We are excited to announce that our member portal is now live and ready for you to use. You can view and manage your pension where and whenever needed.

You can use the member portal to: 

• update your personal details such as your address 
• see how much your pension might be worth when you retire 
• view your annual benefit statements 
• view and search your documents 
• update your death grant nominees 

We have put together a list of Frequently Asked Questions if you need any help accessing the member portal, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Download: Member Portal Frequently Asked Questions (PDF)

We are looking for an employee to join our Local Government Pension Board, appointed as an active employee representative.

The Board will meet a minimum of four times per year, with the hours usually taking place between 9:00am and 5:00pm at County Hall, Worcester.

The recruitment of this member will be following a transparent process which is open to all active Fund members and appointment will be made by the Chief Financial Officer of the Administering Authority.

The member representative will have the capacity to represent the scheme members of the fund as well as being able to demonstrate their capacity to attend and complete the necessary preparation for meetings and participate in training as required.

A full induction will be provided by a dedicated team of Officers who will be there to support you. You will be supported with a tailored training programme and given access to a wide range of training materials.  Training is delivered in a mixture of face-to-face sessions with other board members and remote access to a training portal.

What does the Pension Board assist us in?

• complying with LGPS regulations, other relevant legislations and any requirements imposed by The Pensions Regulator
• ensuring effective and efficient scheme governance and administration

Substitutes for this role will not be appointed.

You can find out more about the Pension Board at: Browse meetings - Pension Board - Worcestershire County Council (moderngov.co.uk)

If you are interested in this, please email us at: WPFengagement@worcestershire.gov.uk

Now that legislation for delivering the McCloud remedy has been published, we will be reviewing all ‘in scope’ benefit entitlements.

To have an ‘in scope’ benefit entitlement you had to be an employee member of the LGPS prior to 01 April 2012 and during the period between 01 April 2014 and 31 March 2022, with no disqualifying break in membership of a public service pension scheme of five or more years.

If before 1 April 2012 you were either an employee member of a different public service pension scheme or an employee member of the LGPS with in a different LGPS fund and have not transferred those benefits into Worcestershire Pension Fund, please contact us with those details, as we will not be aware of them and cannot therefore bring you ‘in scope’.

Although it will take us time to review every benefit entitlement ‘in scope’, you do not need to do anything unless we are unaware of your other public sector pension scheme membership. All ‘in scope’ benefits due an increase will be backdated. You can find out more about the McCloud remedy at The McCloud Remedy LGPS (lgpsmember.org) and Guides and sample documents (lgpsregs.org).

We will update our website with our progress in delivering the remedy. In line with regulatory guidance we will be delivering the McCloud remedy for all new benefit payments we make after 30 September 2023 and prioritising cases where a member or survivor pension is in payment. We will also include details of how McCloud affects members in their annual benefit statement for 2025.

You should receive yours by early September along with our 2023 employee newsletter (PDF).

If, once you have yours, you are thinking about contacting us about your statement, we recommend that you first read our 2023 employee benefit statements FAQs (PDF).

If you contact us, we would appreciate you bearing with us if our phones are busy and whilst we work through our inbox.

We have issued these and our 2023 newsletter for deferred members.

If you have not received yours, it is possible that we do not hold an up-to-date address for you, in which case please provide us with your current address using our Notify Change of Personal Circumstances Form.

You can scan and email the form to us.

For security reasons, we are not able to accept address changes over the phone.

We always recommend that members who move advise us of their new address.

If you have contacted us about your deferred benefit statement, we would appreciate you bearing with us if our phones are busy and whilst we work through our inbox.

We expect our 2023 employee benefit statements and newsletters to be on doormats by early September.

Fair Deal: The proposed amendments (GOV.UK) to the LGPS Regulations would, in most cases, give transferred staff the right to stay as members of the LGPS.

Male survivor benefits: The Chief Secretary to the Treasury has made a written statement on remedying survivor benefits for opposite-sex widowers and surviving male civil partners where male survivors remain entitled to a lower survivor benefit than a comparable same-sex survivor.

Restriction of public sector exit payments in England: £95K cap disapplied: The government has announced that parts of the restrictions on public sector exit payments that came into force in November are disapplied. The Treasury’s updated guidance states: “After extensive review of the application of the Cap, the Government has concluded that the Cap may have had unintended consequences and the Regulations should be revoked. HMT Directions have been published that disapply the Cap until the Regulations have been revoked.”

Tax relief for low earners: Following a consultation the government has announced that it will introduce a system allowing low-earning individuals saving in a pension scheme using a net pay arrangement to claim top-up payments from HMRC in respect of tax relief on contributions made from 2024 / 2025 onwards.

We are currently working with a company called Target Professional Services (UK) who help pension schemes find members who they may have lost touch with.

If you are a deferred member of the Fund, you may be contacted by them and asked to complete a verification exercise.

Please confirm your details and verify your address with Target.

This will allow us to update our records with any changes and keep in contact with you in the future to send you updates about your pension and make payment of your benefits when they are due.

You can read more about Target at www.targetprofessional.co.uk  

Our first hope is for a resolution to the current situation in Ukraine.

As far as investments are concerned, the situation is having an impact on broad asset markets and is complex and fast moving. 

As we factor in responsible investment issues into our investment decisions, we are discussing our stewardship of our Russian assets with our Committee, Investment Managers, Investment Partners and Stakeholders, including LGPS Central Limited.

We have identified that we have 0.15% of the overall Fund invested in Russia. 

We have suspended any further investments in Russia and our approach will be to exit from all investments in Russia as soon as markets permit.