Ms Miriam Adams, Interim Head of Pensions and Treasury introduced the report and stated this was a government backed initiative which required the pensions industry to design and own the dashboard. She said the Pension Scheme Act 2021 received Royal Assent on the 11^th February 2021, and provided the legal framework to support pension dashboards, including powers to compel schemes to provide member information.

Ms Adams drew particular attention to paragraphs 3.5 and 3.6, which set out the requirements for the Pensions Dashboard as well as the risks associated with the project, such as who will be responsible for hosting the dashboard plus the impact of the McCloud judgment, referred to at paragraph 3.14.

In response to comments and questions from members the following was noted:

• Ms Adams said the actuary had made the appropriate adjustments to the Pension Scheme, however the cost of McCloud would not be known until the LGPS regulations had been issued.
• In reference to paragraph 3.16 and the external support required, Ms Adams said it was too early to assess exactly what support would be required. She said this was a big project, with a considerable amount of data implications.

The Pensions Committee RESOVLED to:

1. Note the requirement to improve the reliability of data in accordance with the Pensions Dashboards Programme data standards guide in order to supply the correct information to the dashboards and ensure compliance with the statutory staging timeline to onboard schemes.
2. Note the critical bottleneck the scheme faces in respect of council employee data.

Ms Miriam Adams, Interim Head of Pensions and Treasury introduced the report and stated this was a government backed initiative which required the pensions industry to design and own the dashboard. She said the Pension Scheme Act 2021 received Royal Assent on the 11^th February 2021, and provided the legal framework to support pension dashboards, including powers to compel schemes to provide member information.

In response to comments and questions from Board members the following was noted:

• Mr Thompson said he noted this was a two-year project and said given the resource implications, what were the ‘critical bottlenecks’ referred to in the second recommendation of the report? Ms Adams responded stating the bottlenecks has been reported to the Board for quite a while; They related to the uploading of employer data. She said there was a project plan in place, whereby she was working with the six largest employers and was trying to get them to provide the data digitally via i-connect. She said if this was not resolved soon, the incoming data would create a bottleneck, in terms of meeting the deadline for setting up the Dashboard.
• Referring to paragraph 3.16 and the sentence “External support may be required”, Mr Thompson asked what support was to be provided and how was this to be monitored? Mr Visram replied stating the data issue were a significant challenge and as such they had used a ‘payroll consultancy’ to identify the risks. He said the recommendations and the action plan from the report were discussed at bi-weekly meetings but there were some system changes required and as such external support may be required because of the pressure to progress things quickly.

The Pensions Board RESOLVED to:

Note the recommendations being made to the Pensions Committee who were to consider this report at its meeting of 10^th March 2022.

The Pensions Committee is recommended to:

1. Note the requirement to improve the reliability of data in accordance with the Pensions Dashboards Programme data standards guide in order to supply the correct information to the dashboards and ensure compliance with the statutory staging timeline to onboard schemes.
2. Note the critical bottleneck the scheme faces in respect of council employee payroll data.