First Awards
A total of 3751 applications have been processed so far in May of which 96.91% were paid on time.
Bereavements
Bereavements is progressing through recovery and reaching some stability. A number of activities are on-going to prioritise bringing the work back within targets soon, with the total outstanding work volumes decreasing daily.
Revised Pensions (AW171)
Steady progress has been made as we re-commence processing revised pensions in a controlled environment. The insourcing of payroll changed how we must process these cases as the calculation and payment of revised pensions are now all processed from NHS Pensions systems and not through a third party.
The training of the staff on the new business process for revised pensions is going well and we are seeing a greater throughput against our daily clearance plans than we initially anticipated which is really encouraging at this early stage.
The 2nd stage of the Compendia development is due to be delivered later in the year but due to the processes we have put in place, we have found it is not preventing us from processing work through the system. Again, this is great news.
All the work has now been triaged which is making the training and allocation of work to staff much easier and will hopefully help us increase clearance as they become more proficient. Once we fully understand timings for the new end to end process we will be able to finalise the plan and share our anticipated recovery date with you, but until then be assured we are taking all steps possible to stabilise this work.
Contact Centre
Calls to our Contact Centre remain higher than average even though we are nearly through our first main peak period of the year, so customers may still feel a longer wait time on all four pension lines (employer, member, TRS and payroll) but this continues to fluctuate daily.
During April across all four lines, we received a total of 68,024 calls. Each call on average took approximately 7 minutes 29 seconds to resolve and customers were waiting around 30 minutes for their call to be answered. So far in May we have received 72,670 calls with each call taking on average 7 minutes 41 seconds and customers were waiting approximately 41 minutes for their call to be answered.
In the short term, we continue to have messages on the lines to further support customers at this busy time. However, as a longer term solution we are recruiting more call handlers to help reduce the wait times to improve the on-going service to our customers.
ESR Year-end updates 2019
We are pleased to inform you that the 2019 ESR Year-end data processing is now complete with a total of 1,412,454 annual updates being applied over the last five weeks. Over the latter couple of weeks we have spent time catching up on the April joiners and leavers and May joiners to bring processing fully up to date.
We will now commence the preparation of the annual heat maps to report the data processing successes to ESR employers, currently scheduled for distribution by the end of July 2019.
TRS Refresh 2019
The TRS data cut for the annual refresh will take place after 7pm on Friday 21 June 2019, with refreshed statements being made available by the end of August 2019. The data cut will capture successfully updated records up to and including 31 March 2019, so please ensure you have updated your employee pension records and cleansed any data errors by this date.
POL downtime in June
During June POL is scheduled to be unavailable from:
- Friday 22 June at 7pm to Monday 24 June at 7am
- Friday 29 June 7pm to Monday 1 July at 7am