmed only a few minor updates had been made.   It was confirmed that Evans and Ashcroft is still being worked on by XPS some cases have been passed back to the Pension’s Team for further information to be provided.

GMP Equalization – still waiting for further information.

The Newsletter has been removed from the workplan as not yet had a conversation with XPS regarding providing the newsletter and what it would look like.  Any feedback from pensioners on how useful the newsletter was would be helpful.

The TPR scheme return remains on the workplan but as the date of the return changes every year, the date on the workplan may not be right.

11

Pension Board Training:

It was confirmed that all new Board Members are sent the link to the TPR online training, and all current members of the Board have completed this.

Action 2023-14:  The training log is to be updated with the NPCC and LGA training which took place last week.

RL

12

AOB:

It was confirmed that the part two minutes of the last meeting had been shared directly with the Board Members, as there is no part two of this meeting, should Members have any comments or amendments would they please contact RL directly.

11

Date of next meeting:

The next meeting was confirmed as the 6 of September 2023

ITEM

NOTES

ACTION / OWNER

1

Welcomes, Apologies & Conflicts of Interest:

The Chair welcomed everyone to the meeting, including Raff Cioffi who was attending his first meeting as the Sussex Police Federation Representative, introductions were made all round.  The meeting was declared quorate and balanced. 

Apologies had been received prior to the meeting from Adrian Rutherford, Tom Budd, Natalie Bevan, CC Jo Shiner, CC Gavin Stephens, Louise Monk and Anthony Croxford.

No conflicts were declared.

ITEM

NOTES

ACTION / OWNER

2

Minutes / Action from Previous Meeting:

The minutes of the 23^rd of November 2022 were approved by the Board as a true reflection of the meeting.

Joint Pension Board Actions:

Action 2021-17: Risk Register –Opt out rates – now on the risk register as a separate risk and nationally there is awareness – Closed

Action 2022-16: Scheme Membership Opt Out Rates for Surrey & Sussex - a report will be shared as soon as it is available or will on the agenda for the next meeting - OPEN

CG

Action 2022-18 – Data Breach - To follow up with Equinity to see if the Statement had been destroyed or returned - 21/02/2022 Still chasing a response - OPEN

CG

.

Action 2022-21: AOB – Retire & Re-join Scheme Policy – see item 9 of this agenda - Closed

Action 2022-24 A meeting is to be set up with discuss Abatement in more detail – Complete - Closed

Action 2022-25 The paper and the abatement guidance to come to the next Board meeting – see item 9 of this agenda - Closed

Action 2022-26 - Amend the Risk Register for 1.5 as discussed and add McLeod as a separate risk – completed - Closed

Action 2022-27 – Risk Register - XPS to review the Risk Register – see item 3 of this agenda - Closed

Action 2022-28: Pension Remedy- Confirm with the NPCC what the position is regarding the pension saving statement and scheme member obligations to produce a tax return - OPEN

CG/DS

Action 2022-29: Work Plan - Share GMP reconciliation error rate information re Surrey / Sussex member data with the Board once it becomes available - data not yet available - OPEN.

CG

Action 2022-30: Share links to The Pension Regulator online training and

XPS’s ARENA online training with the Joint Board Members – Completed - Closed

3

Risk and Issue Register:

The Board reviewed the Risk Register, PM said that from XPS’s perspective the register was comprehensive and well set out with control mechanisms and the mitigations in place they would expect to see, and these made a lot of sense.

It was felt that risk area 2.3 needed more clarity as if the GMP figure is not correct in the first place then the single tier pension may be set incorrectly.

Action 2023 01:  Risk & Issue Register – Risk Area 2.3 – Send a form of words to inform the amendment to the Risk Register.

GB/CG

ITEM

NOTES

ACTIONS

/ OWNER

4

Pension Administrator Summary:

The Chair thanked PM for the quarterly reports that had been received in time for the meeting. 

PM spoke to the reports and reassured the Board that no payments to members had been delayed, he explained the reasons why the 1 case for Surrey and the 4 cases for Sussex had fallen outside of the KPI targets.  There had been no complaints for Surrey in this period but one for Sussex which was in relation to a case that had been inherited from Equinity.  PM explained that the figures in the report did not include the 566 pieces of work that had come over from Equinity or the collection tasks that do not sit within the KPI’s

Of the work that had had been inherited, most of it was now complete although there were still some collections tasks to complete.  PM thanked the Pensions Team for all their assistance in achieving this result.

A question was asked regarding the volume of work received, was it as expected when XPS had taken on the contract.  PM felt it was difficult to say as demand goes up and down anyway, XPS have virtual teams who were flexible, and experience and the workflow could be adjusted to meet the need, so the team were able to react very quickly.

PM made the Board aware of a new complaint that would appear in the next quarters figures, this was currently being dealt with and a full update will be given at the next meeting.

The Board thanked PM for the reassuring reports and excellent KPI results, and service provided to date.

Action 2023-02:  Quarterly Report - Amend the cases by month section of the quarterly report to say Deferred Benefits notifications to make this clearer

PM

5

Pension Remedy:

The Board were given an informative presentation on the Pension Remedy, it included the remedy timetable and a link to the tax regulations which have now been laid.  The Public Service Pension Schemes (Rectification of Unlawful Discrimination) (Tax) Regulations 2023 (legislation.gov.uk)

A 2nd consultation is expected for tax laws on Deaths, Transfers, Divorce and Ill health retirement which was not included in the legislation.

The NPCC have sent a data sharing agreement to all Forces to enable data held to be shared in relation to Officers who have transferred in and out of Forces and the data held on them may not be complete.  Currently with the Data Protection Team for review and due to be signed off at the end of the week.

ITEM

NOTES

ACTIONS

/ OWNER

5 Cont.

The NPCC proposed priority order of processing was noted by the Board. 

Work is ongoing with XPS to identify missing and incorrect data and various options for communicating information to Officers currently being considered, the Pensions Team will be approaching the scheme member Rep bodies to make sure that the comms plan is as targeted and as accessible as possible. 

Project plans are being worked on by the Pensions Team for the work that needs to be completed.  Mini projects like Evans and Ashcroft, pension savings statements, GMP, McLeod etc. are still being worked on. 

DS advised the Board that as well as being part of the Pension Remedy working group, the Scheme Managers Steering Group representing the 43 Forces of England and Wales, she had also been nominated to be on the Scheme Advisory Board which has been resurrected.  The strategic direction of pensions and what they should look like in the future of pension is being considered, the pension reforms have highlighted that doing things 43 different ways provides less consistency.  Consultants have been appointed to complete this work, the team would pull this all together and feed back to the Board, this is a big piece of work/reform. 

The huge workload of the Pensions Team was acknowledged. 

Ill Health Retirement Update – a report and some figures had been shared with he Board.  The wording of the report was felt to be misleading regarding the reassessment of ill heath, it is not the outcome of the ill health that is being reassessed, but it is a reassessment of the tier that the individual should be in.  It was confirmed that the NPCC have written templates around the wording that should be used, and it was acknowledged that this is a very sensitive issue for those affected.

Action 2023 03:  Share the Comms Plan with the Board, as soon as it is available

DS/CG

6

Review of reported breaches:

There had been no reported breaches in this quarter.

7

Work Plan:

The roadmap had been updated to show the current position, still liaising with XPS to see if any scheme year events needed to be updated to fit in with XPS’ timetable.

ITEM

NOTES

ACTION / OWNER

8

Report on Scheme Membership opt out rates:

The Board were informed that this is a national concern; the NPCC had submitted a comprehensive report into the Police Pay Review Body which highlights the pension opt out rates.  There is also an NPCC Board which is considering the various options that had already been suggested to try and reduce opt out rates, including the possibility of a 50/50 scheme.

It was confirmed that if an Officer opts out of their pension, they lose a key part of their terms and conditions as the Chief Constable contributes 31% towards the pension against the Officers 13% contribution making it a good long-term savings, they also lose their ill health retirement benefit and life insurance benefit. The Officer is given information when they join and there is an auto re-enrolment that takes place every 3 years, information is also provided at this point to help inform the Officers decision.

It was agreed that communication is the key, the Federation Reps and XPS offered to help with this and will discuss this in more detail with the Pensions Team outside of this meeting.

The Pensions Team had carried out a mini project to examine the challenge from a strategic point of view, the Board noted the paper.

Action 2023-04 – A Strategic Options paper - an updated options paper to come to the next Board meeting.

CG

9

Retire and Rejoin Scheme & Abatement Guidance.

The Scheme and Abatement guidance had been published; this had led to a few of queries about the process, some small updates are to be made to the Abatement Guidance to make the process clearer.  It was confirmed the guidance had been based on the NPCC guidance and was an adaptation of the 30+ scheme.  Abatement applies to the 1987 and 2006 pension scheme and allows for a discretionary abatement of part of the pension when an individual returns to work so that their monthly pay, and pension do not equate to more than their monthly pay prior to retirement and each case is to be considered on a case-by-case basis.

10

Guidance re Expenses for the Joint Board for Adoption:

The Board were happy to adopt the guidance.

ITEM

NOTES

ACTION / OWNER

11

AOB:

XPS Portal –PM confirmed that letter had been sent out to active members with information and an individual key to allow them to access XPS’s portal which would enable them to see their own pension record etc.  Management information on the uptake across the membership types would be Included in the next quarterly report allowing for benchmarking and comparisons to other forces.

The Chair informed the Board that this was the last meeting whereby CC Gavin Stephens would be the Scheme Manager for Surrey Police.  The Board wished to express their thanks to CC Stephens for his support for the Surrey Police Pension Board over many years and more recently the Joint Surrey/Sussex Board.

The Board were looking forward to welcoming the new Scheme Manager CC Tim De Meyer to future meetings.

11

Date of next meeting:

The next meeting was confirmed as the 24^th of May 2023

12

Exclusion Notice:

The Chair read out the Exclusion Notice in full and thanked everyone for joining the meeting.

The public part of the meeting closed at 15:52

ITEM

NOTES

ACTIONS

/ OWNER

1

Welcomes, Apologies & Conflicts of Interest:

As the Chair was having difficulties connecting with the meeting, IM welcomed everyone including the two Scheme Managers, CC Gavin Stephens and CC Jo Shiner and led the introductions. The meeting was declared quorate but would not be balanced until the Chair was able to join. The 3 representatives from XPS were thanked for all attending the first meeting following the transition.

ITEM

NOTES

ACTION

S / OWNER

1 Cont.

Apologies had been received prior to the meeting from Danielle Mead, Tom Budd and Daisanne Summersfield.

No conflicts were declared.

2

Minutes / Action from Previous Meeting:

The minutes of the 25th of August 2022 Joint Pension Board were approved by the Board as a true reflection of the meeting.

KM joined the meeting at 1:15pm and continued to chair the meeting from this point on.

Joint Pension Board Actions:

Action 2021-17: Risk Register – Annual Report – IM confirmed he had raised Opt out rates as an issue in the annual report but there hadn’t been a response to this yet. This remains a concern for the Board, with the cost of living rises, officers may choose to opt out of their pension as a short-term gain with long term implications – IM to follow up with SAB Chair - OPEN

IM

Action 2022-07: GMP Reconciliation – the transfer is now complete - the Board were reassured that XPS will be picking up the outstanding work on this - Closed

DS/PM

Action 2022-10 & 2022–11 – Equinity Quarterly reports - To standardise the Y axis on the graphs within the report so that they are consistent and populate the movement statistics with the raw data and reissue the reports to the Board by the end of the week – reports received - Closed

Action 2022-14: GMP Reconciliation – Transfer now complete – waiting for data to come across from Equinity to XPS so that it can be double checked to make sure there is nothing left to do - Closed

Action 2022-16: Scheme Membership Opt Out Rates - a report will be on the agenda for the next meeting - OPEN

CG

Action 2022-18 – Data Breach - To follow up with Equinity to see if the Statement had been destroyed or returned - still waiting for a response from AH. Chase AH for a response - OPEN

CG

Action 2022-19: Members to email DS with any suggestions for further training. –

See Action 2022-30 - Closed

Action 2022-20: Invite Simon Lambert to future meetings of the Board, send him training information and inform the Scheme Manager of the change of membership. – Completed - SL at this meeting - Closed

ITEM

NOTES

ACTIONS

/ OWNER

2 Cont.

Action 2022-21: AOB – Retire & Re-join Scheme Policy – a copy of the new scheme had been circulated a couple of days prior to the meeting and will be published on the intranet by the end of the month, the pensions team were still waiting on one small piece of information to be able to finish off the abatement guidance that sits alongside this document and both documents would be brought to the next meeting for the Boards information. It was confirmed that this is an extension of the old 30 + and 30 ++ scheme and would only apply to those who would be eligible to retire anyway, and each case would be considered on a case-by-case basis. It was agreed that a report should come back to the Board after approx. 3-6 months with data as to how many people have taken this scheme up although the numbers were expected to be small - OPEN

CG

Action 2022-24 A meeting is to be set up with CH to discuss in more detail

CG

Action 2022-25 The paper and the abatement guidance to come to the next Board meeting

CG/RL

Action 2022-22: Project Plan – transfer now complete - Closed

3

Risk and Issue Register:

The Board reviewed the Risk Register and were asked to consider if risk area

1.5 could now be closed as the transfer to the new scheme administrator had taken place. The Board felt that this risk should be amended rather than closed to reflect any residual risk re data quality etc. It was also noted that there may be smaller issues identified during the transfer process which need to be teased out and captured to make sure they are being managed correctly. The Board agreed that McLeod should be added as a separate risk in relation to communicating information to members re the pension remedy and immediate detriment, promote the benefits of the scheme and possibly reduce the opt out rate. This would enable the controls in place to be identified and managed.

Action 2022-26 - Amend the Risk Register for 1.5 as discussed and add McLeod as a separate risk.

CG

Action 2022-27 – Risk Register - XPS to review the Risk Register and advise CG what plans they have in place to mitigate the risks in relation to their scheme administration so that the Risk Register can be updated to reflect this.

PM / CG

ITEM

NOTES

ACTIONS

/ OWNER

4

Pension Administrator Summary:

The Chair again thanked the XPS team for attending the meeting. NB, Business Development and Client Manager for Blue Light clients at XPS, introduced herself to the Board and stated that although they were only into day 23 of the contract there had been contact from quite a few scheme members prior to, and since the transfer. This was the largest volume of work in progress that XPS had ever taken on from another administrator, but that they would work through it. The focus this month was to get the pensions paid with the Surrey payroll set to run on the 24^th of November and the Sussex payroll on the 1^st of December. They had received good feedback from scheme members who had already engaged with the XPS team, and a full report on the quarter performance would come to the next Board meeting.

AW, XPS Administrator, shared a short report on the work in progress and spoke to the report, 462 cases had formed part of the backlog of work handed over from Equinity. In addition to this, between the 18^th of November and the go live date of the 1^st of November a further 104 cases were sent across, a starting position of 566 cases to work through. Including the cases that had come in since the 1^st of November, 37 cases had been completed, 79 cased were in progress with the remaining 476 still to be started. The priority this month had been to make sure the pension payments went through on time and were correct, the Board were assured that the outstanding cases had been checked to make sure that there was nothing payroll critical within them.

Quite a considerable amount of the data passed over from Equinity would need checking, the team would methodically work through each case as it was important to get it right, with an estimate of a minimum of 12 weeks to clear the backlog.

NB confirmed that XPS have already received requests for support from members who have already breached their annual allowance and she would encourage all scheme members, if they have any questions about the pension savings statement to contact the XPS technical team to discuss any actions they would need to take.

PM, Governance and Communications Manager, advised the board that he thought things were in a good place but part of the work they need to do was to establish what they didn’t yet know which become clearer in the formal project closure report, this would be published in December and would identify some of the highlights of the project, the transition, the project environment, and the work that XPS would undertake to reduce the risks. XPS bring a lot of experience to the table.

ITEM

NOTES

ACTIONS

/ OWNER

4 Cont.

PM confirmed that he attended all manner of pension boards across the public sector, including other joint boards. XPS have their own Joint Board that comprises of 14 police forces which can benchmark, compare and contrast experiences between one force and another looking at particular big-ticket issues such as opt outs. Currently the opt out range is between 5%-11% so looking to see whether any force is doing something ground-breaking in terms of communication to bring members into the scheme other than by statutory re enrolment.

Training - There are other Pension Regulator toolkits available which are not specifically geared to police pensions, but the Members may find it useful. XPS have their own training portal called ARENA, which they would be happy to share the links to this.

PM confirmed he would be happy to review the Risk Register and would be open and transparent with the Board, flagging national issues etc. He confirmed a report would come to the Board on a quarterly basis showing a breakdown of the KPIs, complaint trends etc.

The Chair thanked XPS for their input to the meeting and requested that XPS let the Board know immediately if they felt something was going wrong and not wait until the next Board meeting.

PM confirmed that they would be happy to review the Risk Register and would be open and transparent with the Board, flagging national issues etc. He confirmed a report would come to the Board on a quarterly basis showing a breakdown of the KPIs, complaint trends etc.

The Chair thanked XPS for their input to the meeting, thanked PM for offering to share the links to additional training and requested that XPS let the Board know immediately if they felt something was going wrong and not wait until the next Board meeting.

5

Pension Remedy:

The Board were informed that the Surrey/Sussex Pensions Team continue to take part in NPCC national discussions, they were still awaiting treasury directions and the Home Office are finalising the secondary legislation which is due to be enacted for October 2023.

There would be a significant impact within the force to manage such a complex project in terms of aspects of the administration, governance and engagement, Comms etc., the team were working on a plan to ensure that they were in the best possible position to support all the activities associated with the remedy and that scheme member data needs to be in the best possible position. The pensions team will work with XPS to ensure that this is the case.

ITEM

NOTES

ACTIONS

/ OWNER

5 Cont.

The remedy calculator now covers the 2006 scheme, the start date of the HO pensions dashboard has been put back to allow for the pension remedy period and the new release date has yet to be confirmed.

Annual benefit statement would be issued as normal in October 2023 but it had been confirmed that pensions saving statements would not be produced until the following October, this was to allow the statement to cover any remedy adjustments within this period although remedial service statements were expected to come out in the 6-12 months following October 2023.

Scheme members obligations to produce a tax return was discussed by the Board and it was felt that there would be many forces asking the NPCC the same questions.

Action 2022-28: Confirm with the NPCC what the position is regarding the pension saving statement and scheme member obligations to produce a tax return.

CG/DS

6

Report on Scheme Membership opt out rates:

The Board were informed that there was a flaw with the original data, so no report was yet available, opt out rates were a national concern; DS had attended an NPCC Board which was looking at the various options suggested to try and reduce opt out rates. Also, the pensions team are carrying out a project to examine the challenge from a strategic point of view and will bring a report on this issue to the next Board meeting.

7

Review of reported breaches:

There had been one outstanding with Equinity (see actions 2022-18) no new breaches had been reported in this period.

8

Work Plan:

There were some updates on page 3 of the workplan that were brought to the Boards attention, this document will be discussed with XPS as their scheme year may differ slightly so the requirements within the report may change accordingly. It was agreed that the road map needed to be updated for the next Board meeting so that it starts from that point in time for each meeting.

It was confirmed that there was currently no member web portal available, this was to allow for member data to be checked and be as complete and accurate as possible.

The Board asked for information to be provided regarding the error rate on data held re Surrey’s scheme members as this would give a good indication as to what the error rate would be in the Sussex’s member data.

Action 2022-29: Share error rate information re Surrey member data with the Board once it becomes available.

CG

ITEM

NOTES

ACTIONS

/ OWNER

8 Cont.

It was confirmed that the Discretions policy was still on hold, waiting for NPCC to issue guidance on the matter.

9

Pension Board Training Log:

The log was reviewed by the Board and the Chair thanked PM for his offer to share the link to online training that the Board Members may wish to complete (see action 2022-30)

PM

Action 2022-30: Share links to The Pension Regulator online training and

XPS’s ARENA online training with the Joint Board Members

10

AOB:

The Board recognised the fantastic achievement of the Pensions Team in getting the transfer over the line on time, with some of the team working additional hours to get it done. The Board thanked the team for their efforts and XPS for the warm welcome they had extended.

11

Date of next meeting:

It was confirmed that the next meeting would be on the 21/02/2023 at 2pm and would remain as a Teams meeting for the time being.

12

Exclusion Notice:

The Chair read out the Exclusion Notice in full and thanked everyone for joining the meeting.

The public part of the meeting closed at 15.20pm

Surrey Police/Sussex Police – Joint Pension Board (Officer)

Date:  25 August 2022 at 10.30am

Location:  Microsoft Teams

Chair:  Kelvin Menon

Protective Marking: Official

Surrey & Sussex Board Members

Kelvin Menon (KM), CFO Surrey OPCC

Iain McCulloch (IM), CFO Sussex OPCC

Danielle Mead (DMD), Surrey Federation

Daren Egan (DE), Sussex Federation,

Tom Budd (TB), Superintendent’s Association – Surrey Police

Miles Ockwell (MO), Superintendent’s Association, Sussex Police

Tony Suter (TS), Scheme Member Representative – Surrey NARPO

Graham Bradley (GB), Scheme Member Representative – Sussex NARPO

Vacant - Executive Director of Commercial and Financial Services for Surrey & Sussex Police

Daisanne Summersfield (DS), Head of Shared Business Services for Surrey & Sussex Police

Adrian Rutherford (AR), Head of Employee Services for Surrey & Sussex Police

Carwyn Hughes, Head of Digital, Data & Technology for Surrey & Sussex Police

Advisors: Cassidy Gillett (CG), Michelle Quirk (MQ) Isobel Tait (IT) & Shelia Love, Surrey & Sussex Pensions Team

Guests:

CC Gavin Stephens (GS), Scheme Manager for Surrey Police

CC Jo Shiner (JS), Scheme Manager for Sussex Police

Adam Holt (AH) Equinity

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

1

Welcomes, Apologies & Conflicts of Interest:

The Chair welcomed everyone to the meeting, the meeting was declared quorate but not balanced.  CH was expected but had been held up dealing with an operational matter and would be joining the meeting shortly. It was agreed that the meeting could continue and if any decisions by the Board were required, the absent members would be contacted by email outside of the meeting.

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

Apologies had been received prior to the meeting from Gavin Stephens, Jo Shiner and Danielle Mead.

No conflicts of interest were declared.

2

Minutes / Action from Previous Meeting:

The minutes of the 25^th of May 2022 Joint Pension Board were checked and found to be a true reflection of the meeting and were approved by the Board. 

Joint Pension Board Actions:

Action JB 2021-04 – Pension Board Budget – See item 8 of this agenda – Closed

Action JB 2021-17:  Risk Register – Write to SAB Chair re national opt out rates – see item 7 of this Agenda - Open

IM/CG

Action JB 2021-18:  Discretions Policy – see item 9 of this agenda - Closed

Action 2021-21: Work Plan – Evans & Ashcroft – now business as usual - Closed

Action 2022-06: Sussex’s Outstanding Actions to be added to Joint Pension Board Action log for next meeting – Completed – Closed

Action 2022-07 & 14 – GMP Reconciliation – Surrey’s is complete.  For Sussex, it was disappointing that not a lot of work has been done on this over the last couple of years, Equinity had given the impression the work was progressing but this now appears not to be the case, this had been escalated to the Managing Director and a priority list had been drawn up of where Equinity were to focus their effort prior to the transfer, the Board were assured that anything not completed in time will be picked up by XPS after the transfer. c

The Board were reminded that the Guaranteed Minimum Pension (GMP) is the minimum pension that an occupational scheme has to provide for employees who were contracted out of State Earnings-Related Pension Scheme (SERPS) between 6 April 1978 and 5 April 1997. Although the GMP no longer accrued from 6 April 1997, schemes were still liable to pay for members who had accrued during 1978 to 1997. This was abolished as from April 2016 as part of the introduction of a single-tier State Pension, which dictated the state pension amounts which were based on the GMP figure.  Once the reconciliation is complete there may some scheme members who have received too much state pension and some who have received too little.  

DS/AH

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

2 Cont.

AH confirmed that there were approx. 770 deferred members, and these cases would be quite straightforward, 1000 members, who are below GMP payment age, who may be affected and 2100 active members for whom there would be no impact, it was just of case of making sure the GMP uncontracted out earnings data is accurate on their record for when they do retire –

Action 2022-14:  DS– To set up another call with Nolan in the Equinity GNP team to discuss the proposed way forwards and the Board will be updated at the next meeting or before if necessary - OPEN

DS

Action 2022-09: The Risk Register had been updated see item 3 of this Agenda - closed

Action 2022-10 & 2022–11 – To standardise the Y axis on the graphs within the report so that they are consistent and populate the movement statistics with the raw data and reissue the reports to the Board by the end of the week – AH confirmed that this had been done, apologised that he had yet to send the reports, and will send them to the Board following the meeting – OPEN

Carwyn Hughes joined the meeting at this point.

AH

Action 2022-12:  To check the Pension Regulators online training – see item 13 of this Agenda - Closed

Action 2022-13:  See item 9 of this agenda - Closed

Action 2022-15 – Pop up Survey on the portal – AH confirmed no survey had been completed and not a lot of feedback on the portal had been received – it was agreed that due to the transfer to a new supplier this action would now be closed – Closed

3

Risk and Issue Register

The Risk Register was confirmed as having been updated with the items that had been identified at the last meeting; a star had been added to show the new items to make it easier to identify them on the Risk Register.  The scoring and control measures were discussed.  The pension provider transfer was felt to be a high risk, the Board were assured that with the control measures currently in place the transfer was still on track to take place on the agreed date, if there were any more delays, the risk would increase.  It was confirmed that the Pensions team met to discuss the issues on a weekly basis and this discussion informed the scoring on the Risk Register, the Board were content to accept the team’s assessment on this occasion but reminded the Pensions team that the Board are ultimately responsible for the scoring.

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

4

Pension Administrator Summary

Quarterly report – no report had been received in time for the meeting, the Board expressed their disappointment as this was the 3rd meetings in a row whereby no report had not been received in time for the meeting.  AH confirmed that he had chased the team for this and should have the report to share in the next few days.  The Board asked what the SLA performance rates were likely to be.  AH confirmed it was around the 60% level with Equinity prioritizing certain case types to make sure they minimized the impact on the membership.   

Both Scheme Managers had sent a letter to the Head of Equinity in July highlighting the concerns over the level of the service being received, contractually and regarding the transfer requirements.  Nigel Pierce Managing Director had been assigned to help sort out the issues and had managed to get some of the milestones across the line.

AH confirmed that Equinity had been focusing their resources where they were needed, and that Nigel had been holding their feet to the fire.

The Board will be kept informed, and an additional meeting will be called if required.

5

Pension Remedy

The Board were informed that regular national meetings continued with the Pension Remedy and PCC working group, the figures were being collated and a paper is being put together to go to the Chief Finance Officer Board at their next meeting.  The Pensions Team are working closely with XPS on a plan of how the records can be cleansed prior to October 2023 so that they are as clean as possible for everybody who will be impacted by the remedy.  Legislation is still going through; updates are regularly being received from the NPCC and Rep Bodies will be receiving updates and guidance where applicable and appropriate.  October 2023 will just be the beginning of the actual exercise of rectifying each scheme member record, this will take time, so expectations need to be managed.  The digitization of records procurement process was going ahead to allow for historical records to be checked if necessary. 

A question was asked about the resourcing of the Pensions Team, did they need additional staffing?  DS confirmed that this was under constant review. 

6

There was no item 6 on this Agenda

7

Report on Scheme Membership

Action 2021-16 - The Pensions Team had produced a report giving the opt out rates for the last 5 years for Surrey & Sussex, they would be carrying out a bit more analysis and then the report would be shared with the Board in the next couple of days - OPEN

CG

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

8

Pension Board Terms of Reference, Policies & Procedures

The Board reviewed the documents, the TOR had been changed to reflect the change in the sequence for Chairing the Board.  It was agreed that the last paragraph on the knowledge & Understanding Policy could be removed.  The new Fees and Expenses Policy was discussed and the procedure for making a claim confirmed, the Board were happy with the paper apart from one small change regarding the location of the meetings.  It was agreed that as Members would now have to travel long distance to attend meetings in person they should continue as virtual meetings for the time being but that this would be kept under review. The budget for the Board was confirmed to be £1K and a report would come to the Board Annually following each year end with the expenditure against the budget.

9

Discretions Policy

The Board were informed that this is now on hold, there is an appetite nationally for a policy but waiting for NPCC to issue guidance on the matter.  A question was asked about the implementation of any discretions and who would make these decisions.  It was confirmed that if a policy and procedure was written it would come back to the Board for approval.  It was agreed that this would be revisited at a future meeting.

10

Work Plan

There had been some updates to the work plan and road map to reflect the current position, the upcoming pension administration transfer and auto re- enrolment which will be taking place in May.  Still waiting for a confirmed timeline from the NPCC for the national dashboard.

11

Annual Report

IM was thanked for writing the annual report which reflected the work the Board had completed last year.  Some small changes to the report were discussed, these amendments would be made, and the report reissued.

Action 2022-17 Amend the report as per discussion and reissue to the Board.  Send a copy of the report to the Chair of the Chair of the Scheme Advisory Board.

IM

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

12

Review of Reported Breaches for Surrey and Sussex

CG advised the Board that she was aware of two breaches that she would expect to see on the Equinity report for the last quarter.

AH confirmed that one had been where an officer had given an incorrect address themselves, the occupant had opened the correspondence and contacted Equinity to let them know the officer did not live at this address and had returned the correspondence.  The officer then gave their correct address and had now received their correspondence.

The second case had been when the Equinity contact centre member of staff had accidently recorded the wrong address when it had been given over the telephone.  The statement had been issued to this address and the error subsequently discovered, Equinity had written to the incorrect address to ask that they destroy or return the statement and the statement had been reissued to the correct address.

Action 2022-18 - To follow up on the data breach to see if the Statement had been destroyed or returned and update CG as to the outcome

AH/CG

13

Pension Board Training

The Board noted the report and Members were asked to complete any outstanding training requirements.  A discussion was held as to what further training the Board Members could undertake.

Action 2022-19:  Members to email DS with any suggestions for further training.

ALL

 14

Any Other Business

TS regretfully advised the Board that this would be his last meeting as NARPO rep and proposed Simon Lambert as his replacement. The proposal was accepted by the Chair.  TS was thanked for his time on this Pension Board and previous Surrey Police Authority and Surrey Police Pension Boards spanning many years and for his work with the Pensions Team, the Members all expressed their thanks and noted that he, and his cakes, would be sorely missed. 

Action 2022-20:  Invite Simon Lambert to future meetings of the Board, send him training information and inform the Scheme Manager of the change of membership.

RL

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

14 Cont.

Retire & Re-join Scheme Policy

The Board were asked to review the Surrey Sussex Retire and Re-join Scheme Policy which had been circulated to the Board shortly before the meeting.  Following changes to the compulsory retirement age the Retention policy had been refreshed and renamed to reflect the changes.  An Abatement Policy was also in the pipeline and will come to the Board later.

Action 2022-21:  A separate email to be sent to the Board Members following the meeting to highlight the changes to this policy and invite feedback. 

SL

A question was asked about the Annual Pension Statements and how Members would access these if they had not registered on the portal.  It was confirmed that a comms plan was being worked on and a message would go out internally to announce the change in scheme administration provider and advise active members of the key things they need to do to download their statements, the scheme member representative bodies would be asked to push this out to their members. AH confirmed that members can still request paper copies of their statements by ringing the Equinity Contact Centre.

15

Date of next meeting

The date of the next meeting was confirmed as 23/11/2023 at 2pm.

16

Exclusion Notice

The Chair read out the Exclusion Notice in full and thanked everyone for joining the meeting. 

The public part of the meeting closed at 12.10pm

Title: Surrey/Sussex Police – Joint Pension Board (Officer)

Date:  25 May 2022 at 2pm

Location:  Microsoft Teams

Chair:  Kelvin Menon

Protective Marking:  Official

Surrey & Sussex Board Members:

Kelvin Menon (KM), CFO Surrey OPCC

Iain McCulloch (IM), CFO Sussex OPCC

Danielle Mead (DMD), Surrey Federation

Donna Lonsdale (DL), Sussex Federation,

Tom Budd (TB), Superintendent’s Association – Surrey Police

Miles Ockwell (MO), Superintendent’s Association, Sussex Police

Tony Suter (TS), Scheme Member Representative – Surrey NARPO

Graham Bradley (GB), Scheme Member Representative – Sussex NARPO

Peter Gillett (PG), Executive Director of Commercial and Financial Services for Surrey & Sussex Police

Daisanne Summersfield (DS), Head of Shared Business Services for Surrey & Sussex Police

Adrian Rutherford (AR), Head of Employee Services for Surrey & Sussex Police

Carwyn Hughes, Head of Digital, Data & Technology for Surrey & Sussex Police

Advisors:  Cassidy Gillett (CG), Michelle Quirk (MQ) Isobel Tait (IT) & Shelia Love, Surrey & Sussex Pensions Team

Guests:

CC Gavin Stephens (GS), Scheme Manager for Surrey Police

CC Jo Shiner (JS), Scheme Manager for Sussex Police

Adam Holt (AH)Equinity

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

1

Welcomes, Apologies & Conflicts of Interest:

The Chair welcomed everyone to the meeting, thanked them for joining and the meeting was declared quorate.  Carwyn Hugues was welcomed to his first Pension Board meeting.

Apologies had been received prior to the meeting from Gavin Stephens, Jo Shiner, Adrian Rutherford and Danielle Mead. 

No conflicts of interest were declared.

2

Minutes / Action from Previous Meeting:

The minutes of the 2^nd of February’s Joint Pension Board were checked and found to be a true reflection of the meeting and were approved by the Board. 

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

2 Cont.

Joint Pension Board Actions:

Action JB 2021-04 – Pension Board Budget – See item 8 of this agenda – OPEN

SL/DS/RL

Action JB 2021-06: Pension Administrator – Repeat contact stats now included in report - closed

Action JB 2021-17:  Risk Register – See Item 7 of this agenda - OPEN

IM/DS

Action JB 2021-18:  Discretions Policy – still a work in progress - OPEN

CG

Action JB 2021-19:  Pension Remedy - Letters have gone out to affected individuals - Closed

Action 2021-21: Work Plan – Evans & Ashcroft - Have worked with XPS on this, cost equivalent with Equinity - on the plan but won’t happen until transfer to new Administrator is complete - OPEN

DS

Action 2022-01 – Template letters – copies of the letters to be shared with the Board for their information and comment before being sent out to Scheme members – as the letters have now been sent this action is closed.

Action 2022-03:  Equinity Quarter 4 Report to be distributed to the Board as soon as it is available- distributed – Closed

Sussex Actions:

Action 2022-06: Sussex’s Outstanding Actions to be added to Joint Pension Board Action log for next meeting – OPEN

RL

Action PPB/007/2020-7 – GMP Reconciliation – See item 6 of this Agenda - to be added to the JB Action log - OPEN

AH

Action PPB/008/2020-2: – Pop up Survey on the portal – work ongoing - to be added to the JB Action log OPEN

AH

3

Risk and Issue Register:

The Risk Register was confirmed as the version that had come to the Board in February as no updated version had been received. It was agreed that an updated version was required for each quarterly meeting.

Action 2022-09: The Risk Register is to be updated for each quarterly meeting, the Risks highlighted in the NPCC letter, opt out rates and the cost of living rise are all to be added to the Risk Register.  The Risk Register is to be circulated to Board Members prior to the next meeting so that they have the chance to come back with any comments prior to the meeting.

CG

Risk 1.5 was agreed to be a short-term risk, the pension administration transfer is on track for November, a project plan is in place and regular meetings were being held with both XPS and Equinity to manage the risk. 

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

3 Cont.

A question was asked regarding the scanning in of paper documents and it was confirmed that all files were now in the one place and a procurement process was in hand to make sure that the documents complied with data protection timelines, this has proved more complex than originally anticipated. The team may require input form the Pension Board as part of a scoring process for the procurement exercise.

4

Pension Administrator Summary:

Adam Holt introduced himself to the Board, he confirmed that he is the new Relationship Manager replacing MC and he and BR were still looking after all of the Police contracts.  AH apologised that he did not have the Q4 reports to hand, although the Board had them, so could not comment on them but the even though improved the Quarter 1 report KPI’s were still below where he would like them to be. There has been a restructure within which meant they hadn’t been able to deliver the service as well as they would have liked.  A new work tracking system was in place and they were actively recruiting more staff, but this would take time.  Calls to the helpdesk were up but this was reflected across the board and not just for police pensions. Looking to build on the data collected regarding the calls.   

Members of the Board raised concerns of the KPI scores and the delays in handling queries for Officers approaching retirement.  AH confirmed that the Surrey Police Pension’s Team were now sending a list to Equinity of forthcoming retirements for the next three months, this was happening on a monthly basis, and this enabled them to cross reference. The team were looking at their ways of working to enable them to put the focus on the cases that needed the most time and attention. 

The inconsistency in the axis across the graphs in the quarterly reports was pointed out. Equinity agreed to standardise this

Action 2022-10 – To standardise the Y axis on the graphs within the report so that they are consistent.

AH

The automated response email generated by Equinity was discussed, the wording in the response stated that ‘personal information was sent at their scheme members own risk’ and this had caused concern amongst scheme members as they thought perhaps the Equinity servers had been hacked.  AH confirmed that Equinity’s servers had not been hacked, but that there are inherent risks in sending personal information via the internet and people needed to be reminded of that. He had raised the wording of the auto response as an issue with the Information Security Team to see if it could be softened.

AH confirmed he was happy to share any relevant information with the Scheme Member Reps on the Board, this would enable them to update their scheme members.

The increase in deaths in the 1^st quarter was noted, AH confirmed there usually was an increase in the number of deaths at this particular time of year. Although there had been an increase in numbers they were being dealt with in a timely manner and this was testament to the improvements Equinity had made.

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

4 Cont.

The Board acknowledged the assurance they had been given and AH confirmed that Equinity would continue to support members and deliver their service as best they could up until the end of the contract. They have an internal Project Board working on the transition which keeps the admin team free to do the day-to-day work.  It was noted that complaints were mainly to do with delays, but this should improve going forward.

The membership movement report was blank – there had been an issue with the running of the raw data, it had only arrived this morning, AH would populate the reports and send them on the Board.

Action 2022-11 – Quarter 1 Reports – To populate the movement statistics with the raw data and reissue the reports to the Board by the end of the week.

AH

A question was asked about the Equinity call centre’s performance. The call centre had been moved to Liverpool a few months ago and the Surrey Police Pension Team had received several complaints regarding the lack of response.    AH stated that he was surprised and concerned by the issues raised as he was not aware of any complaints from other clients regarding this.  All the call centre staff received training and should know most of the answers. If not, they had a set of scripts that they could refer to.  It should only be the more obscure or complex cases that they wouldn’t be able to answer immediately and hence have to be referred.  AH confirmed that he would look at this in more detail and feedback directly to the Pension Team - if they could give him a list of specific cases this would help.  The Pension Team agreed to provide a list, this will be discussed further outside of the Pension Board at the weekly catch up meetings.

The Chair thanked AH for his update.

5

Pension Remedy:

The Board were informed that discussions were continuing at a national level on this area. The feedback on the online calculator for the 87 scheme was good, there is a lot of work going on behind the scenes in terms of financial regulations, legislation and secondary regulations and so waiting to see what the outcome of this is and some of the challenges that these may present. 

In respect of Immediate Detriment, the advice from the Home Office and legal guidance had been not to pursue this any further. This had been communicated out to scheme members though various channels.  It was confirmed that prior to the receipt of the legal advice Surrey/Sussex had already started to process 7 applications between the two forces and it had been agreed by the Scheme Managers that they should continue, despite the legal advice, as they felt they should honour the applications that were in train.  There is currently no mechanism or appetite for the Scheme Managers to open this process up again.  There may be risks in respect of the 7 individuals who have already been through the process. They had been made aware that this was at their own risk when they signed the consent form and understood that they may get a tax bill in the future or there may be other risks/implications as yet unknown.  Immediate detriment is thought to affect approx. 100 scheme members across the two forces.

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

5 Cont.

A lot of Data cleansing work is being done to make sure the data held is in the as accurate as possible to allow the Pensions Team to process the Pension Remedy when ready.  The team have so far dealt with 400 plus queries in relation to this and engagement sessions had been held with the Rep bodies and these will be widened to include other stakeholders.

6

GMP Reconciliation:

The Board were informed that the Bill had had its 3^rd reading in the House of Lords and this had included a number of amendments intended to allow the regulations to clarify and streamline the GMP conversion process.  The Bill is now at its final stage.

AH confirmed that Surrey was slightly ahead of Sussex in this, he was working with the Equinity GMP team to find out exactly what is left to do and what can still be achieved before the transfer to XPS and would feed back to the Pensions Team once the full detail was known.  DS advised the Board that she had been asking for updates for several months and was concerned that if the process was not completed before the handover it would lead to additional costs.  AH was asked to make this a priority.

Concerns were raised about the amount of notice people are given regarding adjustments made to their pensions, AH confirmed that they receive at least 3 months advance notice to any changes in their pension payments.

7

Report on Scheme Membership:

The Board had received the membership stats for Sussex and were informed that Surrey’s figures were unavailable at this time due to a system issue.  The Board agreed it would be useful to have some comparison with national opt out figures and for the report to cover the last 5 years as they felt the impact of covid on the figures would be interesting to see. Affordability and Gender inequality was discussed as the stats show more people aged 26-35 have opted out and more female officers than male officers. The Board were informed that this is not just reflected in police pensions but across the private and public sector as well.  The Pensions team are looking to do some further research on this and potentially some gender focused campaigning to raise awareness of the impact of opting out of a pension scheme. 

It was agreed that this would remain on the agenda for the next meeting.

8

Pension Board Budget, Fees & Expenses Policy & Procedure:

The Board were informed that the policy and procedure had been drafted but was not quite ready in time for this meeting as some decisions still needed to be made re the amount of budget, who would administer it etc, this will remain on the agenda for the next meeting.

9

Review of Reported Breaches for Surrey and Sussex:

The Board was informed that there were no Breaches in this quarter for Surrey or Sussex.

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

10

Work Plan:

The Board were informed that there were no changes to the road map from the last quarter, it is hoped Evans and Ashcroft could be cleared off of the plan by the end of the year. 

Equinity is working on producing an updated common data scoring report which will be used to look at some improvements and data cleansing opportunities. 

Still waiting for a confirmed timeline for when the Pensions dashboard will be implemented for the public sector but there had been a bit of pushback nationally due to potential of this clashing with the pension remedy. 

The Members were asked to feedback anything else they felt should be added to the work plan to CG outside of the meeting.

11

Pension Board Training:

The Board noted the report and Members were asked to complete any outstanding training requirements. 

The CIPFA Training for Pension Board Members had been attended by two of the officers who attend this board, there was no issues raised at the training that the Board needed to be aware of.

It was not known if the training on the Pension Regulators website for Board Members had changed in any way.

Action 2022-12:  To check the Pension Regulators online training for Pension Board Members to see if there have been any changes or additions and feed back to the Board

CG

 12

Any Other Business:

None.

13

Date of next meeting:

The date of the next meeting was confirmed as 24/08/2022 at 14:00.

14

Exclusion Notice:

The Chair read out the Exclusion Notice in full and thanked CA and MC for joining the meeting. 

The public part of the meeting closed at 13:15.

Title: Surrey/Sussex Police – Joint Pension Board (Officer)

Date: 2 February 2022 at 1pm

Location: Microsoft Teams

Chair: Iain McCulloch

Protective Marking:  Official

Surrey & Sussex Board Members:

Kelvin Menon (KM), CFO Surrey OPCC

Iain McCulloch (IM), CFO Sussex OPCC

Danielle Mead (DMD), Surrey Federation

Daren Egan (DE), Sussex Federation,

Tom Budd (TB), Superintendent’s Association – Surrey Police

Miles Ockwell (MO), Superintendent’s Association, Sussex Police

Tony Suter (TS), Scheme Member Representative – Surrey NARPO

Graham Bradley (GB), Scheme Member Representative – Sussex NARPO

Peter Gillett (PG), Executive Director of Commercial and Financial Services for Surrey & Sussex Police

Daisanne Summersfield (DS), Head of Shared Business Services for Surrey & Sussex Police

Adrian Rutherford (AR), Head of Employee Services for Surrey & Sussex Police

Carwyn Hughes, Head of Digital, Data & Technology for Surrey & Sussex Police

Advisors: Cassidy Gillett (CG), Johanna Langley (JL) Isobel Tait (IT) & Louise Monk (LM) – Surrey/Sussex Police

Guests:

CC Gavin Stephens (GS), Scheme Manager for Surrey Police

CC Jo Shiner (JS), Scheme Manager for Sussex Police

Mark Chapman (MC), Equinity

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

1

Welcomes, Apologies & Conflicts of Interest:

The Chair welcomed everyone to the meeting, thanked them for joining and the meeting was declared quorate.  The Chair also welcomed Clair Alcock from the NPCC to the meeting and informed the Board that Clair had kindly agreed to give a presentation to the Board under Item 6 which would be moved up the Agenda so that Clair could leave once she had completed her presentation if she wished.

Apologies had been received prior to the meeting from Gavin Stephens, Jo Shiner and Carwyn Hughes who is replacing Dave Miller on the Board following Dave’s retirement but Carwyn had been unable to attend this meeting. 

No conflicts of interest were declared.

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

2

Minutes / Action from Previous Meeting:

The minutes of the 10^th November 2021 Joint Pension Board we checked and apart from one small typo found to be a true reflection of the meeting and were approved by the Board. 

Joint Pension Board Actions:

Action JB 2021-04 – Pension Board Budget – DS has been liaising with Miranda, this in hand and paper will be provided for next Board meeting – OPEN

DS

Action JB 2021-05 – Amend the Risk Register to reflect the comments of the Board – Risk Register had been updated to show both a risk owner and risk manager and added two new risks, sustainability of the Pension Board and Pension Team - Closed

Action JB 2021-06: Pension Administrator - To consider how repeat contact about the same query can be picked up and measured as part of the KPI stats – MC confirmed that calls had now been transitioned over to their Contact Centre which does allow for a wider range of reporting and this will be incorporated into the next quarterly report. – OPEN

MC

Action JB 2021-07:  Amend Work Plan re the Annual Report and Discretions Policy – Workplan updated see Item 8 of this Agenda – Closed

Action JB 2021-15:  Risk Register - 1.2 Update Risk Register to include concerns re the number of paper files still be scanned into the system – See item 4 of this Agenda - Closed

Action JB 2021-16:  Risk Register - 1.4 Review Scoring to better reflect concerns – Risk Register updated - Closed

Action JB 2021-17:  Risk Register - Write to SAB Chair to query the national opt out rates and raise the Boards concerns about at what point the opt out rates impact on the scheme funding, that new recruits can’t afford living costs and to be able to pay into a pension.  To ask what modelling the Treasury / Home Office has done around this and if the Pay Body have considered the affordability of deductions.  IM advised the Board he needed to review where he had got to with this inquiry.  DS confirmed that she will follow this up with the Comms Team and that this was a work in progress - OPEN

IM

DS

Action JB 2021-18:  Discretions Policy - Send a copy of the consultation document and timeline to the Board Members and included the Boards involvement in the discretions process into the policy. This had not yet been done, CG will pick this up - OPEN

CG

Action JB 2021-19:  Pension Remedy - AR & DS to Link up re national communications and MW and JL to link up re local communications. – it was confirmed that template letters have been shared with all forces and the letters are in the process of being sent out to affected individuals in each category, this process will be completed shortly as the 1^st of April is a critical date for all individuals effected and we need to let them know they are impacted and with as much detail as we are able - OPEN

AR/DS/

MW/JL

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

2 Cont.

Action 2021-20: Work Plan – Evans & Ashcroft - Check to see if Equinity have received any direct requests. – MC confirmed that Equinity had received an individual contact; they had reviewed the case in question and following a review the determination was that there was no reduction in 2010 so there was no balance to redress.  Equinity had done some further analysis and had come up with approx. 360 scheme members potentially in scope.  It hard to believe only one member had made a claim, GB expressed his concern that there may be a communications issue.  He felt he had had done his bit to raise awareness and confirmed he was happy to leave it where it is, so long as the pensions team acknowledged the sense of fairness in the outcome of the judgment and that members should be repaid if they are owed money.

DS confirmed that she absolutely agreed and stated that she wanted to communicate to everyone, was talking with the new service provider on what piece of work that they can do in on communication in the future. Agreed we need to do something now and will be do something, this was why JL had got the numbers of affected scheme member who would be in scope from Equinity, but the how the when the why and the wherefores were still to be worked out and costed.

The Board agreed that this is probably the biggest issue affecting scheme members particularly those that are within the immediate detriment category and are looking to make those life choices around retirement within next six months.  They are desperately short of information to help them make an informed, decision.  

Members of the Board appreciated the National situation and that we are waiting for updates from the Government but with the last communication withdrawing the advice to the forces on how to progress immediate detriment and signposted members back to either the Staff Associations or AAP who don’t have any more information to give.

It was confirmed that the Pension Team are working on amending one of the template letters that came out last week from the NPCC, this template letter will then be shared with the Board Members for their view – Closed

Action 2021-21: Work Plan – Evans & Ashcroft - To review workload and feed back to Board Members with a proposal and rationale, still a work in progress - OPEN

DS

Action 2022-01 – Template letter – Copy of the template letter to be sent to Scheme Members who have been identified as being potentially in scope to be shared with the Board for their information and comment before being sent out to Scheme Members - OPEN

DS/CG

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

Sussex Outstanding Actions:

Action PPB/007/2020-7 – GMP Reconciliation – MC confirmed he now has the data reports and will send them across to JL – To be added to the next agenda - OPEN

MC

RL

Action PPB/008/2020-1 - Call back service – Contact has now moved over to Central Contact Centre who provide 24/7 cover – Closed

Action PPB/008/2020-2 – Pop up Survey – MC stated that this had not yet moved forwards, he has been concentrating on the functionality of the portal, the release of the functionality and the messaging surrounding this, once this is done this is the next item on the list and he will be reviewing the list with the Pensions Team - OPEN

MC

Action PPB/008/2020-3 – Further functionality of the Portal – GB felt this action was not for him and would like this corrected – agreed.  It had arisen out of request to have survivor benefits added to the portal at the start of the pandemic, but this could now move into the background as a nice to have, not a necessity – MC confirmed this is on the list that he will be reviewing with the Pensions Team - Closed

Action PPB/008/2020-7 – Opt Outs – Agreed discharged, this is now an item on the Agenda - Closed

Action PPB/008/2020-9 – Contractual Obligations – All in hand - Closed

Action PPB/009/2021-4 – Intranet update re Web portal – Complete – Closed

6

Pension Remedy:

The Chair thanked CA for agreeing to give a presentation to the Board.  CA confirmed that her background was in policing and police pensions. The presentation was to address unknowns that had grown up around the Pension Remedy.

The Board thanked CA for her clear presentation which they had found very useful.

CA confirmed that her presentation would be sent to the Board and could be shared with colleagues

The Board thanked CA for her clear presentation which they had found very informative.  CA confirmed that her presentation would be sent to the Board and could be shared with colleagues

3

Report on Scheme Members:

The Board were informed that this report is not yet available as it forms part of a larger project which is looking at the opt out rates by age, gender, length of service and linking in with the survey results on what had made them opt out in the first place.  The survey is currently being drafted wand work is ongoing with Comms to get the message out.

Action 2022-02 – Data analysis on Opt out rates to be shared with the Board once it becomes available. 

MQ

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

4

Risk and Issue Register:

The Risk Register was reviewed, the concerns raised at the last meeting had been incorporated into the Risk Register and no changes were made at this meeting.

5

Pension Administrator Summary:

MC apologised that the quarterly report had not been produced in time for the meeting, there had been problems running the data extracts as they had moved to an integrated work management system and were having difficulty extracting the data they needed for the report.  There were concerns raised at the last meeting over the KPI scores and the number of held over items, MC confirmed that these figures would comparable to the last quarterly report but would be back within target in the next report as they now had more people on the team and more structure to the service they were able to provide.

The Chair sated it was disappointing to not to have the report provided in time for the meeting.

Action 2022-03:  Equinity Quarter 4 Report to be distributed to the Board as soon as it is available

MC

MC confirmed he is moving on to a new role within Equinity and was thanked by the Board for his contribution and wished good luck in his new role. It was confirmed that BR will be returning as the Relationship Manager for Surrey and Sussex taking over from JK and BR will introduce Adam Holt, the new Relationship Manager who is taking over from MC at the next meeting.  The Board voiced concerns over the change in personnel, MC confirmed he would still be around so it would be a close and well managed transition.

GB raised that the NARPO contributions had not been deducted from the February pension payments, the same problem had occurred last year but thought it had been resolved.  MC agreed to take this away and look into the matter.

There had been one complaint raised in the last quarter, MC confirmed this was in particular complaint was in hand and they were going to do a review of a sample of similar cases to make sure not of those had been effected.

7

Review of Reported Breaches for Surrey and Sussex:

No Breaches had been reported in this quarter for Surrey or Sussex.

8

Work Plan:

The Work Plan had been updated in line with the Boards comments at the last meeting and the GMP reconciliation immediate detriment has been added.  More clarity was requested on the comment re awaiting further guidance for public sector schemes.

Action 2022-04:  To add more clarity around ‘further guidance re public sector schemes’ re expectations, timescales etc.

9

Pension Board Training:

The Board noted the report.

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

10

Ill Health Retirement & Injury Award Update:

The Board felt that the reports received in their current format did not give them an overview of how long the cases were taking to process etc.  AR confirmed that he sat on the OCC Health Collaboration Board who had oversight of the actual process which should normally take about 12 months, due to delays in the NHS due to Covid, this period was likely to increase.  It was confirmed that the Surrey Board had asked for these reports initially as they wished to understand if the number of people seeking ill health retirement had increased or decreased over a period of time but had never been able get information in a report form that covered this.

It was agreed that as there was good governance over the process in both Surrey and Sussex the Board would only receive a report by exception and not keep it as a standard agenda item.

 12

Any Other Business:

None.

13

Date of next meeting:

The date of the next meeting was confirmed as 24/08/2022 at 14:00.

14

Exclusion Notice:

The Chair read out the Exclusion Notice in full and thanked CA and MC for joining the meeting. 

The public part of the meeting closed at 13:30.

Joint Pension Board (Officer)

Date:  10/11/2021 at 12:00 – 14:00

Location:  Microsoft Teams

Chair:  Iain McCulloch

Protective Marking:  Official

Surrey & Sussex Board Members:

Kelvin Menon (KM), CFO Surrey OPCC

Iain McCulloch (IM), CFO Sussex OPCC

Dave Miller (DML), Assistant Chief Constable, Surrey & Sussex Police

Danielle Mead (DMD), Surrey Federation

Daren Egan (DE), Sussex Federation,

Tom Budd (TB), Superintendent’s Association – Surrey Police

Miles Ockwell (MO), Superintendent’s Association, Sussex Police

Tony Suter (TS), Scheme Member Representative – Surrey NARPO

Graham Bradley (GB), Scheme Member Representative – Sussex NARPO

Peter Gillett (PG), Executive Director of Commercial and Financial Services for Surrey & Sussex Police

Daisanne Summersfield (DS), Head of Shared Business Services for Surrey & Sussex Police

Adrian Rutherford (AR), Head of Employee Services for Surrey & Sussex Police

Advisors:  Cassidy Gillett (CG), Johanna Langley (JL) Isobel Tait (IT) & Louise Monk (LM) – Surrey/Sussex Police

Guests:

CC Gavin Stephens (GS), Scheme Manager for Surrey Police

CC Jo Shiner (JS), Scheme Manager for Sussex Police

Mark Chapman (MC), Equinity

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

1

Welcomes, Apologies & Conflicts Of Interest:

The Chair welcomed everyone to the meeting and the meeting was declared quorate by the Chair.

Apologies had been received prior to the meeting from Gavin Stephens, Daisanne Summersfield, Miles Ockwell, Cassidy Gillett & Mark Chapman.  The chair welcomed Melanie Warnes (MW) who was representing the Federation on behalf of Danielle Mead, Jo Banks (JB) who was representing the Superintendent’s Association on behalf of Miles Ockwell and John Kakatsos (JL) who was representing Equinity on behalf of Mark Chapman.

No conflicts of interest were declared at this meeting.

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

2

Minutes / Action from Previous Meeting:

The minutes of the 22^nd of July’s Joint Pension Board and the minutes of the Extraordinary meeting of the 13^th of October were both found to be a true reflection of these meeting and were approved by the Board. 

Sussex Outstanding Actions:

Action PPB/007/2020-7 – GMP Reconciliation – No update at this meeting - Ongoing

MC

Action PPB/008/2020-1 - Call back service – No update at this meeting – Ongoing - OPEN

MC

Action PPB/008/2020-2 – Pop up Survey – No update at this meeting - Ongoing - OPEN

MC

Action PPB/008/2020-3 – Further functionality of the Portal – GB not yet spoken to Equinity about this – Ongoing - OPEN

GB

Action PPB/008/2020-7 – Opt Outs – No update at this meeting - OPEN

DS

Action PPB/008/2020-9 – Contractual Obligations - See item 4 of this Agenda – Ongoing - OPEN

DS

Action PPB/008/2020-10 – Guidance on PPS 1987 Regulations Survivor pensions –Discretions Policy complete - see item 5 of this Agenda - Closed

Action PPB/009/2021-2 – Data Breach – No update at this meeting

- OPEN

DS

Action PPB/009/2021-4 – Intranet update re Web portal – no update at this meeting – OPEN

DS/CG

Implementation Sub Board Outstanding Actions

Meeting 1 Action 7:  Indemnity Insurance – Confirmed in place – Closed

Meeting 2 Action 2: Set dates for future meetings – awaiting availability of the Chair – Completed – Closed

This completed all outstanding actions for the Implementation Sub Board

Joint Pension Board Actions:

.

Action JB 2021-04 – Pension Board Budget – no update at this meeting – OPEN

DS

Action JB 2021-05 – Amend the Risk Register to reflect the comments of the Board – As KE has left the organisation this had not been completed, will be done in time for next meeting - OPEN

JL

Action JB 2021-06: To consider how repeat contact about the same query can be picked up and measured as part of the KPI stats – no update at this meeting – OPEN

MC

Action JB 2021-07:  Amend Work Plan re the Annual report and Discretions policy – As KE has left the organisation this had not been completed, will be done in time for the next meeting - OPEN

JL

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

3

Risk and Issue Register:

The new Risk Register for the Joint Board was reviewed, JL apologised that it had not been updated since the last meeting and confirmed it would be done in time for the next meeting.

1.2 Member Data Incomplete or inaccurate - Concerns were raised about the number of paper records that are still being held and what the plans were for updating the computer records. It was confirmed that there are still 85 boxes of paper documents waiting to be scanned onto the system.

Action JB 2021-15:  1.2 Update Risk Register to include concerns re the number of paper files still be scanned into the system

JL

1.4 Membership Communications – The Board felt the scoring for this did not reflect the concerns over the Pensions Savings Statements, Scheme Pays, Member access to the portal and lack of timely responses.

Action JB 2021-16:  1.4 Review Scoring to better reflect concerns

JL

The Board discussed concerns around the high opt out rates in Surrey & Sussex currently 7.7% and opt out rates in the Scheme overall.  It was agreed that as good communications were in place for new recruits in Surrey & Sussex it did not need to go on the Risk Register as a separate issue at this moment in time but may do in the future.

Action JB 2021-17:  Write to SAB Chair to query the national opt out rates and raise the Boards concerns about at what point the opt out rates impact on the scheme funding, that new recruits can’t afford living costs and to be able to pay into a pension.  To ask what modelling the Treasury / Home Office has done around this and if the Pay Body have considered the affordability of deductions.

IM

4

Pension Administrator Summary:

JK apologised for the lateness of the Quarterly reports and the disappointing KPI scores.  He explained that this was due to 3 issues, People/Process and Technology, that an experienced person has now taken accountability to bring the team back to where it should be.

A presentation was given to the Board on the Plans to rectify the situation:

• People - there were recruitment challenges so internal staff were to be used to cover the gaps in the Team.   
• Process – There had been a restructure allowing the business to make changes more quickly and a continuous improvement programme was in place to allow for more efficiency and build resilience.
• Technology – now more automation within the team with end to end automation and this month, enhanced active retirement quotations would be available to scheme members.  Protecting the quality of the information was just as important.
• Immediate detriment – the calculations are done by a separate team, the scenarios to be presented to scheme members can be complicated.

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

4 Cont.

The Chair thanked JK for the presentation which was important for giving assurance whilst the two organisations continued to work together.

JK confirmed that the project plan is being reviewed and progress against the plan will be shared with the Surrey Police Pensions Team at their regular monthly meetings and also between the meetings.

The Board queried what had gone wrong in the last quarter and JK explained that there had been a 57% backlog from the previous quarter which had progressed into this quarter and the knock on effect would again be felt in the next quarter as well.  The Board queried what the priority for the workload was and JK explained that if it had financial implications for the member it went into the priority bucket and if not a different bucket. There had not been enough resources to empty both of the buckets.  The Board expressed their disappointment, the resourcing demand was a known demand and therefore should be staffed accordingly.  JK confirmed that as far as he was aware all of the annual Pension Statements had been issued on time but if anything was outstanding to let him know outside of the meeting and he would progress with the team.  JK again apologised for the lateness of the quarterly reports, the team are getting back to green on activities for Surrey and Sussex and he will liaise with JL re this.

5

Discretions Policy:

AR informed the Board that the Policy was due to be reviewed, the Board were asked to consider the Policy and if there were any comments or views these could be fed back to the team to enable a final version to be drafted ready for the next Board meeting.  A consultation document will be sent out to the Board with timeline attached.  The Boards involvements in the decisions relating to the discretions process was discussed.

Action JB 2021-18:  Send a copy of the consultation document and timeline to the Board Members and included the Boards involvement in the discretions process into the policy.

6

Pension Remedy Latest Update:

It was confirmed that the process for doing immediate detriment and the policy and procedure around ID and what that entails for Officers should be available by the end of the month.  Communication would be going out about this after Christmas to enable Officers to make informed choices. The communications coming out from the National Team had been disappointing. 

JK informed the Board that the HMRC had released some tax guidance re immediate detriment which may trigger more people to retire, the communications around this were very important.

Action JB 2021-19:  AR & DS to Link up re national communications and MW and JL to link up re local communications.

AR/DS/

MW/JL

7

Review of Reported Breaches for Surrey and Sussex:

No Breaches had been reported in this quarter for Surrey or Sussex.

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

8

Work Plan:

It was confirmed that Evans and Ashcroft had been added to the Work Plan, was in the forefront of the teams’ mind and any applications would be dealt with on a case by case basis.  JK confirmed he was not aware of Equinity receiving any requests directly, but GB felt that this might be because members may not be aware and would like a more active stance to be taken, he had contacted the NARPO branch secretary who will contact the NARPO members but this would not include any members of the scheme who were not NARPO members and reminded the Board that any complaints about this would go to the pensions ombudsman. 

It was confirmed that details of those scheme members effected across Surrey and Sussex would be available and these members could be contacted directly to make them aware of what they needed to do but concerns were voiced over the impact this might have on the Pensions Teams workload, a review is to be carried out and feedback given to the Board Member, it was agreed that this was a sensible approach.

Action 2021-20: Check to see if Equinity have received any direct requests.

JK

Action 2021-21: To review workload and feed back to Board Members with a proposal and rationale.

DS

9

Pension Board Training:

The Chair reminded Board Members to complete their online training if they had any modules still outstanding.  The pension scams training had been particularly informative.

10

Sussex Pension Board Annual Report:

The draft report was now complete, and the Chair apologised for the delay in getting this finished.  He reminded the Board that this was the last single Board report as from next year, it would be a joint Surrey/Sussex Board report.

JS thanked the Sussex Board Members for their work on the Board in the previous year and stated that she was aware that GS, had he been at the meeting, would also have expressed his thanks to the Surrey Board.

One change was requested to the wording of the report in relation to Evans and Ashcroft.

Action 2021-22: Change of wording to be sent to IM to be included in the report.  Final version of the report to be sent to the SAB Chair.

GB / IM

11

Ill Health Retirement & Injury Award Update:

The Board were informed that there had been a steady flow of applications, the delays in the NHS was having an impact on the timings of the applications.  Injury on Duty reviews – LM is currently waiting for details from Equinity of numbers of cases.

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

11 Cont.

AR thank LM for her hard work, he informed the Board she was the most proficient in the country, dealing with members and their families at their most difficult time which was not easy. The Board also expressed their thanks to LM

 12

Any Other Business:

None.

13

Date of next meeting:

The date of the next meeting was confirmed as 02/02/2021 at 01:00.

14

Exclusion Notice:

The Chair read out the Exclusion Notice in full and thanked JK for joining the meeting.  The public part of the meeting closed at 13:30.

Title: Surrey/Sussex Police – Joint Pension Board (Officer) Extra Ordinary Meeting

Date:  12/10/2021 at 08:00

Location:  Microsoft Teams

Chair:  Iain McCulloch

Surrey & Sussex Board Members:

Kelvin Menon (KM), CFO Surrey OPCC

Iain McCulloch (IM), CFO Sussex OPCC

Peter Gillett (PG), Executive Director of Commercial and Financial Services for Surrey & Sussex Police

Daisanne Summersfield (DS), Head of Shared Business Services for Surrey & Sussex Police

Adrian Rutherford, Head of Employee Services, Surrey & Sussex Police

ACC Dave Miller (DML), Surrey & Sussex Police

Danielle Mead, (DMD), Surrey Federation

Daren Egan (DE), Sussex Federation

Tom Budd (TB), Superintendent’s Association – Surrey Police

Miles Ockwell (MO), Superintendent’s Association, Sussex Police

Tony Suter (TS), Scheme Member Representative – Surrey NARPO

Graham Bradley (GB), Scheme Member Representative – Sussex NARPO

Advisors:  Kelly Ellison (KE), Cassidy Gillett (CG), Johanna Langley (JL) Isobel Tait (IT) & Louise Monk (LM) – Surrey/Sussex Police

Guests:

CC Gavin Stephens (GS), Scheme Manager for Surrey Police

CC Jo Shiner (JS), Scheme Manager for Sussex Police

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

1

Welcomes, Apologies & Conflicts Of Interest:

The Chair welcomed everyone to the extraordinary Joint Surrey/Sussex Pension Board meeting, and confirmed that the Board were being asked to make a decision on the way forward for the Police Pension Administration Procurement, it was noted that this meeting was not quorate and it was agreed that members not currently at the meeting could be contacted by email following the meeting for their vote.

Apologies had been received prior to the meeting from Gavin Stephens, and ACC Dave Miller. 

No conflicts of interest were declared at this meeting.

2

Exclusion Notice:

The Chair read out the Exclusion Notice in full The public part of the meeting closed at 08:10.

Part Two (In Private)

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

3

A Police Pension Administration Procurement Decision paper was presented to the Board.  The Chair thanked DS & CG for the paper which had been clear and easy to read.  DE joined the meeting at this point and it was noted that the Board was now quorate so a vote could take place at the meeting.

Various questions were asked and answered, the Chair then asked the Members to vote on the decision to accept the recommendation in the report. 

Decision:  The Board voted unanimously to accept the recommendation in the report, option B.

It was noted that with the transfer and the pensions remedy there was a lot of work for the team, the Board agreed that resources would need to be kept under review.  DS confirmed that CG would lead on this project and a project plan was being developed, this would be shared with the Board and Board. Members of the Board would be invited to take part in the process.

4

AOB:

None

Title: Surrey/Sussex Police – Joint Pension Board (Officer)

Date:  22 July 2021 at 10:00

Location:  Microsoft Teams

Chair:  Iain McCulloch

Surrey & Sussex Board Members:

Kelvin Menon (KM), CFO Surrey OPCC

Iain McCulloch (IM), CFO Sussex OPCC

Dave Miller (DML), Assistant Chief Constable, Surrey & Sussex Police

Danielle Mead, (DMD), Surrey Federation

Daren Egan (DE), Sussex Federation

Tom Budd (TB), Superintendent’s Association – Surrey Police

Miles Ockwell (MO), Superintendent’s Association, Sussex Police

Tony Suter (TS), Scheme Member Representative – Surrey NARPO

Graham Bradley (GB), Scheme Member Representative – Sussex NARPO

Peter Gillett (PG), Executive Director of Commercial and Financial Services for Surrey & Sussex Police

Daisanne Summersfield (DS), Head of Shared Business Services for Surrey & Sussex Police

Adrian Rutherford (AR), Head of Employee Services for Surrey & Sussex Police

Advisors:  Kelly Ellison (KE), Cassidy Gillett (CG), Johanna Langley (JL) Isobel Tait (IT) & Louise Monk (LM) – Surrey/Sussex Police

Guests:

CC Gavin Stephens (GS), Scheme Manager for Surrey Police

CC Jo Shiner (JS), Scheme Manager for Sussex Police

Mark Chapman (MC), Equinity

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

1

Welcomes, Apologies & Conflicts Of Interest:

The Chair welcomed everyone to the 2^nd meeting of the Joint Surrey/Sussex Pension Board and this meeting was declared quorate.

Apologies had been received prior to the meeting from Gavin Stephens, Jo Shiner, and Adrian Rutherford. 

The chair also welcomed Isobel Tait to the meeting; and it was confirmed that Isobel is the new Pension Project Support Officer who will be taking over the administration for the Board meetings.

No conflicts of interest were declared at this meeting.

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

2

Minutes / Action from Previous Meeting:

The minutes of the 22^nd April’s Joint Pension Board meeting were found to be a true reflection of that meeting and were approved by the Board. 

Surrey Outstanding Actions:

Action 138 – Quick Easy Guide – A joint guide – now available on the portal - Closed

Sussex Outstanding Actions:

Action PPB/007/2020-7 – GMP Reconciliation – MC confirmed that the data is to be loaded in the next week or two, the Data Solutions Team will be meeting soon to review data and plan a way forward.  An update report should set deadlines and this will be shared with the Pensions Team - Ongoing

MC

Action PPB/007/2020-14 – Completed/Discharged

Action PPB/007/2020-16 - KE Continues to review this and will inform the Board when any new training available.  Now business as usual – Completed / Discharged

Action PPB/008/2020-1 - MC confirmed that call volumes were now stable with no noticeable peaks.  A wider piece of work is taking place to move all calls from Crawley back to the main Contact Centre as they have greater capacity and can offer a call back service, which would result in a better service for callers – Ongoing - OPEN

MC

Action PPB/008/2020-2 – Pop up Survey –  MC confirmed that the additional content will go onto the site during this quarter – need to engage with web experts re the survey -  Ongoing - OPEN

MC

Action PPB/008/2020-3 – Further functionality of the Portal – GB not yet spoken to Equinity about  this – Ongoing - OPEN

Action PPB/008/2020-4 – Member training – 22/07/2021 as there is now a new Board this action is closed

Action PPB/008/2020-5 – Risk Management Training – It was confirmed that the training had taken place and the Board Members had found this useful - Closed

Action PPB/008/2020-7 – DS confirmed she is still working with the Comms Team but their capacity to help was limited, the meetings with DE had taken place and there is now more information available for new starters which is more of a story telling message - OPEN

DS

Action PPB/008/2020-9 – See item 17 of this Agenda - OPEN

DS

Action PPB/008/2020-10 – Guidance on PPS 1987 Regulations Survivor pensions – DS confirmed that the Discretions Policy was still being worked on, it will mirror the LGPS and Legal are pulling all the information together, which will then be reflected in the Policy - OPEN

DS

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

2 Cont.

Action PPB/009/2021-2 – Data Breach – 19 people had been affected overall and not all letters had been returned.  CIFAS services were being offered to all those affected.  It had been agreed with the DPO, that there was no need to notify the Pensions Regulator as the breach did not meet the required criteria. GB queried how this decision had been made and what the role of the Pension Board was in this process, should they have been notified so that they could have a view?  DS confirmed that this was an internal process with a matrix used in the determination.

Share outside of this meeting, a copy of the matrix used and a paper to inform the Board on how this decision had been reached so that the Board could have a view, if the Board felt it needed to have be reported to the Pension Regulator then the Team would act accordingly.  Any future breaches are also to be reported to the Board immediately (outside of the quarterly meetings) to enable them to have a timely view - OPEN

DS

Action PPB/009/2021-4 – Now part of a wider strategy and a working group was being established – OPEN

DS/CG

Implementation Sub Board Outstanding Actions

Meeting 1 Action 7:  Indemnity Insurance – still waiting for a response to this query – OPEN

Meeting 2 Action 2: Set dates for future meetings – awaiting availability of the Chair - OPEN

PG

IM/RL

Meeting 2 Action 3: TOR – see item 3 of this Agenda - Closed

Joint Pension Board Actions:

Action JB 2021-01:  Set up an Implementation Board meetings and invite those Members not at this meeting to attend – 3 Implementation Board meetings had taken place and had considered what legislation/guidance the Joint Board needed to take account of – see item 3 of this Agenda - Closed

Action JB 2021-02:  Work Plan:  The work plan had been updated - Closed

Action JB 2021-03:  Pension Remedy – it was confirmed that the National Police Chief’s Council (NPCC) had taken this into consideration – Closed

3

Terms of Reference & Other Constitutional Pension Board Documents:

TOR – The Implementation Sub Board had considered the working arrangements for the new Joint Pension Board. The TOR had been rewritten to reflect these considerations and the Scheme Managers of both Surrey and Sussex had approved the TOR for the Joint Board.  The other Surrey constitutional documents had also been reviewed but only minor changes made and these now formed the basis of the constitutional documents for this Joint Board.  The Members agreed to adopt the TOR and other policies and procedures.

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

3 Cont.

Action JB 2021-04 - Follow up with Miranda re the budget for this Joint Pension Board.

DS

4

Risk and Issue Register:

The new Risk Register for the Joint Board was reviewed, it was agreed that the Board needed a systematic way of grading the risks; and that the Risk Owner was not necessarily the same as the Risk Manager.  The Board noted they were dependent on the Risk Owners or Managers escalating any risks to the Board.

It was agreed that both the Risk Owner and Risk Manager should be identified on the Register and that the sustainability of the Pension Board and Pensions Team should be added as a Risk.  The Chair thanked KE for her work on this.

Action JB 2021-05 – Amend the Risk Register to reflect the comments of the Board.

KE

5

Pension Administrator Summary:

MC apologised that there were still no joint KPI data available, this report had not been ready in time to share with the Board prior to this meeting but would be distributed to the Board as soon as it is available.  Quarter 2 had been a challenge, with several pinch points within the team, which had reflected in the SLA results having a number of missed targets and this was disappointing.  The exiting Team Manager had not been able to give a handover to the incoming Team Manager Simon Ellard although Simon had been able to join the weekly calls with the Surrey/Sussex Pension Team before he actually transferred over. 

There had been a number of retired members who had struggled to register on the Portal and had required assistance with this, the team had been able to resolve these issues but this had taken time.  The installation and testing of the active member retirement calculations on the portal had also had an impact.  The overall input uplift had resulted in the missing of some of the SLA targets although not by a significant amount of time.  One area of challenge remained the transfers in and the divorce cases, the training and upskilling of the team was ongoing.  The telephony centralisation back to the Call Centre would help with this, as it would increase capacity within the police pension’s admin team.  The Surrey/Sussex work management system is currently siting on a separate system to everything else, once the calls are centralised this will all be on the one system, which should speed things up.  Overtime would also be considered to clear the backlog of cases. The short guides for both schemes had been loaded onto the portal and the up take of registrations for the portal had increased by Surrey 38% and Sussex 35%.  There had not been a spike in complaints in this quarter despite these issues.

Questions were raised by the Members regarding the transfer of calls to the central Contact Centre, were those staff skilled or working from a script?  Would they hand calls over to the team if they were unable to answer the query?  MC confirmed they were trained call handlers, the calls would go through an appropriate ID&V process and would be transferred over to the Pensions Team or a request could be fed directly into the Admin Teams work queue. 

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

5 Cont.

It was acknowledged that the performance of the Contact Centre could damage the reputation of both Forces and Equinity if calls were not handled correctly, or not handled in a timely manner, or people had to keep going back because they did not get the quantitative data they needed in response to their query.  Another issue discussed related to the over inflated quotations when nearing retirement age, leading to confusion when a more accurate quotation was issued nearer the actual retirement date Members sometimes had to go back two or three times to get the accurate data.  MC acknowledged that it was important to be clear in terms of numbers and that the information given should be as accurate as possible.  MC confirmed the Annual Events Team were focusing on the accuracy and timeliness of  statements issued and acknowledged there isn’t currently a process to measure the statistics on this but would take this away and think about how this can be measured as part of the KPI’s.

It was confirmed that more Tax Awareness sessions were being arranged

Action JB 2021-06: To consider how repeat contact about the same query can be picked up and measured as part of the KPI stats.

MC

6

NPCC Pension Update:

The Board noted the update.

7

Pension Remedy Latest Update:

DS informed the Board that the HO had issued a 2^nd set of guidance and an Immediate Detriment report had gone to the Chief Officers group.  A large proportion of Chief Officers had agreed they would do something within the tight framework on immediate detriment.  In light of this, the team would have to go back and review the project plan that is already in place and look at the engagement sessions planned, the Comms focus etc.  Governance is already in place.  Currently working on the data/risks/numbers /cohorts with a large amount still unknown.  The bill is to be put before parliament this week.

The Board wanted to know if there was a risk if different forces were doing different things, as this was not the NPCC approach.  DS confirmed that the NPCC has an overarching plan and it was good to have a common approach but that Surrey and Sussex would probably not wait for the guidance if this had not been issued by early September, will do nothing for now but as thing become clearer, this may change.  HR consultants are already working with the team on this.

8

Review of Reported Breaches for Surrey and Sussex:

No Breaches had been reported in this quarter for Surrey or Sussex.

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

9

Work Plan:

The Chair thanked CG for her work on the new joint work plan and asked that the Annual Report be added to the first meeting in the new financial year and the date was updated in relation to the Discretions Policy.

There had been an action (JB 2021-02) for Evans and Ashcroft to be added to the Work Plan and this had been done. This case related to the Ill Heath and injury component of the pensions for those who were also getting additional benefits from the DWP and possible over deductions.

DS confirmed that any queries would be dealt with on a case by case basis and that she had no issue with GB sending information to the NARPO members to let them know.  GB confirmed a questionnaire was being sent out which would help individuals assess if they may have a claim and this might cause a number of queries to come into the team.  DS confirmed they would work through these but hoped the numbers actually affected would be very small.

Action JB 2021-07:  Amend Work Plan re the Annual report and Discretions policy.

CG

10

Pension Board Training:

A new joint training log had been created and this was reviewed.  It was noted that 3 new Members still needed to complete their Pension Regulator online training for Pension Board Members.

RL confirmed that she would send/resend the link to the training to the new Board Members and asked that copies of the Sussex’s Board Member training certificates be sent on to her so that she could create a central record for the new Joint Board.

Action JB 2021-08:  Send copies of Sussex Member certificates to RL

Send link to the Pension Regulator online training to new Members

KE

RL

11

Pension Board Annual Report:

The Board noted the Surrey Pension Board Annual Report.  The Chair confirmed that the Sussex Annual Report had not yet been completed but would be and shared with the Sussex Member’s outside of the meeting. 

It was noted that the next annual report would be a joint report and would be written by the Chair.

Action JB 2021-09:  Take the Surrey Annual Report forwards to Scheme Manager and the SAB Chair.

Write Sussex Annual Report, share with Sussex Board Members outside of this meeting and present to Sussex Scheme Manager and send to the SAB Chair.

KM

IM

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

12

Ill Health Retirement & Injury Award Update:

DS confirmed that she was working with the OCC Health line manager to support the Boards request for year on year figures but that this had yet been resolved.

The Boards role in the IHR process was queried and confirmed as that of an oversight role to make sure the process was being administered correctly.

13

Annual Board Expenditure Report:

The Board noted the Surrey Board Expenditure report; it was acknowledged that the Sussex Board had not historically produced a report on its expenditure but in future a joint Expenditure report would be available.

14

Any Other Business:

None.

15

Date of next meeting:

Dates for the next two meetings were still to be established and RL confirmed she would be contacting all to check availability in the near future.

16

Exclusion Notice:

The Chair read out the Exclusion Notice in full and thanked MC for joining the meeting.  The public part of the meeting closed at 12.05pm.

Part Two (In Private)

Title: Surrey/Sussex Police – Joint Pension Board (Officer)

Date:  22 April 2021 at 10:00

Location:  Microsoft Teams

Chair:  Simon Patter (SP)

Surrey & Sussex Board Members:

Kelvin Menon (KM), CFO Surrey OPCC

Iain McCulloch (IM), CFO Sussex OPCC

Simon Patter (SP), Surrey Federation,

Daren Egan (DE), Sussex Federation,

Tom Budd (TB), Superintendent’s Association – Surrey Police

Nick May (NM), Superintendent’s Association, Sussex Police

Tony Suter (TS), Scheme Member Representative – Surrey NARPO

Graham Bradley (GB), Scheme Member Representative – Sussex NARPO

Peter Gillett (PG), Executive Director of Commercial and Financial Services for Surrey & Sussex Police

Daisanne Summersfield (DS), Head of Shared Business Services for Surrey & Sussex Police

Advisors:  Kelly Ellison (KE), Cassidy Gillett (CG), Johanna Langley (JL) & Louise Monk (LM) – Surrey/Sussex Police

Guests:

CC Gavin Stephens (GS), Scheme Manager for Surrey Police

CC Jo Shiner (JS), Scheme Manager for Sussex Police

ACC Dave Miller (DM), ACC Sussex Police

Mark Chapman (MC), Equinity

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

1

Welcomes & Apologies:

The Chair welcomed everyone to the pilot meeting for a Joint Surrey/Sussex Pension Board and the meeting was declared quorate.

Apologies had been received prior to the meeting from Tom Budd, Dave Miller, Nick May and Louise Monk and during the meeting from Tony Suter who was unable to join the meeting as he was having IT issues.

No conflicts of interest were declared at the meeting.

The Chair informed the Board that after this meeting he would no longer be attending the Pension Board as the Federation Rep and introduced Danielle Mead (DM) who would be taking over his role within the Federation and proposed that Danielle to take his place on the Board, the Scheme Manager and Chair of the Surrey Board were content to accept this proposal. 

The Members thanked Simon for his contribution to the Board over a number of years and wished him well for the future.

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

2

Minutes / Action from Previous Meeting:

Surrey – the minutes of the 28^th of January 2021 meeting were reviewed and accepted by the Surrey Members as a true record of the meeting. 

Action 138 – Quick Easy Guide – A joint guide has been produced and will be shared with the Board and published on the portal once final approval has been given.  MC confirmed that it could be loaded onto the portal very quickly once the final version had been received - OPEN

CG/MC

Action 150 – Joint Surrey Sussex Pension Board – As this is the first (pilot) Joint Board this action is closed.

Action 162 - Ill Health Retirement & Injury Award Update – See item 11 of this Agenda – Closed.

Action 170 - Retirement packs - now a larger piece of work looking at the retirement leaver experience, work in progress – Closed.

Action 173 - Joint Pension Board - Send a summary of other Joint Pension Board’s governance structures and any further comments received to the Board – Closed.

Action 179 – Pension Remedy - Send wording to be entered onto the Risk Register to RL – New joint risk register to be considered by the Implementation Board - Closed

Action 180 – Review of Pension Board Privacy Statement – See item 12 of this Agenda - Closed

Action 181: Review of Internal Dispute Resolution Policy & Procedure -  See item 13 of this Agenda - Closed

Action 182 – Pension Board Work Plan -  – See item 6 of this Agenda - Closed

Action 183 – Ill Health Retirement & Injury Award Update – see item 11 of this Agenda – Closed

Sussex - the minutes of the 4^th of February 2021 meeting were reviewed and accepted by the Sussex Members as a true record of the meeting. 

IM ran through the Sussex action log:

Action 2020-7 – GMP Reconciliation – MC confirmed that Equinity have a dedicated team working on this and will discuss any issues with the Surrey/Sussex Police Pensions team to identify any further actions – Ongoing

Action 2020-1 – Equinity Call Back Service – MC confirmed that he had reviewed the stats and felt that the waiting times were reasonable, there were no issues at the moment as there was adequate coverage within the team - Closed

2020-2 – Pop up Survey –  MC confirmed that the roll out to deferred members has taken place and it would be interesting to see if this increased the access to the web portal, stats would be picked up in the next quarterly report -  Ongoing

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

2020-3 – Estimates for survivor benefits to be added to the portal – the calculations option for the active members is due to be released in the next few days – Closed

2020-4 – Pension Board Member Training – see item 8 of this Agenda- Closed

2020-5 - Risk Register Training for Board Members – both Surrey & Sussex Members had attended the Risk assessment training - Closed

2020-7 – Promote pension scheme to new recruits – DS confirmed she has spoken to Connie re getting specific communications support for this and was informed this had been removed, DS to speak to AR about this.  It was confirmed that Surrey will have 70 new recruits in June and Sussex are expecting 250 next year.  The Board acknowledged that although the subject is only covered briefly within the new recruits training, it is a very important subject.  DE offered to take part in the training session and DS welcomed this.  Speak to Payroll to gain info on numbers opting out - OPEN

DS

2020-9 – See item 18 of this Agenda - OPEN

2020-10 – Guidance on PPS 1987 Regulations Survivor pensions – DS confirmed that Legal had been consulted, this now forms a wider piece of work and the policy was still being worked on - OPEN

2021 – 1 – Contact details had been distributed to the Board - Closed

2021-2 – Data Breach – Report from Equinity has been shared with Marcus Potter  - Closed

2021-4 – Update web portal with outcome of consultation –Completed - Closed

A combined Risk Register for future meetings will be considered by the Implementation Board.

3

Surrey/Sussex Joint Pension Board Implementation Working Group:

A short discussion was held around how the new Joint Board would work and what would be required to make it work.  A draft Terms of Reference had been prepared for consideration.  The Board agreed that an Implementation Board would need to work out the dynamics of the Board and formulate the other policy and procedures the Board were required to have and will bring these papers to the next Joint Board meeting.  It was confirmed that this was a Governing Board not a Working Board.  GS reiterated that he and the CC of Sussex were happy to continue with a Joint Board.  The Members were asked to volunteer to take part in the Implementation Board.  Several Members volunteered and PG offered to chair, those Members not attending this meeting are also to be invited to join.

Action JB 2021-01:  Set up Implementation Board meetings and invite those Members not at this meeting to attend.

RL

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

3 cont.

Consider what legislation/guidance the Implementation Board need to take into consideration in order to create the documents, policies and procedures the Joint Pension Board require to enable them to carry out their function.

PG

CC Gavin Stephens left the meeting at this point, 10.45am

4

Pension Administrator Summary:

Quarterly Update:

Surrey:  The Surrey Members reviewed the report and noted there had been a theme to the cases that had not met the SLA target in this quarter, these were all divorce cases and MC stated that expertise within the team was now limited, a skills matrix had been drawn up and he was now organising more training for those within the Police Pensions team.

Sussex: The Sussex Members reviewed the report and noted that the missed SLA’s in this quarter had been across a broad spectrum of subjects.

Call handling and missed calls were discussed and MC confirm that a greeting message was played when the call is received which pointed callers to the self-service portal.  The Board agreed it would be interesting to know if this led to an uptake of scheme members accessing the portal as it would highlight what more needed to be done to get the message out.  MC confirmed that they were looking to amalgamate the two reports into one for the joint board and would see what further information could be included in the report going forwards. 

Portal update:  In mid-March deferred scheme members had been given registration information and this had led to 115 calls to the help desk re process problems, these were mostly from Sussex member who had issues with their NI numbers, now close to bottoming this out and will update CG & KE at the next weekly meeting. 

MC confirmed that the calculations function and the quick easy guide would be available on the portal shortly.  The Surrey members confirmed that they had had a preview of the calculation function during a test run and that it had worked well with no issues.

Additional comments and queries raised by exception – none.

5

Review of Reported Breaches for Surrey and Sussed:

No Breaches had been reported in the quarter for Surrey or Sussex.

6

Work Plan:

A proposed joint Surrey/Sussex work plan had been created and shared with the Board shortly before the meeting, the Board were advised that this was still a work in progress and would be updated to include any observations they had in time for the next Board meeting.  GB raised a query in relation to the Evans & Ashcroft case, (how to treat the over deduction of Incapacity Benefit (IB) and Industrial Injury Disablement Benefit (IIDB)) and what the current status of the project was, the Pensions Team agreed to investigate the current situation and update the work plan. 

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

6 cont.

Action JB 2020-02:  Update work plan to put more Clarity in around this.

CG/DS

GB also asked what advice was being given to eligible scheme members as to where they should refer any claims.  It was confirmed scheme members should contact Equinity directly but KE confirmed that if they applied to Surrey or Sussex Police it would still be dealt with. 

7

Risk and Issue Register:

The registers for both Boards were reviewed. 

Members from both Boards had recently received training on this subject and thanked DS & KE for organising and KW for delivering this informative session which all Members had found useful.  The Board acknowledged that Surrey and Sussex currently recorded their risks differently and the plan was to have a joint register for the next meeting.  It was acknowledged that this was a good time to have a reset, set out a framework and consider the contents of the Risk Register.  The Board also agreed that they did not own the risks but needed to have an overview to enable them to seek assurance from the Officers attending from those organisations that the risks were being monitored and actions were being taken to mitigate the risks.  Currently Surrey’s risk register is a public document and Sussex’s not and the question was asked if it should be a public document?  The Board felt it was better to be open and transparent and that any sensitive issues could be discussed in the part 2 (private) part of the meeting if necessary.  It was agreed that more work would be done on this document by the Implementation Board.

8

Pension Board Training:

The training logs for both Surrey and Sussex were reviewed.  It was confirmed that the Risk assessment training had been added to both logs, LB did not need to complete the Pensions Regulator’s online training, DE had completed his and NM had completed part and would complete the rest before the next meeting. In the future the logs would be amalgamated into one document for the purposes of the Joint Board.

9

Scheme Advisory Board Quarterly Update:

The last letter form Scheme Advisory Board had been received on the 4th of February so was now a little out of date, no information on who was going to be the new SAB chair had yet been received.  It was acknowledge that the letters from the SAB Chair do not always arrive in time for the Surrey quarterly meetings, dates of future meetings are to be considered by the Implementation Board.

10

Pensions Remedy:

DS confirmed that the NPCC Pension Remedy working group have working on resolving issues.  The NPCC and LGA are working with the Home Office and Treasury to get the retrospective and prospective legislation in place.  There is a tight timeline for this of March 2022.  There is to be a £7m fund available to distribute to those in immediate detriment and discussions were ongoing on how and where this should be applied, should this be mandatory or for schemes to engage.  As there was yet no legislation it makes it hard to understand how this will work.  There were risks re the timeline / data risks / process risks etc. and the admin around all of this would also be a risk as it will be very complex to administer.

GB/DS

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

10 Cont.

The Pensions Remedy Stakeholder Engagement Forum would test and engage with the communications strategy, this would be an interactive forum and invites were to be sent out soon.

GB informed the Board that the NARPO CEO had recently written to the Treasury regarding the Pension Remedy solution in which he pointed out that the process for implementing the agreed Remedy Solution would result in discriminatory delays for the eligible pensioners.  DS confirmed that it had not yet been mentioned in any detail but that she would be happy to take this forward at the next meeting.

Action JB 2021-03:  GB to forward information to DS.  DS to raise at the next Pension Remedy Stakeholder Group meeting

GB/DS

11

Ill Health Retirement & Injury Award Update:

The Board acknowledged that the current reports were not quite what the Board required, it was confirmed that the trend in Surrey was known to be on the decline but there was no data in the Surrey report to back this up.  The Board agreed a consistent approach across both organisations was needed and a rep from Occupational Health should attend the Board as context to the reports are useful.  DS confirmed this formed part of an ongoing dialog, with Occupational Health and she had been given to understand that it was easier to pull out information from one side but not the other.  What is required in this report will be considered in more detail by the Implementation Board.

12

Review of Pension Board Privacy Statement:

The Privacy Statement for Surrey Police Pensions had been due for a review, it was confirmed that was updated as a document bi annually but reviewed by the Board annually in line with TPR guidance.  The Board noted the statement and no changes were required at this time.  This document will be considered as part of the Implementation Boards programme of work.

13

Review of Internal Dispute Resolution Policy & Procedure:

The Surrey IDRP had been due for a review, it was confirmed that was updated as a document bi annually but reviewed by the Board annually in line with TPR guidance.  The Board noted the policy and no changes were required.  It was confirmed that Sussex’s policy had not been review by the Sussex Board but was exactly the same with just the contact details being different.  This document will be considered as part of the Implementation Boards programme of work

14

Consideration and Discussion of Actions in advance of the next meeting:

Annual Report – it was agreed that both Surrey and Sussex Pension Boards would need to submit their own reports to the SAB Chair for this past year but that the next years report would be a joint report.

15

Any Other Business:

None.

The Board again thanked SP for his contribution to the Board.

Item

Notes

Actions / Owner

16

Date of next meeting:

There was already a meeting date set in the calendar for the Surrey side which is 22nd of July at 10am and the Implementation Board will consider if this meeting can go ahead as a Joint meeting or if a new date needs to be selected, the Implementation Board will set the future dates for the Board at the so that these dates can be published in advance

17

Exclusion Notice:

The Exclusion Notice was read out by the Chair and the public part of the meeting closed at 11.50am.

Part Two (In Private)

18

AOB:

The Board were given more details in relation to an issue they had been made aware of at the last Board meeting for which legal advice was being sought.  A discussion was held around bringing the date for the process to be brought forward although the Board acknowledged the timeframe was already tight, it was confirmed the hard stop date for this was January 2022 and a paper on this would be brought to the next Board.

PG left the meeting at this point, 12.30pm.

The Board were also made aware of another issue in relation to the Scheme Administration, and with this, the Pension Remedy, and the above issue it was a perfect storm and more resources were urgently required within the Surrey/Sussex Police Pension Team, a recruitment process was underway with the advert due to go out soon

There was no other business.

Department/ Division:

Pensions Dept. Surrey & Sussex Police

Name:

Surrey and Sussex Police - Joint Pensions Board (Officer)

Location of meeting:

Via Microsoft Teams

Date:

Wednesday 16^th of September 2024

Time:

14:00 – 16:00

Meeting Chair:

Kelvin Menon

CFO

Office of the Surrey PCC

Name

Initials

Role

Board Members:

Iain McCulloch

KM

CFO, Office of the Sussex PCC

Peter Appleton

PA

Executive Director Commercial & Financial Services

Angela Packebusch

AP

People Services Operations Manager, Surrey & Sussex Police

Adrian Rutherford

AR

Director of People Services, Surrey & Sussex Police

Carwyn Hughes

CH

Head of Forensics, Surrey & Sussex Police

Matt Barcraft-Barnes

MBB

Superintendent’s Association, Surrey Police

Miles Ockwell

MO

Superintendent’s Association, Sussex Police

Daren Pemble

DP

Federation, Surrey Police

Raff Cioffi

DE

Federation, Sussex Police

Simon Lambert

TS

NARPO, Surrey

Graham Bradley

GB

NARPO, Sussex

Scheme Manager

Tim De Meyer

GS

Chief Constable, Surrey Police

Jo Shiner

JS

Chief Constable, Sussex Police

Board Advisors:

Jo Langley

JL

Pensions Technical Lead, Surrey & Sussex Police

Chloe Cook-Richardson

CCR

Pensions Technical Lead, Surrey & Sussex Police

Osei Sarpong

OS

Pensions Technical Lead, Surrey & Sussex Police

Shelia Love

SL

Pensions Lead for Surrey & Sussex Police, Engagement, Projects & Relationship Management

Isobel Tait

IT

Pensions Project Support Officer, Surrey & Sussex Police

Ricardo Herrera-Delgado

RHD

Head of Financial Accounting, Surrey & Sussex Police

Natalie Bevan

NB

Senior Client Relationship Manager, XPS

Graeme Hall

GH

Head of Public Sector Relations, XPS

Minutes:

Rachel Lupanko

RL

Office Manager, OPCC Surrey

Guests

Apologies:

CC Jo Shiner, Adrian Rutherford, Tim De Meyer.

Part 1 – Open Session

Item

Owner

1

Introduction and Apologies (5 minutes)   

·                Declaration by the Chair that the meeting is quorate.

·                Apologies for absence and welcome to Guests

·                Conflicts of Interest

Chair

2

Minutes / Actions from Previous Meetings (5 minutes)

·  To agree the minutes and actions of previous meetings

·  Progress on actions log

Paper

Paper

Chair

3

Pension Team – Introduction to new team members and plan (5 minutes)

Verbal

AP

4

Pension Administrator Summary (30 minutes)

·           XPS quarterly update report to the Board

·           Data & Dashboards Update

·           Data Protection

·           Additional comments and queries raised by exception

Paper

Verbal

NB/GH

All

5

Pension Remedy Update & Workplan (30 minutes)

Update:

·      National Update NPCC Scheme Managers Steering Group & Scheme Advisory Board (SAB) Updates

·      Update Surrey & Sussex Police

·      Scheme Sanction Charges

·      NPCC Police Pension & Tax Information

·      Ill Health Reviews

Workplan:

·      Review of upcoming quarter

·      GAD Valuation 2024 Data Specification

·      Annual Tax Workshops

Paper

AP/JL

6

Scheme Membership (5 minutes)

Employee side representatives to feedback on activities to encourage membership of pension scheme and reduce opt outs.

Verbal

Employee Reps

7

Employee side feedback (10 minutes)

Chair would like to seek feedback from Federation Reps, Superintendent Reps & NARPO on items of interest to the Board.

Verbal

Employee Reps

8

Risk Register (5 minutes)

·           Review of Risk Register

Paper

Chair

9

Joint Pension Board Annual Report (5 minutes)

Paper

IM

10

Review of Reported Breaches for Surrey & Sussex (5 minutes)

Verbal

JL

11

Pension Board Training Log (5 minutes)

Paper

Chair

12

AOB (5 minutes)

Verbal

Chair

13

Date of next meeting – 4/12/2024

Verbal

Chair

Department/ Division:

Pensions Dept. Surrey & Sussex Police

Name:

Surrey and Sussex Police - Joint Pensions Board (Officer)

Location of meeting:

Via Microsoft Teams

Date:

Wednesday 5 June 2024

Time:

13:00 – 15:00

Meeting Chair:

Name

Initials

Role

Board Members:

Iain McCulloch

KM

CFO, Office of the Sussex PCC

Peter Appleton

PA

Executive Director Commercial & Financial Services

Angela Packebusch

AP

People Services Operations Manager, Surrey & Sussex Police

Adrian Rutherford

AR

Director of People Services, Surrey & Sussex Police

Carwyn Hughes

CH

Head of Digital, Data & Technology Department Surrey & Sussex Police

Matt Barcraft-Barnes

MBB

Superintendent’s Association, Surrey Police

Miles Ockwell

MO

Superintendent’s Association, Sussex Police

Darren Pemble

DP

Federation, Surrey Police

Raff Cioffi

DE

Federation, Sussex Police

Simon Lambert

TS

NARPO, Surrey

Graham Bradley

GB

NARPO, Sussex

Scheme Manager

Tim De Meyer

GS

Chief Constable, Surrey Police

Scheme Manager

Jo Shiner

JS

Chief Constable, Sussex Police

Board Advisors:

Jo Langley

JL

Pensions Technical Lead

Shelia Love

SL

Pensions Lead for Surrey & Sussex Police, Engagement, Projects & Relationship Management

Ricardo Herrera-Delgado

RHD

Head of Financial Accounting, Surrey and Sussex Police

Shelia Love

SL

Pensions Lead for Surrey & Sussex Police, Engagement, Projects & Relationship Management

Isobel Tait

IT

Pensions Project Support Officer

Ricardo Herrera-Delgado

RHD

Accountant, Surrey and Sussex Police

Paul Mudd

PM

XPS

Minutes:

Rachel Lupanko

RL

Office Manager, OPCC Surrey

Guests

CC Jo Shiner, Peter Appleton, Carwyn Hughes, CC Tim De Meyer, Jo Langley & Iain McCulloch

Part 1 – Open Session

Item

Owner

1

Introduction and Apologies (5 minutes)   

·            Declaration by the Chair that the meeting is quorate.

·            Apologies for absence and welcome to Guests

·            Conflicts of Interest

Chair

2

Minutes / Actions from Previous Meetings (5 minutes)

·  To agree the minutes and actions of previous meetings

·  Progress on actions log

Paper

Paper

Chair

3

Pension Administrator Summary (25 minutes)

·         XPS quarterly update report to the Board

·         Data & Dashboards Update

·         Data Protection

·         Additional comments and queries raised by exception

Paper

Paper

Verbal

Verbal

PM

All

4

Pension Remedy (10 minutes)

·     National Update NPCC Scheme Managers Steering Group & Scheme Advisory Board (SAB) Updates

·     Update Surrey & Sussex Police

·     Scheme Sanction Charges

·     Ill Health Reviews

·     NPCC Police Pension Bulletin 7

Paper

Paper

AP

Chair

5

Scheme Membership (5 minutes)

Employee side representatives to feedback on activities to encourage membership of pension scheme and reduce opt outs.

Verbal

Employee Reps

6

Employee side feedback (10 minutes)

Chair would like to seek feedback from Federation Reps, Superintendent Reps & NARPO on items of interest to the Board.

Verbal

Employee Reps

7

Risk Register (5 minutes)

·         Review of Risk Register

Paper

Chair

8

The Pension Regulator – New Code of Practice (5 minutes)

Verbal

Chair

9

Annual Review of Board Policies and Procedures (15 minutes)

1.          Terms of Reference

2.          Conflict of Interest Policy & Procedure

3.          Knowledge & Understanding Policy

4.          DP, GDPR & information Security Policy & Procedure

5.          Code of Conduct

6.          Reporting Breaches Policy & Procedure

7.          Budget, Fees & Expenses Policy & Procedure

Papers

Chair

10

Contingent Decisions & Internal Dispute Resolution Procedure (10 minutes)

Paper

AP

11

Review of Reported Breaches for Surrey & Sussex (5 minutes)

Verbal

AP

12

Surrey/Sussex Work Plan/Timeline (5 minutes)

·         Review of upcoming quarter

·         GAD Valuation 2024 Data Specification

·         Annual Tax Workshops

Paper

AP

13

Pension Board Training Log (5 minutes)

Paper

Chair

14

AOB (5 minutes)

Verbal

Chair

15

Date of next meeting – 16/09/2024

Verbal

Chair

Department/ Division:

Pensions Dept. Surrey & Sussex Police

Name:

Surrey and Sussex Police - Joint Pensions Board (Officer)

Location of meeting:

Via Microsoft Teams

Date:

Friday 7 March 2024

Time:

10:00 – 12:00

Meeting Chair: