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There is no summary of this meeting yet. One is written once the council publishes the minutes. The agenda and papers are below.
1.1 Apologies were received from Mr. Reese, Mrs. Morley, Mr. Wright & Mr. Rogers. 1.2 The Local Pension Board noted that this was Tim James’ final Local Pension Board meeting prior to his retirement and gave thanks for his hard work and all the support he had provided the Local Pension Board.
2.1 Board Members confirmed the following declarations of personal interest: Board Member In Receipt of Pension Contributor Bob Campbell Self Steve Harford Self Sister Rhian Hayden Mother Self and sister Meirion Rushworth Self Jane Waters Brother Self Anthea Wellington Self and husband Daughter 2.2 The CLO left the meeting.
3.1 Regarding paragraph 11.4 of the minutes, there was a repeated instance of the word “members” that needed to be corrected. 3.2 It was agreed that once this change had been made, the minutes were an accurate record of the meeting.
4.1 In respect of the first action point, the administration system would not allow for a report to be shared on the requested information. . 4.2 A verbal update was provided on action two and work had been undertaken to include the requested information within the Annual Local Pension Board report. 4.3 The Pension Board noted the Action Sheet.
5.1 The Pension Board considered the draft minutes of the Pensions Committee held on 24th June 2024. 5.2 It was noted that there was no inclusion of the Members of Local Pension Board in attendance which would be amended. 5.3 The Pension Board agreed to note the draft minutes.
6.1 AK outlined the report and provided an update on the current year audit plan. 6.2 The Audit planning had identified one significant financial statement risk, which was management override. However, this was noted to be a risk each year and therefore the response to this risk had not changed from the previous year. 6.3 There were three other areas of focus: The value of assets, the estimate made by the Fund Manager in respect of the value of retirement benefits and the control of the investment managers. 6.4 The reporting date for this year’s plan was November. This would be presented to Local Pension Board once completed. There had been a 6.4% fee increase but this was in line with Audit Wales’ new fees and what all other organisations were charged. 6.5 Following questions from the Board, the AK & HoP made the following points: • Risks and responses were included within the Audit monitoring, which included transfers of funds. There would be further detail provided to the Local Pension Board. • The Draft Report would be published in August, this would be brought to the Local Pension Board in October. • It had been decided that the Local Pension Board were to scrutinise the annual Audit Plan and Audit Opinion for the fund, rather than the Governance and Audit Committee. The statutory deadline for this to be published was 1st of December, therefore there was likely to be a Special Pension Committee to approve this in November. • Whilst the WPP did not have any formal requirements for Audit, there was still a level of oversight undertaken on the Pool. 6.6 Members of the Local Pension Board noted the report.
7.1 The PM outlined the report and provided an update on the administrative services provided by the Pensions Section and highlighted several areas of current activity and development. 7.2 The table showing performance could be seen on page 48 of the report. In April, the then Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities or DLUHC (now Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government or MHCLG) published a new ‘Preparing the Pension Fund Annual Report Guidance for Local Government Pension Scheme Funds.’ The tables had now been updated to reflect the new reporting requirements. 7.3 The KPIs for Transfers were low compared to the other cases. This was partly due to McCloud and the knock-on effect of putting transfers on hold. McCloud has also made the whole transfer process more complex. Currently the Pension Administration System had not been configured to carry out McCloud transfers in or out for non-club and club. As a result of this manual calculations were required, in addition to all the existing checks and additional data the team requires to process these. There had some changes made to the transfer tasks to accurately reflect the time taken to process these cases and transfer cases are being monitored on a weekly basis. The additional complexity of McCloud meant that transfer statistics were not going to recover as quickly as had been expected, however measures were being put in place to improve the statistics where possible. 7.4 There had been training sessions undertaken with employers and the Pension Fund’s quarterly newsletter distributed to all employers in April advertised training for employers. The Fund would soon be writing to all employers to offer Pension Awareness sessions to correspond with Pension Awareness week in September. 7.5 All employers had submitted their final month file to the Fund for Year End. The deadline was the 30th April, and 53 employers met this deadline. 2 employers submitted their data after this date. The late submittals had been within two weeks of the deadline. 68.4% of active member data was submitted through i-Connect compared to 21.3% last year. 7.6 As a result of McCloud some teachers had been made retrospectively eligible for Local Government Pension scheme benefits. This affected some teachers who had a full-time employment and part time employment during the remedy period 1st April 2015 – 31st March 2022. Teacher’s Pensions were in the process of contacting employers where they have identified employees who have LGPS linked excess service. Once verified, the employers will contact the Greater Gwent (Torfaen) Pension Fund and the Fund will be required to set up records for these members. 7.7 The Pension Manager has been working with the Chief Information Security Officer to create a specific Business Continuity Plan for the Pension Fund. Torfaen County Borough Council has an overreaching Business Continuity Plan which the Fund is covered under. 7.8 Following questions from the Board, the PM made the following points: · A review of the previous quarter would also be included within the report for comparison purposes. · A number of funds were experiencing similar issues due to the McCloud remedy. A meeting was held among several funds to discuss the complexities related to McCloud. · It was unknown how many the McCloud remedy would affect. Since it had started, there had only been 6 processed that had the underpin and these had not been for a significant amount. · The Fund had not been affected by the global Microsoft outage this week. It was expected that there would be conversations regarding this within the next monthly meeting with the Chief Information Security Officer. · There was Cyber Security training to take place after September’s Pension Committee for members of the Local Pension Board and Committee. · There were no penalties for breaches that the Fund currently had as they are all regarding unprocessed refunds. New regulations would reduce the number of breaches. 7.7 The Chair noted that the last significant breach had been four years ago. 7.8 Members of the Local Pension Board noted the report.
8.1 The PM outlined the report and provided an update on the draft Pension Administration Strategy and invite comments ahead of consultation with the Fund’s Scheme Employers. 8.2 It was good practice for Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) funds to prepare and maintain a Pension Administration Strategy. A Pension Administration Strategy should outline the performance standards to be achieved by the Fund and its Scheme Employers to enable the provision of a cost-effective and high-quality pension administration service. 8.3 The aims and objectives of this strategy could be seen within paragraph 4.3 of the report. The Fund would consult with the scheme employers regarding this strategy as it was important to maintain good working relationships. This strategy would also clearly set out the expectations of both the Fund and Employers. 8.4 The HoP explained that a lot of work had been undertaken on this strategy and it had been linked back to the Business Plan document which stressed accessibility for Members and Employers. The strategy would be used as a positive tool to engage with employers. 8.5 Following questions from the Board, the PM made the following points: • The strategy would be updated to reflect the correct year if it was likely to be published in 2025. • There would be consideration of changing the order of the Key Objectives and Strategic Objectives within the report to show how they interlink. • There would be consideration into including audit work into the roles and responsibilities of officers. • It had not yet been decided who would be consulted on this strategy but it was thought this would likely be HR managers within the scheme employers. • The strategy would be put out for consultation after any updates arising from this meeting. Once there had been a response from the consultation period, the draft strategy would be taken to Pension Committee to approve. 8.6 In accordance with overseeing the good governance of the Fund, the Local Pension Board noted the contents of this report.
9.1 The HoP outlined the report and provided a quarterly update on how the Pension Fund approaches its management of risk. This item had been removed from the agenda at the April’s Local Pension Board meeting due to formatting issues but there had been a lot of work undertaken on the Risk Register since. 9.2 It had been agreed that the Risk Register would be separated into a two-tier approach, with strategic risks forming at tier 1 and being presented on a quarterly basis. To ensure the Local Pension Board maintains oversight of all risks it was also agreed that operational risks within tier 2 would be presented on at least an annual basis and at any such time where material change occurs. 9.3 During the current quarter an extensive review of the Risk Register had been carried out and updates issued, with the new updates being shown in red, but where the residual risk has not changed. In addition, several risks have received risk score changes, risks both added and removed, and in some cases switched between operational and strategic, which were shown in red and highlighted yellow. 9.4 Following questions from the Board, the HoP made the following points: • There would be further consideration into condensing the Risk Register into smaller, more digestible segments. 9.5 The Board Members complimented the new format of the Risk Register and agreed that breaking this down further each quarter would be helpful. 9.6 The Local Pension Board noted the updated Risk Register.
10.1 The HoP outlined the report and provided an update on the work undertaken by the Wales Pension Partnership (WPP) on behalf of the eight LGPS funds in Wales. 10.2 The operator update could be seen on page 114 of the report which showed an in-depth breakdown of allocations to each of the following WPP sub-funds and private market vintages. 10.3 The WPP Business Plan could be seen on page 139 of the report. This had been taken to Pension Committee in June for approval. This had been included for information for Local Pension Board Members as it clearly stated the work plan for the next three years and what the fund was tasked with achieving over this period. 10.4 At the request of the Board, a breakdown of the Fund’s asset allocation could now be seen on page 155 as an appendix to report, split between Fund investments and those managed by the WPP. At a headline level, equities were currently overweight and had been the position for a number of years while the Fund continued to build its private markets allocations. 10.5 Following questions from the Board, the HoP made the following points: • Any future investments into real estate would be undertaken via the WPP who had now appointed its long-term allocator to the asset class. • When capital was committed to a private market fund, it was not known exactly when they would call for the capital to be deployed. Therefore, work was being undertaken to develop a model that would allow for better management of this process in future.
11.1 The PM outlined the report and provided an update on training already undertaken by members of the Pension Board, for information, and to aid consideration of future training requirements. 11.2 The Cyber Security training would now be held in Quarter 2. There had been an email distributed regarding Fundamental Training which was held on an annual basis, over three days. Members of the Board were asked to register their interest by the end of the week commencing 29th of July 2024. There was also an option for all Local Pension Board Members to attend the LGA annual conference on the 31st of January 2025 that was being held in Bournemouth. 11.3 Members of the Local Pension Board noted the training update provided in this report.
12.1 The date of the next meeting was noted.
13.1 The Board agreed to the exclusion of the press and public from the meeting as presentations and meeting papers were not for publication because in accordance with paragraphs 12 and 14 of part 4 of Schedule 12a of the Local Government Act 1972 (as amended by the Access to Information Variation Order Wales 2007), it contained information about a particular individual and information relating to the financial and business affairs of particular persons including the Council and in all the circumstances of the case the public interest in maintaining the exemptions outweighs the public interest in disclosing the information.
16.1 The HoP gave a summary of the report for information.
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