On the go: Connection trouble with a third-party pensions administrator’s systems has caused staff productivity at the Kent Pension Fund to suffer, while poor record management by Kent Police led to a breach of Local Government Pension Scheme regulations.
Though regulations were breached, KPF’s pensions manager did not initially deem it sufficiently serious as to justify reporting it to the regulator, though members of the KPF board disagreed and that verdict was subsequently changed.
Kent Police, an employer within the KPF, missed a number of deadlines for supplying information about active members to Kent County Council, meaning it was unable to provide annual benefits statements to 3,100 police employees of the LGPS by the legally required deadline of August 31.
Kent Police attributed the delay to “resource issues” within its payroll section.
Though failing to provide annual benefits statements constituted a breach of LGPS regulations, not all breaches require a report to be made to the Pensions Regulator.
Barbara Cheatle, pensions manager at the KPF, told a meeting of the council’s Superannuation Fund Committee that TPR uses a “traffic light framework” for pension boards and committees to decide whether and when breaches should be reported.
“If we had not been able to provide an annual benefit statement to any of our members, that would have been considered a red [light],” she explained, and would have had to be reported.
She told the committee that she considered this particular breach constituted an “amber” light, and that “because we now had the data, and could provide these members with their annual benefits statements, it should be shown there was a breach but not reported”.
Cheatle noted that some board members disagreed with this determination, feeling that the breach should be reported to TPR because of the size of Kent Police as an employer.
She told the committee that, in light of the board’s verdict, she was now recommending that the council report the breach to TPR.
Your connection is poor
The connection problems afflicted staff working from home during the pandemic, and arose from problems with the third-party administration service hosted by Aquila Heywood, a software solutions company.
KPF had problems with the transition to working from home from the start. Cheatle told the committee that, initially, two thirds of KPF staff did not have the required equipment, though this was eventually able to be sourced “over some time”.
Connection problems were likewise experienced from the start, though most staff “were able to complete their work”, she said.
In February, Kent County Council suffered an “outage of some sort in their server room”, and it was from that point that KPF’s connection problems began to deteriorate, leading to a decision taken at a meeting in June to get someone from the council together with someone from Aquila Heywood to try to resolve the issues, Cheatle continued.
Discussions were still ongoing in August when “the situation deteriorated even further”, she said, to the extent that staff members who might once have been able to complete 10 cases in one day were reduced to completing two, “because the connection problems became so bad”.
“The frustrating thing was that no one could be specific about what had happened to make this deterioration happen,” Cheatle told the committee.
Things improved slightly after 10 days when connection was restored to the still sub-optimal level KPF had experienced since February, but she noted that “again, nobody could put their finger on what had changed after those 10 days, so we’re at a bit of a loss as to what we are investigating and what was the cause”.
Cheatle added that investigations are ongoing and staff are trying three different ways to connect to Aquila Heywood’s system, but she warned that the problems will show up when the scheme’s key performance indicators are reviewed.
An Aquila Heywood spokesperson told Pensions Expert: “Our cloud hosting platform was fully available to all of our customers throughout August. We are aware that Kent’s users experienced connectivity issues for a period during the month and we supported their IT team in their investigations.
“Throughout these investigations, the Kent service was successfully accessed on non-Kent machines from diverse geographical locations,” they continued.
“The issues were resolved without any changes made by Aquila Heywood.”
