Agenda item

This paper sets out a summary of the performance of the Local Pension Partnership Administration (LPPA) in providing a pension administration service to the Hammersmith & Fulham Pension Fund, including the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for the period January 2023 – March 2023, i.e., Quarter 4 (Q4), and a summary of LPPA’s KPI performance over the last 12 months.

Eleanor Dennis (Head of Pensions) provided a summary of the performance of the Local Pension Partnership Administration (LPPA) in providing a pension administration service to the Hammersmith & Fulham Pension Fund (HFPF). She gave an update to the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) further to those listed in the report, covering up to May 2023.

Councillor Laura Janes was pleased to note the encouraging improvements. She was concerned about follow-up actions taken to rectify the errors in reporting.  Eleanor Dennis explained that they were errors in the system, with the clock started ticking, with the relevant information and documents for processing were yet to be received.  On methodology to be adopted, David Hughes (Director of Audit, Fraud, Risk and Insurance) said he believed the data would be more accurate in future given the LPPA’s Managing Director (MD) had reassured this going forward.

Councillor Florian Chevoppe-Verdier noted that LPPA had managed to clear the backlog inherited from the previous pension administrators.  Eleanor Dennis said it took LPPA a while to deal with some of the cases hence all 740 cases were processed by 30th April 2023, a month later than the target completion date.

Noting that member surveys were conducted by sending emails after retirement, helpdesk interactions, bereavements, and joining the scheme, to allow LPPA to gather feedback and continue to improve the experience across the processing teams, Councillor Chevoppe-Verdier was keen to know about the outcome of these surveys. Eleanor Dennis confirmed only a handful were received from LBHF members so unfortunately there was no qualitative data to share from these as they were such a small sample.

On missed SLA cases, the Committee noted that the cases which missed on Retirements and Bereavements Team for Q4 (January to March 2023) were reviewed. Significant work had taken place around ensuring the system was triggering the SLA start date at the correct point. For some of these cases the SLA trigger point was under the old methodology and was triggered at an earlier point in the process. This had not been corrected retrospectively meaning that performance was likely to be under reported in some instances. SLA performance in April and May 2023 had improved significantly.

Iain Cassidy observed the huge jump in the performance against SLA cases for the two months of April and May as compared to the three months in Q4, given the latter contained some cases in unallocated category.

Eleanor Dennis explained that to address the challenges facing the Retirements Team, a significant training programme was in place. This was showing positive results alongside improved checking and re-work and work allocation processes. The challenges on the Bereavement Team primarily related to checking processes. The team had now changed the way of checking and added additional controls. The work allocation had also been revised and the performance against the SLA was significantly improving into April and May.

The Chair expressed appreciation for the hard work of the Pension Administration Team in holding the LPPA into account.  He considered it necessary to reiterate the Committee’s frustrations to the LPPA’s MD about the performance against SLA and the quality of data.  He said he stood ready to join any pre-meeting with the MD to express the concerns raised by members at several occasions in the past.

ACTION: Eleanor Dennis

RESOLVED

That the Committee noted the contents of this report.