Wandsworth’s pension board chair praised the fund’s transfer figures as “excellent again” on Thursday, in the same discussion where officers said the transfer backlog was still being cleared.
It was not a slip. Five months earlier, the same board privately discussed cutting that target from 98% to 75% behind closed doors, and never told the public either conversation had happened.
Later in that same discussion, the chair’s verdict was direct: “your KPIs are excellent again, and it’s always a pleasure to read, so it makes our job a lot easier. Congratulations for keeping up the good work.” Nobody on the board raised the transfer figures again during that meeting, even while working through the fund’s annual report line by line and asking detailed questions on half a dozen smaller figures elsewhere in it.
The target the chair praised measures whether the fund gets people’s transfers done within 15 working days. On Thursday, the fund had completed just 69.38% of transfers in on time and 59.74% of transfers out, against that target. A year earlier, it was hitting 97.94% and 94.08%.
At a board meeting in February, officers admitted the transfer service was failing. They blamed the strain of the McCloud pension recalculations, a court-ordered fix affecting schemes nationally, on top of tighter anti-scam checks and years spent training replacement staff. The board’s chair, Richard Perry, responded by proposing the target come down. “Are you happy for us to put it in at 75% or something like that?” he asked. “I’m sure we’d be sympathetic to that.” Nobody on the board asked for evidence behind the “hands tied” explanation. Nobody objected.
Wandsworth’s 2025/26 annual report, published months later, still measures the fund against the original 98% target, not 75% or anything else. Its own verdict is that “performance indicators show an excellent standard is maintained.” The same sentence, word for word, had already described a transfer service in crisis in a February board paper.
The excuse that doesn’t change
This is not new. Officers have a stock line for it: “we always say there’s no silver bullet in pension administration.” They used it to explain the February shortfall, then repeated it almost word for word at Thursday’s meeting to explain the same thing again. That phrase traces back to guidance from CIPFA, the public finance body, which tells pension boards to be supportive rather than defensive, and to judge the fund on its direction of travel rather than “a particular set of results.” That may be why nobody presses: the board is following official advice not to.
The people affected by that gap are still waiting. A freedom of information request revealed one member waited 445 working days, up to 18 months, for a transfer meant to take 15. The council’s complete written improvement plan, in answer to that request, was one sentence: “New jobholders are addressing backlogs.” No target, no timeline, no milestone. The same response disclosed that not one formal complaint was recorded in six months, despite 209 people waiting more than 90 days for their own money.
The fund is also behind on its legal obligations, not just its service standards. Two new sets of pension regulations took effect on 30 June. The fund’s own compliance papers, presented two days later, show that its Conflicts of Interest Policy does not meet the new rules, that it has no Governance Strategy at all, and that it has not yet appointed the Independent Person the rules require, due by 31 December. Told this at the meeting, board members did not ask for a date. They asked whether they, as unpaid volunteers, could keep up with the paperwork being generated by all the new requirements.
None of this touches the fund’s finances. It remains comfortably funded. The problem is how the scheme is run, not its money. But that slow pace has already had a cost elsewhere in the same institution. Wandsworth’s investment committee, a separate body from the board, has left one investment fund sitting above its own risk threshold for over a year, after its own overseer called performance “incredibly disappointing.” Different committee, same institutional habit of noting a problem and moving on.
Anyone can check the underlying papers themselves. Wandsworth’s Local Pension Board meets in public and its papers are published on the council’s committee website. Pension fund members experiencing delays with their own transfers can contact the Pensions Shared Service on 020 8871 6594 or pensions@richmondandwandsworth.gov.uk, escalate an unresolved complaint to the council, and take it to the Pensions Ombudsman if that doesn’t work.
