Agenda item

A report of the Director of Finance was presented to provide Members of the Teesside Pension Board with information on items scheduled in the work plan for consideration at the current meeting.

The latest triennial valuation of the Fund (as at 31 March 2022) was currently in progress.  Reports were brought to the last two Board meetings outlining progress.   The reports had been exempt owing to commercial sensitivity around draft information and the intellectual capital contained within.   The Board would continue to be kept informed throughout the valuation process, with the final report due to be published by the end of March 2023.

At present almost all Pension Fund employers had been provided with details of their draft valuation outcome, setting out the employer contribution rates they would be required to pay over the three year period commencing 1 April 2023.  Although these were presented as ‘draft’ results, the outcome was unlikely to change unless some material discrepancy was identified in the data used to prepare the report, or if the employer proposed a realistic alternative contribution pattern that was acceptable to the Pension Fund that would achieve the same funding objective.

An example draft valuation outcome report together with a Briefing Note from the actuary which was also sent to employers was enclosed at Appendix B to the submitted report.

As part of the communication process around the valuation, all employers were invited to an online Employer Forum held on 10 February 2023 where the actuary gave a presentation explaining more about the valuation process and outcomes and also took questions from attendees.  A copy of the slides used at this presentation was attached at Appendix C to the submitted report.  Employers were encouraged to contact the Head of Pensions Governance and Investments if they wanted to discuss their valuation outcome.  The Board would have the opportunity to discuss the final valuation outcome and report at the next meeting.

A Pensions Dashboard would be introduced by Government which would enable people to see all their pension information in one place online.  By October 2024 each pension fund was required to submit information to the Dashboard in a format that could be uploaded and matched with other records.  This would be a complex process involving cleansing data and working with other organisations to ensure it could be shared in the correct format.  This exercise was likely to generate a lot of enquiries to XPS.  It was confirmed that XPS would continue to issue paper annual statements and deal with enquiries by phone for those people who could not access information online. 

This issue of staff who were transferred to other organisations via TUPE was raised and in particular the advice they received around transferring their pensions.  It was clarified that employers who had taken the staff from a trust or school and had obligations to continue to provide the Local Government Pension Scheme for those existing members as well as those who were not in the scheme but were eligible to join if they wished.  XPS could provide pensions awareness sessions if required.

AGREED that:

1.           the information provided was received and noted.

2.           Pensions Dashboard and Cyber Security would be added to the Work 

  Plan.