Pensions Policy Lead

The starting salary is £62,310, which includes allowances totalling £3,009. The salary is broken down as £59,301 basic salary, which will increase annually until you reach the top of the scale £72,254. Plus, a location allowance of £2,009 and a non-pensionable allowance of £1,000.

Location: Kilburn, London

The HR Pension Policy Lead is responsible for managing the administration, compliance, and strategic management of the organization’s pension schemes, which includes both defined benefit and defined contribution plans. To lead on the development, implementation, and governance of pension policies and ensure compliance with statutory regulations and internal standards. The role manages relationships with outsourced pension providers, oversees strategic projects, and ensures accurate financial forecasting and reporting for pension schemes. The HR Pension Lead is responsible for ensuring that the Police Pension Regulations are applied by the pensions administrator and acts as a subject matter expert, providing advice to the third party service provider, via Management Business Services (MBS) while ensuring accurate reporting and engagement with external pension authorities, government departments and agencies. The HR Pension Lead is responsible for ensuring that the income/expenditure and future costs associated with the Police Pensions Fund account is reconciled and submitted to the Home Office in line with agreed timelines.

Key Responsibilities

• Ensure compliance with Police Pension Scheme Regulations, HMRC, TPR guidance, and Home Office directives.
• Monitor legislative changes and implement necessary policy updates.
• Act as primary liaison with pension regulators and internal stakeholders.
• Prepare and reconcile pension fund accounts, including income/expenditure and McCloud remedy costs.
• Deliver accurate annual and five-year pension forecasts for Home Office submissions.
• Build strong relationships with internal teams, external providers, and government bodies.
• Represent the organization in service Pension Regulators strategic forums.

Key Duties

• Using data obtained from the MPS and the outsourced providers accounting records, collate and create a monthly record of Income and expenditure for the MPS Police pension fund account; discretionary pensions spend and police staff Injury benefit / compensation scheme costs.
• Using forecasted numbers and costs of actual members, recruits, retirements and leavers from the scheme and forecasted growth in costs for inflation, pay and pension increases, provide annual year-end and five-year forecasts of police pensions income and expenditure for submission to the Home Office to substantiate the annual payment of the pensions top-up grant.
• Using data obtained from the MPS accounting records, collate, reconcile and create quarterly records of costs arising from the McCloud Remedy Compensation scheme and make submissions to the Home Office for reimbursement.
• Advise HR on the Civil Service Compensation Scheme and the New Fair Deal requirements associated with the TUPE transfer of staff in respect of business service changes to and from the MPS.

Strategic Leadership and Operations

The role of the HR Pension Policy lead is to provide vision, leadership and direction to oversee the delivery of pension services by the outsourced contractor for police officer pensions. Act on behalf of the Scheme Manager (Commissioner) to ensure the MPS’ compliance with Police Pension Scheme Regulations; Associated pensions related legislation; HMRC legislation; TPR legislation and guidance; Home Office / NPCC guidance. Serve as the organisation’s primary point of contact for MBS colleagues and external pension administrators, government pension bodies, and regulators. Support the annual and ad hoc pension audit processes and ensure the timely production of pension reports and disclosures. Working alongside MBS, to manage and assure the successful delivery by the pensions administrator on pension-related queries, including retirement estimates, early retirements, ill-health retirements, and transfer-in/out requests. Collaborate with MBS, payroll, HR, and finance teams to ensure accurate pension contributions are deducted from members and employer contributions are assigned and accounted for correctly. Monitor changes in pension legislation and assess implications for the organisation and workforce and ensure any relevant changes are managed by MBS and implemented by the administrator. Support and/or lead on pension communications, education sessions, and retirement planning workshops. Contribute to or lead projects related to pension reform, scheme transitions, or digital system upgrades. Work alongside the MBS-Pension team to ensure that they are forward thinking, innovative and adopting best practice and optimising technology to create efficiencies and improve service delivery by the outsource contract provider. Ensure that feedback and data drives a culture of continuous improvement. As part of the HR Senior Leadership Team, play a pivotal role in the development of a performance culture within MBS Employee Services ensuring service delivery within Pension is effective, customer focused and informed by timely data (HR KPIs and SLAs). Ensure serving officers are provided with accurate and clear pension’s information and retired officers are paid correctly and on time.

People Management: expertise in managing and developing teams. Collaborate with the Pension team within MBS, to ensure it meets its objectives and contributes to the Department’s success. Model and deliver leadership behaviours with a particular focus on developing trust, accountability and collaborative working across HR, and more widely across the Met Police. Promote an ethos of continuous improvement and striving for excellence within all aspects of Pension.

Specific tasks

• Represent the MPS alongside MBS, at Service Review Meetings with outsourced providers – communicate professionally and assertively to monitor the pensions work undertaken and to ensure that projects are progressing to plan and completed successfully.
• Participate actively in major annual projects for officer pensions, especially Annual Benefits Statements (ABS), Remediable Service Statements (RSS) and Pension Savings Statements (PSS).
• Oversee the key project milestones so that these statutory pension publications are produced accurately, on time and are made available on the officers’ pension portal.
• Oversee the production of the Annual Assurance Statement (AAS), which requires the MPS to provide assurance and evidence that it has correctly applied the requirements in the Participation Agreement in respect of the Civil Service Pension scheme for staff and has correctly paid over employee and employer pension contributions in an accurate and timely fashion.
• Apply knowledge of the public sector McCloud pensions remedy in making decisions about how to communicate with MPS officers and staff. Where officers and staff are in the McCloud remedy cohort ensure that the effect of the remedy is clearly communicated as well as the implications of any McCloud related choice members make.
• Oversee the delivery of the triennial automatic re-enrolment project with the outsourced provider so that staff and officers who had previously opted out of their pension scheme are re-enrolled in line with guidance from The Pensions Regulator. This project involves drafting communications for all those in scope and organising communication distribution as well as payroll liaison for the deduction of pension contributions.
• Draft pension related communications for scheme members to read on the MPS Intranet as well as individual communications for ongoing pension projects that need to be delivered. Communications need to be prepared so that they clearly convey often complex pensions material to busy officers and staff in a format that is readily understood and informs members of pensions news that is relevant to them.
• Deal with often complex pension enquiries and complaints by email, phone, face to face and in Teams meetings. Enquiry and complaint resolution will require a good knowledge of police officer and Civil Service pension scheme rules and regulations. Formal complaints require resolution through the MPS Internal Dispute Resolution Process (IDRP) and some cases require detailed submissions to the Pensions Ombudsman.
• Deal with cases where the MPS has discretion within the regulations of the police pension scheme such as partner pensions and ensure that the regulations are applied equitably. Also liaise with members and their families in cases of serious ill health and death where assistance is required to understand pension options applicable.
• Undertake where necessary, one to one meetings with senior officers and staff about their pension position and especially those who are new to/considering joining the MPS and those leaving the MPS.

Scope for Impact

• Dealing with complaints or enquiries from officers and staff.
• Provide expert advice to the Director of HR Functions in managing level 3 IDRP complaints.
• Ensure the regulatory requirements are met by the pension service providers. Failures to do so can result in the Met being fined by the pension regulators.
• Dealing compassionately with cases of serious ill health and death regarding pension matters with members and their families.
• The development, implementation and performance monitoring of Key Performance Indicators.
• The role allows the jobholder to prioritise their own work which requires ongoing current knowledge of MPS priorities and pensions legislative timescales.
• Dealing with complex complaints against the MPS is challenging.
• Financial constraints include the analysis and verification of costs put forward by the outsourced provider to undertake additional tasks (change requests), as required by the MPS.