To ask the Minister of Health to detail (i) why the annual rise, in line with the Consumer Price Inflation, for the Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service Pension Scheme is not applied at the beginning of the fiscal year; (ii) whether this rise will be backdated to April each year; and (iii) whether there are problems accessing personal pension information via the online portal.

Historically the Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service (NIFRS) have processed the pension increase in July or August of each year, which included any arrears owed since the April increase was confirmed. This was due to resourcing issues, as the pension increase was calculated and processed manually outside of a pension software system.

NIFRS has been undergoing a period of significant change with the pension’s administration and undertook a project to outsource to HSC Pensions’ Service. The final stages of this project involved the transfer of the pension payroll to ensure that they would have a single, automated, end-to-end pension administration with improved resilience and support for their Firefighters and Pensioners. This will reduce the risk of human error from manual calculations of increases and arrears and provide a more efficient service for the member in the longer term. The pensioner payroll migrated across in February 2024.

There was a need to complete additional data cleansing and reconciliation as well as testing of the software application to ensure the pension increase was accurately implemented. Unfortunately there had been some technical issues with the software that delayed the project and NIFRS have worked with the software supplier to resolve these issues and administer the increase.

These issues have now been resolved, and the pension increase together with arrears, for the vast majority of the members, were paid on 1st October 2024. Due to the complexity of some members’ cases, it is envisaged that the remaining cases will be paid by the end of October.

The annual pension increase occurs in April of each year. As the new system has now been implemented it is NIFRS aim to process the pension increase, including arrears backdated to April, much earlier than they have been doing historically.

As part of the pension’s administration project NIFRS and the HSC Pensions Service have been preparing to launch a Member Self Service Portal. This has taken longer than initially anticipated due to technical issues with system development, allowing time for stringent testing of the portal, and the development of member videos on how to navigate registration.

Communications had been issued to scheme members advising them of the upcoming service and asking them to register their interest to facilitate the implementation of the new service prior to Go Live.

HSC Pension Service have advised that to facilitate a soft launch of the self-service portal the service went live on 1st October. Any attempts by members to access the service prior to Go Live, will have failed. Further communications to members will be issued week commencing 21st October, officially notifying them that the service is now Live and they can access their pension information via the portal.