Regulatory changes (including McCloud)

As you may be aware, West Midlands Pension Fund have appointed Equiniti (EQ) to provide a new pensions administration system—which includes new employer and member self-service portals—from Summer 2023. Consequently, to enable employers to focus more time on the transition to the new employer self-service portal (ESS), we have taken the decision to delay the collection of your April 2021 to March 2022 McCloud data, which was originally due to be submitted in September 2022.

Please continue to collate hours changes and service breaks from April 2021 using the file layout below. Further information on the collection in light of the pension transition will be issued to employer in the coming weeks.

Please be aware that the hours file for 2021 to 2023 will be changes in hours only; i.e., you will not be required to submit data for members that have not changed their working hours within the period. We will be providing details of the process for submitting the data through the new ESS in due course; in the meantime, we encourage you to start collating your data in the file format available below so that you are in a position to load your data when the process becomes available.

You should be submitting hours and service breaks for all members on a standard (S10) interface from August 2023, please see download below. If you have any queries about what data should be submitted, please email WMPFEmployerSystemSupport@wolverhampton.gov.uk

The deadline for submission of files for the period 1st April 2014 to 31st March 2021 has now passed. If you have yet to submit your McCloud data files (both hours and service breaks) please contact WMPFMcCloud@wolverhampton.gov.uk to discuss how we can help you to submit your data.

If your organisation uses the services of a third-party payroll provider for the submission of data, but you need to submit the McCloud data yourself, or you do not have access to the Employer Self-Service, please contact WMPFMcCloud@wolverhampton.gov.uk.

Please note that if you have been submitting hours and service break changes for members via the monthly submission, these are currently only accepted on the monthly data file for protected members; therefore, you will need to submit this data for all members to ensure that the full position is captured, because hours and service break data for members that are not currently protected under the statutory underpin regulations will not have had those changes processed.

We must advise you that failure to comply with McCloud data provisions in line with Fund and regulatory requirements means that your employer liabilities may be understated in future actuarial valuations. Additionally, member benefit calculations may also be incorrect as a direct result of up-to-date hours and service breaks information not being provided. You should also be aware that a direct consequence of a lack of accurate member data may result in us having to query hours and service break data for individual members when they come to retire. Given the profile of the Fund's membership, this may mean that we are requesting hours and service data from 2014 from you many years in the future, at a time when you may not have easy access to that data, or indeed it has been destroyed in line with the Information Commissioner's data retention guidelines.

We would ask you to urgently consider submitting the requested data to the Fund in the required format to mitigate the impact of non-submission.

If you would like further support regarding the requirements, please refer to the supporting documentation below. If you wish to meet with a member of the team to discuss any issues or concerns you have regarding the data requirements and timescales, please contact us.

• IMPORTANT: If you have access to Employer Self-Service but you outsource your payroll to a 3rd party provider, and they usually submit your monthly return via Employer Self-Service on your behalf, the process will need to be manually re-routed to your workfeed once you have started the process. Please contact WMPFMcCloud@wolverhampton.gov.uk if this applies to you.
• If you do not have access to Employer Self-Service but need to submit a file, please contact WMPFMcCloud@wolverhampton.gov.uk.
• If you have not yet submitted your 2014-2021 data files, please contact the McCloud Team as soon as possible on the above email address to discuss your submission.

The documents below are designed to support you in your McCloud data collation and upload. You may find our Resource Pack a useful starting point, as it sets out all of the documentation and guidance that is available to support you.

Access the Employer Self-Service