We are continuing to maintain performance in the payment of first pension applications with a total of 5177 applications paid in January so far (30th January).
The total applications on hand currently stand at 4699, slightly less than the same time last month. This is particularly good as it shows we are managing to maintain stability as we start to see an increase in applications due to our next peak processing period for members retiring at the end of March.
During January, of the 5177 pension applications processed, 95.81% were processed early or on time. We are just finalising our Phase 2 plan and full details of our plans for this will be shared in next month’s update.
We have 639 applications in the 4699 mentioned above that are for retirements after April 2019. We are currently unable to process these as we are waiting for the updated Pensions Increase factors from the Government Actuary’s Department. This happens every year and is expected soon at which time normal processing of these particular applications will resume. We are not anticipating any delay.
We are making progress with our revised awards (AW171) plan and are nearer to being able to provide you with more details including volumes and timescales. We have to include an element of assumptions into our plans, to cater for the volumes of AW171 revised award forms that we have not received yet, as a result of the pay award last year. The Compendia functionality remains in development but is still on plan to be delivered in the March system release. In the meantime, we will continue to process on demand urgent cases.
Calls coming through the Contact Centre have fully stabilised as payments have improved. All four lines continue to be reported as within tolerance.
We have no scheduled plans to bring POL down during February at this time. However, if we do need to bring it down at short notice for urgent maintenance we will advise you as much as we can in advance via the POL homepage.