We are pleased to say that the Awards recovery plan is now complete. As part of our normal business as usual activity, we have some pension applications awaiting information from members or employers and as soon as this information is received we will get these pensions put into payment as well.
Our key message today is to please assure any members you may have that have recently applied for their pension, or are close to applying, that the service is on track and they should not face any delays in receiving their benefits as long as their information is complete and submitted to us in a timely manner.
We still have some areas where we can improve. We acknowledge the need to complete our initial checks much sooner following receipt of the application and we will pick this up as an action as we start to shape Phase 2 of our Awards plan in January.
The primary focus of Phase 2 will be to ensure we can significantly increase the percentage of
Pension applications we consistently put into payment by someone’s retirement date and it is our aim to have achieved this by April 2019. We will provide more on this as we develop the plan further over the coming weeks.
During November (as at the 29th November 2018), we have processed 5986 pension application forms with still a couple of days to go. Over 70% of them were paid in time for the person’s retirement date.
You may remember when we started the recovery plan we had over 11,500 applications on hand. Today, the total number of applications on hand stands at 5398 and is continuing to reduce despite pension applications being received daily.
Sub awards - The routine processing of sub awards remains on hold pending a Compendia system functionality release which is currently in development. We continue to process small volumes on demand through means of escalation, purely due to the manual nature of each one.
We will keep you informed of these developments and provide you with more details regarding our plans, including volumes and timescales as they progress over the coming months.
Calls coming through the Contact Centre continue to fluctuate with all 4 lines being reported as above tolerance this week. The main types of queries being reported across the member and employer lines are in relation to awards and estimates.
The next update will be in the January 2019 newsletter.