The Assistant Director – Pensions provided the Board with an update on compliance with the Regulator’s Code of Practice for Public Sector Pension Schemes.

Key Points to note:

·         Appendix A showed the latest assessment against the Code of Practice 14 which is currently in place and the developments the Authority has made to improve compliance with this. One of these being Risk Management Training and work to improve tracking of internal disputes and looking at improving KPIs in the pensions administration teams.

·         The new General Code of Practice has been published and comes into place at the end of March, some aspects of this are not applicable to public sector funds.

·         Cyber controls and Scams are now included in the new code which was previously just guidance and so the Authority will need to prove that there are strong processes in place which comply with this.

·         The Authority will be undertaking an Independent Governance Assessment with provider AoN and as part of this they will assess us against the new code.

Members expressed their interest in watching the AoN webinar on the new Code of Practice.

Action – DS to send the link to the webinar onto Members alongside additional written materials published on the new General Code of Practice.

Members asked what their role would be in deciding what would be monitored going forwards to ensure these are the right things and how the Authority will approach the applicability of the different elements of the code.

The Director responded that although some parts of the code are not directly applicable to our fund, these are good practice, and the Authority strives to always demonstrate good practice and an example of this would be how risk is managed. There will however be some things that will be ignored as they would not be applicable to LGPS funds but if this is the case, an explanation as to why will be provided.

The work being undertaken by AoN would provide a baseline position and allow future efforts to be targeted at these areas where improvement is required.

RESOLVED: Members noted the contents of this report and provided officers with feedback on areas which they felt required attention.