Local Pension Board - Monday 9 February 2026, 11:30am - Wandsworth Council Webcasting

Local Pension Board
Monday, 9th February 2026 at 11:30am 

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Thank you. The meeting is now being webcast.
Lovely. Well, welcome everybody and welcome along to this meeting of the Local Pensions Board, Monday 9th February.
And first things before declarations, obviously we had Chris, been a member on the board for the last, I think it was three, four years.
they now actually decided to leave so we have a vacancy.
Corrald, is there any update on that at all?
Yes, I added some comments to the governance report
just to ensure that it was fully recorded what was going on with it.
But in short we've got four candidates who have expressed an interest.
They are all active members of the Wandsworth Fund at the moment.
So the next stage is to have an interview, a conversation with them.
It's not a formal interview because there's not a formal job description, but to have a conversation with them,
talk through what the role entails and then decide upon one of them to be appointed to the board.
The board appointment is by the chief executive of the councils so there is no
involvement by yourselves as current board members in the process but we hope
to be introducing a new member to the board at the next meeting.
Lovely, thank you for that. Welcome that one. Before we get into minutes of last time round,
any declarations from anybody that they need to put their hand up to for items that are on the
agenda. If everybody's happy to continue, I've said before several of us wear different hats and we
all know where we do that and we should all be doing it appropriately. So that's good. Moving
on to then minutes of last time around, these were for the 3rd of November. Anybody have any
comments on those at all, any points of inaccuracy or anything that those
present feel was incorrectly recorded? If not, can we move on? Thank you. Get those
signed and item three then, training. Coral, over to you or Martin?
Martin. Lovely. Okay, Martin, off you go. Thank you, Chair. I'm just going to load
some slides bear with me for a for a moment
good hopefully you can see the size in front of you if not yeah thanks so yes
we are going to talk a little bit about communication from the pension fund
today and the first regulation that oversees communications is regulation 61
of the local government pension scheme regulations 2013 and that requires all
admin authorities to maintain and publish a communications policy statement
which we have in the past brought to the pension board and pension committee and
if there are any material changes we'll bring that back changes to the way we
communicate and in that statement the requirement is that it covers
communication with members staff representatives future members and all
participating employers. And in the statement it records the format and
frequency and distribution methods for those communications. And as
said there's a requirement to update that communications policy statement if
there are any changes and like we did when we moved to member self -service.
We there's a big change communications. We do go back and look revise those
communications
policy statements and if nothing's happened in between we do it on a regular basis about every three years.
And how do we communicate with
employers? Well since 2020 we've had a pensions admin strategy again, which has been brought to the
board and in that it has the obligations and responsibilities both of the fund
and scheme employers so clearly setting out what both fund and employers need to
do their responsibilities. We also every year the pension fund publishes its
annual report and fund statements and they're published on the Wandsworth
website. At least twice a year we hold employer forums and that gives an
opportunity to talk about the latest developments in the LGPS and also give
some training to our employers to provide a better member experience.
We've also got on our pension shared service website a dedicated employer
webpage and again that has information on the latest issues in pensions and
the changes in regulations and how that affects their duties and
responsibilities. We provide in the pension shared service help to employers
to understand their valuation and accounting reports those funding
strategy statements and investment strategy statements and we also provide
training for employers we offer offer that on a one -to -one or group basis. I
say that each employer will have at this time of year in the three -year cycle a
valuation report and we have that pension shared service website for
their employees so we support their employees knowledge of the LGPS with a
dedicated website.
In those forums, it's an opportunity for us to get over some key messages to employers,
to reinforce the value of the LGPS for their members and to make sure that employers are
aware of this.
it's the second most substantial part of the employees remuneration package after
the salary so we do use an opportunity to promote the value of those benefits
for members and the fact that the employers fund about three -quarters of
the cost of providing those pension benefits. It gives us an opportunity to
promote member self -service in the forums so we want to work with
employers to promote member self -service to their employees and it gives a better
an insight for their employees, a better experience for their employees.
They've got 24 -7 access to their pension benefits.
And we also remind the
employers that they have to
provide
clean,
timely data in respect to their employees.
we have delays then it means a delay to the payment of benefits and the
information that we can give to their employees if we have delays and clean
and accurate data. So it's really important we remind them of their
obligation under the pension scheme regulations to provide data to us and
not rely on their third -party contractor that the responsibility is on employers
to provide that information. And it's also a reminder the forums that we can
tell employers that we have a dedicated employers team in the pension shared
service who are there to help them if they have any questions. As well as our
regulations we get guidance from the pensions regulator on what looks like
good communication and their guidance is it has to be accurate and relevant, clear
and easy to understand, so plain English, accessible to those with temporary or
permanent disabilities and inclusive. Consider of the diverse range of
backgrounds and needs and vulnerabilities in the membership. So
So when we bring policy statements and member
literature to boards and committees,
those are the kind of things that you
would be looking at.
And in that guidance from the regulator,
it talks about research that they've
that found that 46 % of people in the UK are considered vulnerable. So that isn't
solely in the LGPS, that's a general look at people in the UK, LGPS,
non -LGPS. And it covers people with poor mental health, low mental capacity or
cognitive difficulties who may struggle with phone -based customer service, may
feel anxious when comparing financial products, avoid dealing with financial
matters and may fall into debt as a result. So that's the UK population as
well and that includes people who have recently experienced a relationship
breakdown may avoid dealing with financial issues, people with low
financial capability, hearing or visual impairments, physical disabilities. So a
lot of the UK population. So in terms of our wider communications we do use or
signpost to the local government associations, LGPS websites. We do have our
dedicated pension shared service website and this is the front page of that with
information for active members, deferred members and pensioners and icons to at
the top there to get into those pages and you see at the top right an icon for
employer page as well as an icon for the member self -service so clearly
identified pathways for people to get more knowledge and again from the
pensions regulator website the guidance that they've gained from nest the pension
provider for a lot of auto enrollment pensions. Firstly keep it real so pensions
communications should be as practical as possible and use examples people can
relate to. So you'll see later that we we try and use real situations real money
when we're talking about pensions. Rights not responsibility people respond more
positively to language that focuses on their entitlements rather than what they
ought to be doing. So when we send out an opt -out form we clearly say to members
it's your right to opt out but these are the benefits you will be losing and they
read the benefits that they are losing if they want to opt out. They have to be
aware of the benefits that they were losing but they have that entitlement to
leave scheme if they want for example. Out with the old. Communications about
the advantages of being in the pension scheme shouldn't focus on the details of
retirement. People don't like to hear about the problems with as you get
older perhaps your health suffers and the prospect of getting old people don't
want to hear that they want to hear a positive empowering message about their
future and the immediate entitlements that they have in the pension scheme
finally take people as you find them communication should be designed to fit
with where people are in their understanding. So you should tailor your
communications and you start a communication will not have the same
feel as somebody who's been in the scheme and is reaching retirement. You'd
expect some more knowledge of the pension scheme for those in the
retirement stage to somebody who's newly joined the scheme and may know nothing
about a patient of main and may never have received a communication about
their pension before so this month we have launched a sorry last month we
launched a new member self -service we hope that that it will be a better
experience for four members a clearer experience more intuitive for members
and this is an example from one of the landing pages giving signpost more
information and in the middle there there's a retirement planner and then a
on the left a the benefit calculators and the members can view their current
pension benefits. So we think it's going to be
attractive for users to to use and come and come back.
And in that
retirement planner there will be a chance to set goals for members and
really be clear in a very easy to see
understand for members the pathway to either a modest or moderate or more luxurious, what they call luxurious, retirement.
What that actually means, based on the research that's been done by the PLSA and Loughborough University into retirement living standards,
there'll be clear numbers on what is perceived to be or thought to be a more
affluent retirement and where they are heading. So looking ahead we will
continue on our journey of looking at electronic communication and look at the
member self -service functionality and always looking to improve that and
anything we can do to simplify the annual benefit statements we're
continuing to looking at how we present that information and looking at our
retirement and transfer information and looking for any improvement in those and
other guides. So that is the look at communication. Were there any questions
on that?
I think that's, carry on Martin.
Okay, that was communication.
Sorry Martin, it wasn't so much a specific question on any of the sections you just covered,
But I think that it raised questions for me around membership of this group as well,
given that Coral had mentioned someone's going to join our group soon.
And I wondered whether there is a short, I don't know, I don't document,
A short thing that says some of the things that would be expected of someone joining this group, this panel,
because I felt that I didn't really have any of that.
I was kind of thrown in and I'd, you know, go along picking things up and so forth.
And that's what it's about anyway. It's about learning about the pension fund.
But I felt that there ought to be an induction of some form and some of what you were raising around communication and the website and things like that that the person may know about, but we shouldn't assume that they do.
and I wondered is there an induction, sorry I've gone all round the world with it,
but is there an induction pack or sheet that someone joining could read before coming?
Do you want to respond to that?
Yeah sure, we don't have one at the moment.
what we do have is the terms of reference which lays out the responsibilities of the board itself
and thereby all the members of the board. I do take it on board, it might be handy to have
like a fact sheet with some references and places to look to find out key information.
If that's the sort of thing you were thinking of Hilary? Yes, yes I just think it just would be
helpful to come with some basis because of every groups that we join, you know, there's always
something isn't there that gives them induction to or information into the organisation
or committee or whatever. Yeah, I think they within the terms of reference Hillary, you're
within the whole pension scheme set up, how we are different to the Joint Pensions Committee
and the various responsibilities we hold. I would imagine also, Carol, that probably
includes the commitment in terms of number of meetings a year, that side of things.
So I did get that.
There's a good bit of that, Hilary, but you're right.
Yeah, I did get that. I did get that document. Yeah.
And then hopefully there's an indication clearly on the training that they would have to undertake and also the ongoing training that we get as a group as well.
So there's probably a fair bit there, but it's good to reflect on what they do get and any bits that are left out of that.
So I'm sure we'll do that.
And also, we're talking about how people learn and how they take information that, yes, having the written is good, but it's also maybe, you know, an hour or so or half an hour of actually talking through what they've learned at the start of it anyway, at least.
That's a good point. Peter, welcome. You've got your hand up there. So you've been patient
waiting in the wings. Would you like to say what you've got your hand up for?
Nothing very much, but just to apologise for being late. I had an absolute IT nightmare
this morning. So I started trying to log in on about quarter past eleven and then it went
to about two reboots. Later I eventually got on. So apologies for that. No, just my comment
I'm aware that some other pension funds, the pension board actually sends a
newsletter out to both active and retired members. I've got friends who work for other council areas and things.
I think the one I'm thinking of, I think it's half yearly,
well they'll send out something from the chair of the pension board saying, not
really what the Port Board's been doing, but what any key issues within the
pensions environment really, just as a, and that's sent as a PDF, an electronic
documents to, as they all active and retired members. So whether that's
something we would think of as a channel we could use potentially, I don't know.
You reckon maybe do that, or maybe tag it on to the employer briefing that goes
out as a separate section rather than a separate document. Possibly could be something, one that
heightens our role, two reassures people paying into the LGPS or receiving their pension that
there is another body that's involved and what role this body plays in that. So, yeah,
and then we can make sure that we're not sort of then duplicating anything that they will get
ordinarily through another source but if there are angles that we under our umbrella can raise and
let people know about which isn't covered elsewhere that probably is a good thing we can
look to do. Well we have potentially can't count as any sort of comments we have about how
representative the board is or whatever if we're sort of reaching out of the membership as it were.
Yeah, that's a good point. And then I think also as we see how fit for the future goes
and all that side of it, and we see where we stand once all that shake up's done, that's
probably a good time to get back out there and say to people, we're here, this is what
we're still doing. This is what we've been through and hopefully this is what we're still
here to do going forward so good point. Anything else on Martin's
communication presentation? Oh I think thank you for that Martin. Are you moving
straight into the pensions and mean update? Yes I can move straight into
that I was just going to slide back up I was just going to say we do have annual
newsletters that we send to actives and then these are to be sent to deferred so
it's if you wanted to add a chairs article to those and you'd be more than
more than welcome yeah I think at least an introductory one is is good to do
yeah we can talk about that going forward. Yeah, I'll just load those slides and resume. Okay good and you can see the slides so thank you.
So we've talked about these before in the previous meetings
Later and the government has signalled as it is intentionally it is going to go go ahead with the
the changes to equalising survivor benefits so looking at deaths back to
2014 and putting a sexual sex discrimination gender discrimination
remedy applying to to those. Council pensions they're still very much going
to be happening. The latest we hear is the government will introduce the change
from early May 2026 to allow pensioners into the, sorry, councillors into the
pension scheme. We've got fair deal, new fair deal coming. The increase to the
minimum pension age to age 57 which the government is introducing protections
for the LGPS for members so we'll have two tranches of members with without
protections some we can retire at age 55 and some we can retire at age 57 so an
extra complication for administering pensions. Changes to inheritance tax it
will apply to some death death grants will be included now in the inheritance
tax calculations and personal representatives can ask the pension fund
to pay inheritance tax so this is all new to us and will be new procedures
and more administration to administering death grants. Forfeiture
it'll be easier for administering authorities to apply forfeiture to take
pensions away from people who are guilty of misconduct. There's going to be
more Academy moving pension funds pension areas so consolidating around if
there are other academies in another administering area another pension fund
there'll be more of a drive to to consolidate into other pension funds a
lot more movement around that gender pension gap reporting will come in and
funds will have to report on the gender pension gap we expect that there'll be
opt -out reporting so there'll be an invitation now for those opting out of
the pension scheme to go on to a website and put in the reasons why and also to
declare whether they've got any protected characteristics and to kind of
get a map of who's opting out on the pension scheme and there'll be some
changes to the amount of the very maximum lump sum that members can can
take. So quite a bit of change still to come through this system and that's the
all the all the changes. We're on the pathway for the valuation we've been
looking at this sort of roadmap for some time we'll reach the end of the
the valuation process and will come to a head when the pension committee when it
next sits confirming the valuation report and the rates and adjustments
to get the employer rates from the 1st of April 2026. So employers have been
sent their
contribution, draught contribution rates.
So that's the valuation.
Pension Share Service has its
ongoing
projects, the Altair pensioner payroll,
pensions dashboards, we talked about the member self -service upgrade. We
have received information back from our third party on the GMP reconciliation, so
working through that with a view to adjusting any affected pensioners. We
have a telephone system at the moment called Netcore and we are looking to
upgrade that. We're hosted by the council and it's the council system and we hope
that when once we've upgraded our net call telephone system between May and
August this year onto a new platform it'll give us more functionality and
give a better customer experience and we're also working with the council to
develop box agents for our mailbox to sort emails and so again providing a
better customer experience. So Carrie I think you're going to just say a few
words about our AUGTER pensioner payroll implementation. Yep good afternoon
So we have a project to migrate pensioner payrolls from each individual pension fund that we work with onto the Altair Pensions Admin software.
We appointed at the beginning of January, we had a new payroll manager start with us.
She has experience already with pensioner payroll in the LGPS on the same system with another fund.
And so we're very happy to have her on board.
We've also made a couple of internal appointments as well.
So a promotion for one of our pension officers to the team leader role on the payroll, new payroll team,
and also an appointment for one of our pension assistants to a pension officer
role on the payroll team. So we have in place regular project meetings with
Haywood our software supplier and then each of the individual funds those are
split off into two kind of natural streams at the moment those of our funds
that use iTrent payroll and those of our funds that use the Oracle payroll
systems just so that they're likely to have similar issues. We are working
through at the moment getting payroll extracts from their system so that we
can build the conversion into the pensions admin system. And in terms of
timelines we're expecting to get our first cut of data from Merton in January
sorry in June 2026 when their pension and payroll closes and then we'll go
into a two -month period of parallel running so the team will be doing
dual input on both the Merton payroll system and on our pensions admin system
to make sure that the payments that we're making are aligned and reconciled
with a view to if everything is successful going live in September with
Merton. The remaining funds will follow slightly later and so we'll be taking
lessons learned from the Merton payroll conversion exercise and put in any
lessons learned into place with the ongoing projects with the remaining
payrolls. So we'll be taking the first cut of data in August, parallel running
in September and October and then looking to go live on those final
payrolls in November. Attached to that is also a project to initiate all of our
one -off payments from the from the pensions admin system as well so if
somebody is retiring we pay their lump sum from directly from our system if
someone's taking a refund of contributions we'd pay that directly
from the system so and so major project involving all of our all of our partner
funds. So that's where we are with that at the moment. Any questions on pensioner
payroll? On dashboards at the last board meeting we reported that we had
connected to the infrastructure so we are now submitting data to the pensions
dashboard infrastructure overnight every day. We are still working with our AVC
providers to connect their data to the dashboard. As of December 2025 more than
700 pension providers have completed their connexion so that represents
more than 60 million workplace and personal pensions already connected to
dashboard. The dashboards are undergoing testing at the moment so we're currently
in this blue phase of testing where users it's unmoderated testing now so
users can log on small selection of small numbers of users can log on
register themselves for the dashboard and and view their value data from their
from the dashboards. During this testing phase we are expected to respond to any queries and so we
could get queries that are as a result of the data matching not being quite accurate so maybe they've
given us a surname and a date of birth that matches but maybe the national insurance number
didn't match those members will contact us clarify their details and then once we connect them
the dashboard they'd be able to see their value data so we have to respond
to those find requests within the within the slush tree deadlines and then
similarly if there is data if a member can find a match with their data but
there's no value data there so that could be if somebody has left the scheme
and we haven't yet calculated the value of the benefits in the pension scheme
and that will come back as there's no value data available and we'll have
again, 10 days to respond and get the value data available to the member on the on the pensions dashboard.
So with the numbers of people testing aren't high, but during this time
we still need to have our processes in place to pick up any of those queries that we get through.
So
That's where we are on dashboards.
Martin mentioned we went live with our new upgraded member self -service
platform in January. All previous members will need to re -register to use the
site. We contacted, we did a email to any registered members just before
Christmas to let them know that we would be upgrading the the portal and that
they'd need to re -register. In the background we've been busy updating all
of our pension shared service website pages to make sure they reflect the new
portal and the new processes and also making sure all of our in -house
processes and workflows line up with the new arrangements for issuing activation
keys. If members contact us via the portal how we contact them back and
how we can use automation to deal with a lot of those queries and also what
happens when a member updates their address. So we're doing regular meetings
with all the different teams that have new functionality on the portal just to
make sure that our back office processes line up with what's now
available. So while we've been going through that process and also ironing
any sort of sticking points that members are experiencing when they're
re -registering. We haven't done a big comms exercise to members to say that
it's now available. We just want to make sure we've got everything right before
we make it available, make sure we can communicate any of those
solutions to any sticking points ahead of time. So we'll be sending
out comms very shortly to all members and asking employers to promote
promote the new site to. So that's engage. We also have ongoing projects to improve
our data quality scores with the pensions regulator. So the pensions
regulator requires all pension schemes to constantly monitor its data
standards and they're measured against common data items and scheme specific
data items. So common data items will be for example making sure that you have
national insurance numbers available on all member records. Scheme specific data
items could be that if you've had a transfer in that those data items are
recorded, there's certain data items recorded correctly on your system. And so
We've continued to improve our data scores over the time that we've been required to report to the pensions regulator.
And some of those scores where we don't perform so well will be things like member addresses for members that have a deferred entitlement with us
and they've lost contact with us over the years and we have no way of getting in contact with them.
those will always remain something like a data failure
if we don't have an up -to -date address for a member.
And so we'll continue to do member tracing exercises,
but there will always be a proportion of members
that we don't have current addresses for.
And the other one that we don't score so well on
is GMP data.
But as Martin said, we've had our data back
from our third party provider who's been looking at our GMP reconciliation for us.
So with that data coming back in, those scores should also improve.
And then onto service performance.
So you'll see there are some categories,
transferring and out actuals where the scores are fairly not up to the standard
we would normally expect to have. We've spoken in previous meetings about
the staffing challenges that we've had over the last few years and it's taken
time to train replacement staff up to the same level. I think also during the
last couple of years we've also had the McLeod exercise that's ongoing and the
software hasn't kept pace with the changes in regulations so for transfers
in particular the team have had to do a lot of manual calculations the
calculations aren't carried out in the in the admin system so it's been yet
calculations on spreadsheets that then have to be translated into the members
records so there's also a lot more with transfers the pensions regulator has
introduced a lot more diligence that pension schemes have to carry out before
they can transfer pensions out of the of the LGPS so making sure that it's a
registered pension scheme that the member hasn't been isn't being a victim
of a scam that if their values value of their benefits are over a certain amount
that they've taken financial advice before they can transfer. So there's the
complexity of transfers has increased over that period as well. So the
scores are low. I think that represents the fact that we are now or we have been
fully staffed on that team now and the team are working through backlogs and so
there will be a higher number of failures in those categories while we continue to catch
up with where we should be.
Did anybody have any questions on that?
Thanks Carrie, I mean on that point that you've just mentioned, I mean obviously it does stick
out a bit like a sore thumb.
Yep.
And I know we've had those conversations about this area before and then equally added into
I can see that now probably in terms of reporting performance we've split out transfer in and
out quotations from actuals as well.
And the target for achievement on all of those still sits at 98%.
Is it fair on yourselves at the current time based upon as you say the fact that manual
calculations are needing to be done and the complexity that's involved in that.
Is it perhaps a temporary situation that the target level of 98 % is unrealistic and is
that something that we can probably consider bearing in mind what you've said about those
that that should perhaps be a lower target for a period of time or is it the view that
you and the team believe that you can get up to that level within the next 12
months or so.
Well, Martin, do you want to, you're poised to speak.
I was going to say that, um, we,
we will review what other funds are, their KPIs,
and we will cheque that we are in keeping with those,
targets we we we always say there's no silver bullet in pension administration
what we're looking like is trends and we are looking as a to get the trend up
towards the the the target so I would would say we will have a look at that
target and review it with our other providers in the market.
Sorry, Carrie, you were going to say?
And I was also going to say that also it has to be in partnership with all the
funds that participate in the shared service, that they don't have to be on
board with any new targets that we set for ourselves.
I just think, I think the way you phrased it in terms of the obstacles that are currently
out there, if it's permissible, if it's not going to look out of kilter, I'd be sympathetic
to a sort of a gradual move back towards the 98 % over a two or three year period if that's
I don't think it's fair that you've got 98 % there because it's been the target that's
mostly applicable across a lot of those areas if it's not something that realistically can
be achieved in the next year or two.
But if we can see gains being made so that we get to that point, I'm more relaxed if
if that target level is lower in future submissions,
and then we can see it increasing over the next two,
two, three years, if there's no,
yeah, if that's reasonable.
I don't know what other colleagues think.
It just looks as if the team's underperforming,
and if it's only underperforming
because of having hands tied for several reasons,
I think a target should be adjusted to allow for that provided there's justification for it.
Anybody disagree?
No, I'd support that definitely.
Yeah, so can I leave that with you then Martin?
I mean you have our blessing to say come back to us and say actually we're probably a couple
years off before we could get anywhere near that level, are you happy for us to
put it in at 75 % or something like that? And I'm sure we'd be sympathetic to that.
Okay thank you. As I say, we're having internal discussions and improvement
plans internally so yeah as a result of that we'll come back and talk about this.
Yep.
Okay, thank you for that.
My only other comment on the earlier bit where Martin was doing it was, you mentioned that
the employers have been given a draught contribution level for April onwards.
Have they been sent out to everybody?
I will...
One's worth no.
Oh, my apologies.
Yeah.
I think the intention was we had them available but we spotted something that
didn't look quite right and went back to the actuaries and they're just reviewing
them before they give us the green light to send them out so hopefully that
should be this week I'd imagine.
Perfect, I just wanted to make sure I hadn't deleted you by mistake.
Peter, over to you.
Yeah just a couple of queries. I found the presentation really useful actually in terms of the admin part of the agenda.
actually you talking to it and I thought that yeah that's worked very well for me today.
Two queries really on the Councillor pensions I'm assuming they definitely don't come in until
the new councils for Richmond the ones would start from the midnight on whatever the night the day is
so so we're not going to have Councillors from the 1st of May having a pension and then they will get
replaced by other Councillors. Yeah so then the second question was really on the sort of the
portal. Do we think that down the line that might create quite a lot of queries
if somebody like Martin Lewis picks it up and sticks it on national television
every girl look at the national portal you can cheque on your pensions and
everything we're gonna get lots of queries and do we need to try and
channel shift those queries I don't know.
Yep so I think on the first question about the councillors yes I think the
the date is either the 9th or the 11th that they'll come in, that they'll be in their eggs from.
And in terms of the dashboards, we don't have volumes as such. I think there is some anecdotal
evidence from, I think a lot of Scandinavian countries have been live on their dashboards
for several years and it does produce a lot more engagement. I would hope that
our focus ahead of going live so the data availability point so that's the
date from which the government makes it live to them to the public. We'll
get six months notice of that but that's a date yet to be decided. We are
anticipating that's likely to be around the summer of 2027 and so between now
then our focus will be on improving that data, trying to make sure that
we've got good match data for our members and then also getting on top of
any benefits that haven't yet been calculated and trying to drive to make
sure that we've got as much data available in our system as possible.
One of the places that the dashboard will redirect people to is our member website,
is our portal where they can log on. So hopefully all the things that
we're doing now are going to pave the way for us but there is a big unknown
for us in the future.
Anybody else? Anything on communication? Can I just add a congratulations on the
new platform for member self -service? I'm going to have a little play with it.
and it's yeah very good so good progress there well done. Brilliant thanks. Great.
Okay can we move on then to a Government's investment update and this one I won't let you off Coral
I'm sure it's you this time. Would you like to update us on the slow progress that's being made
but progress nonetheless in these two areas.
Yes, certainly.
This one is me.
And I have been spending a lot of time looking at this.
So do tell me if I'm giving you far too much data.
So I'll start with the Fit for the Future consultation.
So I think since we last met,
we've had some draught statutory instruments,
which give a bit more clarity on what's going to be going on with that. So we're
still looking at the very first of March, 1st of April handover for management of
all of our investments to the London SIV. The way that the SIV are handling that
is the SIV cannot write legal agreements individually to change all the contracts
that we've got. So what we're doing is we're writing an investment management
agreement which will go over the top of all the agreements just to say and
everything that Wandsworth Pension Fund has a right to do at the moment we're
giving that right to the London SIV. We're in the final stages of negotiating
the wording of that agreement and in fact I've got a template that I'm
filling in our data at the moment so that should be signed well in advance to
31st of March deadline which makes both us and the SIV compliant with the new
requirements. Sorry I should have said that these the pension schemes bill and
the statutory instruments the two specific ones for the LGPS are still in
draught form they have not been approved they're making their way through the
the Legislative System. We are hoping that they will be in place before the end of the year.
The statutory instruments certainly have been written to be effective from the 1st of April,
regardless of when they're signed, so we do need to work on the basis that they'll be retrospective
if needed. This is just a case of getting them through the government approval process.
So the management of the investments I've just spoken about to say that there will be a legal agreement where we give the right to make the investment decisions as required by the legislation.
I've summarised in Appendix A for you some of the actual, we've now got some
key dates that have been given in the two statutory instruments that have been
consulted on. We've not heard back as a result of a consultation but they did
actually, they have actually put some deadlines in which helps because it
gives us a bit of clarity, a timeline so we're not panicking to do everything by
31st of March which we had been previously concerned we might need to do
so we've got time to appoint an independent, I'll get the wording wrong
but it's an independent person to the Joint Pensions Committee to act as a
what you call it a cheque on the advice that the London SIV will be giving us.
We will still need to take our primary investment advice from the SIV but we
have the ability to have someone on our committee who's an expert and it talks
about in the regulations what expert means to give us assurance on what the
SIF are doing because one of the issues that I'm sure Paul won't mind me saying
that with his head of audit hat on he had concerns about the fact that the
London SIF would be advising us and implementing the advice so that does
and it's not the sort of situation that we're used to having.
The government argues that the SIV are run by us,
so the shareholder committee of the SIV are all the London boroughs,
so in theory there shouldn't be any conflict of interest in issuing advice and then implementing it.
But a lot of boroughs went back and said,
we are concerned about this and I think in fact you might be in yourself chair a
previous board meeting raised concerns around this as well it is the sort of
thing that looks like a conflict of interest even if it isn't one so that's
being addressed by this and we've got I think it is until September to a point
to that as well as the investment management agreement whereby we're
giving the legal rights to the SIF to make the investment decisions for us,
which we have to sign because the regs say they're giving them the legal right regardless.
We're just putting a bit of paper to formally notify our investment managers of this.
We're also getting a service level description, which is a service level agreement by another
known SIF who have decided to call it a service level description. That will cover some of the
it's not really a contractual relationship but what would normally be
the the KPIs between the fund and its supplier if this was a normal contract.
So we're working on that. I was actually at a meeting at the SIV on Friday
going through that so that again is in progress. There's a lot of things that
the SIV are being asked to do for the 1st of April and I think they've
accepted that it's not reasonable to expect them to go live with all of the
things that the government's asking. On the 1st of April we will have some sort
of transition plan. I feel that that's the right way to go about things because
if you're handing over that volume of investment and management of our
hundred million pounds issue of cash as well. That's a lot of transfer of assets
for 33 funds giving to one organisation. We support the CIV in thinking that it's
less risky to go about this in a staged process so we will be implementing it.
we'll be having discussions with the SIV, talking about what the specific issues are
for our fund, because there's 33 funds who are going to be handing over these things
to the London SIV and we're all set up slightly differently.
It's been quite eye -opening for me going to the meetings at the SIV and hearing, however,
some funds are quite like us, some have quite different set -ups and it depends on the administering
authorities situation as much as anything else and the complexity of the
fund. So some of us appoint a custodian to look after our assets which ones were
fund had to have because we had direct holdings so we actually owned equities
until about a year or two years ago that we sold them to give the money to
the sieve. So if you're doing that you need someone to keep track of your
ownership of the actual assets. Some funds have only ever invested in pooled
investments which just means you've got units in a fund so you don't need a
custodian for that. So we're all at different places, it doesn't make sense
to expect the SIV to do a one -size -fits -all implementation for 1st of
April, that wouldn't work for anyone. So we're working through that
process with them. I don't know if the board want to ask any questions on
that or if you want to wait to the end because I have my report is in different
segments so it might make sense to take questions on each segment as they come
up if there are any. Anybody got anything for Coral at this point? No, otherwise you're
doing such a good job you can carry on. Thank you. So we're also looking at the
responsible investment policy so I think the board will remember that you
were asked to consider letters from Trade Union at the last meeting so and
those you asked to be passed on to the pensions committee. Now the pensions
Committee at their last meeting received a delegation deputation and the
committee had a lot of... the committee accepted that they maybe should be
reviewing the responsible investment policy. They felt there would
be some appetite to have some exclusions for areas of conflict. I believe
the UN genocide convention was mentioned, so there was a consensus at the committee at the public meeting that we don't want to be supporting organisations or people who are taking part in genocide, which is illegal.
There was a lot of discussion about how we could actually achieve that aim.
The SIV were again there because all our investments will be with the London SIV.
We need them to provide the products for us that meet these requirements.
And the SIV have since last summer actually been engaging with councils,
with administering authorities to talk about what sort of responsible
investment policies we wanted. They're at the point where they've got three
options on the table. There was some discussion around what it's
actually legal for us to do and that's the problem with this. So where we
are with that at the moment is that we've commissioned Kings Council's
because there are two conflicting opinions in the public domain.
The Saab asked for an opinion which highlighted our fiduciary duty to look at the investment
returns for the benefit of all the stakeholders in the fund as the primary duty and as backed
by regulations as they stand to only take into account non -financial issues after taking
proper advice, the proper advice confirming that they are not a material impact on the
fund, an adverse impact on the fund, and then making sure that you have reason to believe
that members of the fund approve of the policy.
We have had several delegations from unions.
Unions will probably, I don't know how many retired members are still members of a union,
so unions will only represent active membership as a general rule,
and there are a lot of retired pensioners,
so it might be that we need to do some consultation with all members of a pension fund
before we go ahead with any of the things that are being asked for.
So there will be a paper which goes back to the March Committee
taking legal advice. Now in your role as ensuring the governance of the Fund
you hopefully will be satisfied that we are taking Council's opinion
and that will protect the Fund for any legal challenge if we go ahead with any
of this and the opinion will
should be advising us on how we would go about agreeing exclusions and things like that if
that's what we decide we want to do. So it's still ongoing but it was quite a hot topic
still with two deputations presentations at the committee from a union and from
um I think they were um another member of the fund. Is there any questions on that?
JB It's not so much about questions it's yeah it's just it is a an uneasy um area
at the moment isn't it or has been for a while about um where funds are invested and the politics
of it all and yeah so I just wanted to say that it just feels really uneasy because as my opinion
may be slightly different because it's for the organisation, it's for the funds
for pensioners so one may have conflict of views within oneself that's what I mean.
Yeah, it is very difficult and there's such a wide range. I mean we don't at the moment know what the views of the membership are.
We've got a few people like Unison claiming to know what their membership's views are.
I'm not quite sure how widely they've engaged with their memberships to get to this.
I'm not saying they have or they haven't, I'm saying I don't know.
No, no.
You know, I don't want to be misquoted somewhere of making accusations.
But that again, that only addresses people who were members of that union.
They don't know about the people who aren't union members, or the people who are retired
members who may or may not keep up your union subscription, if you ever were a member of
the union.
So it's, there's a large number of people we might need to be getting into contact with
to meet a requirement of the majority?
I mean, there's a lot of questions there
because the regulations say not material.
As an accountant, it's always what is material
to discuss that with our auditors.
And then it's the majority of members.
And again, how many is the majority?
Do you have to get a response rate
and a majority within that response rate,
minimum response rate?
There's a lot of questions there.
Sorry, and Peter had another one.
Yeah, I feel clear, Peter.
Okay, so mine are the March Committee paper. Will we get sight of that or is it a Part 2 paper,
would be the first question. The second one is the nature of the three options that's the
SIV are producing. Would there be three options? Would there be three investment
routes we could choose or is it going to be the best of them all?
And then the other question's gone out of my head now.
If it comes back to you, raise it.
But I've got enough to talk about for the minute.
The March paper, I believe it will be...
I think we would want as...
I think the paper will be a...
What do you call it?
It won't be an exempt paper.
I don't think we will be allowed to publish the whole of the advice
because the advice is for the council or the administering authority rather, I need to get my terminology right,
and cannot be used by others. And if you put it in the public, I think there's tricky
issues around quoting
a legal opinion.
But certainly because there were public
delegation, deputation, I really should try and remember which word it is, because it
was a public discussion at the last committee we really want to get as much
public domain as possible to be so that the people who raised the issue know
what we're doing about it. So it will be a public paper that goes back to March
committee. It won't have all the details of the, might not have all the details in
it but we'll put as much as possible in the public paper. In terms of the three
I hope I'm not doing the SIV a disservice by saying it my impression is
that they're looking at three different levels of concerns about non -financial
issues so there'll be a a low very few exclusions around legal issues there'll
medium and then there'll be a high level of exclusions. Obviously this is
coming out of discussions with the 33 boroughs who are involved in the London
SIF so they cannot do 33 different investment options so that what they're
planning to do is they've got now an idea of what their funds are looking for
they now need to go and find some set up, create some investments for us and say
this is aligned to the low level, this is aligned to the high exclusion level, this
is aligned to the medium exclusion level and then once we've expressed to them
which level we want, they call it pillars but it's a level, they will then make the
for us aligned to that but they're at the start of this process as well. They
spent a lot of time engaging with administering authorities to make sure
that they get this right and but that does mean that they don't have a lot of
products ready for people who will say back to them yes I want a level three
fund or yes I want a level one fund.
That's great.
The other question that's very into my mind now is, what's our relationship with Mercer
going to be going forward?
Because obviously Mercer were providing us with the advice that we're now going to be
getting from the SIV.
Yeah, that was the large majority of what Mercer have been providing us with up to now.
And as you rightly say, that will now transfer to the SIV.
We have an ongoing contract with them but it's a... there's a proper word for this
but in my head it's a pay -as -you -go contract so you pay for what you ask for
there's no guaranteed minimum level with them so the contract will run to term we
will probably ask them for some ad hoc advice on other things I'm not quite
sure what but Mercer are aware of this in all I think in pretty much every
commercial contract terms I've seen there is a clause that says if
legislation overrides the terms of this contract which in this case it will be
that we can no longer Commission the advice from them so there shouldn't be
any default penalty payments for us because within the terms of the
contract it's been overridden once the legislation is passed so there will be
much reduced if any role at all for MRSA going forward especially once we
appoint the independent person to the committee that's the sort of role that
we would have used potentially MRSA for going forwards like I say all we've got
is the definition an independent person I don't recall and I will if it says it
can't be an organisation if it has to be an actual person.
And I have not made a note of it in my,
yeah, it says independent person.
That's all.
I was speaking to Jeff Houston about that point last week,
who works for Baliwadi on the government side.
and he was saying the government's intention is going to be a person rather than an organisation.
I mean they've used the term person in the guidance so I suspect that could well be indicative.
But the drawback if you're getting an organisation you can vary it and get a range of
areas covered but one person it relies on one person's knowledge yes yes indeed
so yeah it's um and I don't know if there will be any sort of rule that it
can't be a person who's employed by someone like Mercer although their
contract of employment may prevent them from doing that anyway so yeah it's it's
it's all still being discussed as Martin says.
Quite a messy area isn't it, I mean if we're saying that from 1st of April the SIF will
be responsible for all investment and we have a small voice in that, probably a very small
voicing that going forward. It's probably this area in terms of the unions and the Friends of
Palestine or of this, the timescale is just unrealistic for us as an individual ministering
authority to do anything at this particular stage. I think it's probably a wise thing to have sort of
legal advice telling us, probably telling us that at this point so that we are seen to be doing
something with it but this very much will be passed on to the CIF to deal with in roundabout
way and I still can't see how they can then come back and give all 33 authorities the
choice to go low, medium, high. I don't know if that's the intention and then the risk
that an authority would then have is say well we're putting a low value on this rather than
value and where you stand legally going forward from that front so it's very
complicated. Yeah, yeah it is and I think I'm not sure if other funds are
taking legal advice on this as well. Paul would know because he has more
contacts in other funds. I think he said that one other fund has asked for a
legal opinion on what they can do, what decisions they can make, how they can
the decision same as we are getting our legal advice on it. But yeah, it's going to take a
while for the SIV to have, you know, once we've set our responsible investment policy and said we want
this, we then need to see which of the SIV's options with the different exclusions. So there's
one that doesn't exclude defence, one that does exclude all of defence, which the UK government
is investing in defence at the moment? Are we going against the UK government?
So it is a very complicated area and that's why we are getting the legal
advice because we want to be confident that any decision made by the committee
is a legal decision that's within the law. But yeah it is very
complicated and once we make that decision we will then say well what our
responsible investment policy is probably a best fit to this option from
the SIV and the SIV will then need to go away and find some investments for us in
the types of asset that we want to invest in that aligns to that
responsible investment. It's very tricky. There's a lot of work that needs to be
done on it but yeah it's I think that we do need the legal advice to know how to
progress this. You're right, a lot of work needs to be done but with your hands tied behind your back as well.
So it's very difficult. We will be fully reliant on the London SIF to provide what we ask for once we've made the decision what we want.
But we have no control of that anymore so we just need to accept that unfortunately.
well. Okay, is that yet on your update? I've also given you some information on our progress
against our decarbonisation target which looks like good news. We are progressing in the right
direction, we look like we're going to be meeting our targets on that. I've put some information on
The data, however data is calculated in the report for you, I won't read all of that out for you.
The bottom line is that it is good news. We're moving in the right direction. There are some caveats
because
apparently this is still quite a new area. So the data is improving
not quite day by day, but the data is
continuously improving on it.
On the bright side that should
you would think that as the data quality is improving, the amount of carbon we're
reporting would go up and our amount of carbon we're reporting is going down,
which gives us some assurance that even while they're capturing more data, getting
more responses, we're still moving in the right direction. So because we just had
that report back from the London Civ recently, I thought it was worth bringing
that to the board's attention because as part of responsible investment that is
something that is of interest to I think some members still. We haven't had
lobbying around that for a while but I think there is still interest for
membership. Yeah that's very positive news and yeah and very very wise to include it.
Any comments from anybody on that particular bit?
If not, we've already covered the vacancy that we have earlier.
Thank you for that.
So, I should just raise one quick query, not on the decarbonisation area,
but on the local pension board vacancy, I sort of missed the beginning of the meeting,
so I probably missed any updates.
Any further updates on where we are on that vacancy?
No, we've confirmed that we've had four candidates express an interest.
We've confirmed that they are active members of the fund
and we're now going to have an interview conversation with them
to talk through the responsibilities, see how good a fit they are to the role
and then the appointment will need to be made by the Chief Executive
so it won't come back to yourselves.
you will hopefully welcome a new member to your next meeting with potentially some sort of
fact sheet and induction meeting prior to them joining the committee, the board. Sorry, my bad.
That's great, thanks.
Thank you. So the risk management section again, is that going to be you again, Coral?
Yep, that's me again. I go for fun stuff. Which is why I talked about risk a lot when I was talking about governance.
Yeah, so this is the normal report that the board sees. Because we've had a bit more information out about Fit for the Future, I've gone through it and updated some of the risks, bearing in mind the new information that we're getting.
So I think it's best to keep it as up to date as possible as we get the new information.
I've added in a transition risk because we are handing over a lot of investment
and responsibility to the London SIV and we need to do that in an orderly fashion
to make sure that nothing, you know, we're not both trying to do the same thing. All
of those issues with transitional things don't fall down between the both of us.
So there's updates for that. There's updates. I've added transition risk and
updated the pensioners payroll move to Altair as a risk issue which hopefully
will come off in November December time as we go live with it successfully but
hopefully I've not jinxed it then but there are I think Carrie spoke about it
in the administration update item there's a lot of meetings going on
there's a lot of discussion with relevant people I'm involved in it
because I need to have assurance that the data that's coming into the accounts,
because it's a significant part of the pension funds accounts, is correct and
I'm happy that I'm being involved appropriately in all of that on behalf
of Wandsworth fund. So it's any sort of change like that, there are risks
involved with it but I think there's a lot of mitigation in place for those risks.
Yeah, thank you for that. What significant update to both new risks and the control measures
in place for existing ones. You're right, there's a little bit of this is how we see
it as we currently are, because then no doubt will be other changes that we'll be putting
in as Fit for the Future takes its hold.
Clearly some of the responsibilities that are still levied on the Joint Pensions Committee
will change in due course, no doubt, but yeah, I've got no comments on any of them as being
not relevant at this stage or I fully support the ones that you've added in.
I don't know if anybody else has any comments on them at all.
Coral, do you want to add any more on that?
No, I'm not going to read it out for you.
So hopefully the highlighting in red helps the members of the board identify all the new additions.
So it's just if a board felt that there was anything missing or inappropriately scored.
The only query I've got is around the payroll and data security because obviously we've
got all of the payroll information is going to be in one place and then therefore if we
had a hack and lost the date, a date of seepage or whatever, it's all in one place for a large
number of also administering funds.
Are there sort of additional measures being put into the setting up of the system around
data security? Probably one for Carrie to answer. She's taking herself off mute, I'm
hoping that's what she means. Yeah I mean we have regular, our software provider
does regular penetration testing, provides us with all the assurances
about what would happen if the system went down. We are hosted and
there are backups of the system taken. Martin, did you want to add
anything else on that? Yeah, so yeah I mean there are controls in
place as Carrie said. It's something we are mindful of and we have quarterly
meetings with our software provider to and one of those items is about the
cyber security so yeah it is prevalent and start the staff training on cyber
security we handle all that data paint all that we've already got all those
payroll details on our scanned in files and our information anyway so it is you
primary aim for us to to look after the cyber cyber security. Anybody else any
comments on the risk management and risk register side of things? No? Anything
else from any colleagues that's not on the agenda any other business at all?
Okay, in which case, I'll bring this particular meeting to a close. Thanks, members for being
present and for your contributions. And also thank you to the team as ever, for what you've
been doing in the background and then what you bring to us to be able to say well done
for everything going forward. There's a lot of work going on and a lot of things put into place
over recent months which is good and still things coming down further down the line
and some regulation changes as well just to keep everybody on their toes. So
thanks everybody and we'll see you next time. Thank you.