West Midlands Pension Fund achieves ‘gold standard’

The West Midlands Pension Fund has become the first local government scheme in England and Wales to achieve PASA accreditation.

The Pensions Administration Standards Association (PASA), the independent body dedicated to driving up standards in pensions administration, today announced West Midlands Pension Fund has been awarded PASA Accreditation – the ‘gold standard’ for high quality pensions administration.

The fund, which is one of the UK’s largest pension funds and has over 330,000 members across more than 700 employers – including local authorities and schools – is the first local government pension scheme in England and Wales to achieve the Accreditation.

Just nine other organisations have successfully gone through the rigorous, independently assessed accreditation programme run by PASA.

‘It’s been very encouraging that, despite the significant restrictions and demands placed on the whole industry in this pandemic, we have seen no reduction in the interest for accreditation,’ said chair of PASA’s accreditation committee, Lorraine Harper.

‘West Midlands Pension Fund now joins a select group of other organisations to be recognised for best practice in the way it serves its members and sets a really positive example to schemes. The process is demanding, thorough and time consuming in the best of times, as you would expect, so to see schemes continue to recognise the significance and value of it whilst also grappling with other demands in this new environment is fantastic.’

The chair of the West Midlands Pension Fund, Cllr Milkander Jaspal, added: ‘We place high importance on the quality of the pension administration service we provide to our key stakeholders, including employers, members, our Pension Committee and Local Pension Board. We already hold the Customer Service Excellence (CSE) Award and Investor in People (IIP) Accreditation, the PASA accreditation was an obvious choice for us.

‘With the expansion of the Pensions Regulator’s (TPR) role to include standards of governance and administration for local government, we were keen to demonstrate, and receive independent acknowledgement for the effective process and controls within our administration service. Our members are our priority and we want to continually demonstrate to them our commitment to best practice.’

PASA has recently updated and further enhanced their accreditation process, details of which can be found here.

Photo Credit – Stux (Pixabay)