Latest news

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In a public meeting in Bath on 28 March, the Avon Pension Fund Committee voted to maintain its current approach to investing in Aerospace & Defence. 

Now that the Committee has made a decision in principle, we will consult our members, which will inform the Committee’s final decision. 

On 28 March the Avon Pension Fund Committee will meet to review its aerospace and defence investments. 

This follows significant work which the Fund has already undertaken, following petitions in December and appeals from Bristol City Council to divest from aerospace and defence companies which supply Israel.

The pension fund has £18m or 0.3% of its £6 billion assets invested in such companies, which primarily supply NATO partners and the UK government.

It has been a year of encouraging progress and development. 

The Fund is in robust financial health, with an improved 98% funding level at 31 March 2024. 

This improved position has enabled us to deliver stable employer contributions, critical given ongoing strain in local government finances. 

Our old website had to be replaced. We decided to take the opportunity to make our website more user-friendly.   

We’ve designed this website to help members do more of the tasks they want to do online, making content easier to find and simpler to understand. 

Councillor Paul Crossley, Chair of the Avon Pension Fund Committee and Councillor Shaun Stephenson-McGall, Committee Vice-Chair and Chair of the Investment Panel, are signatories to a letter calling for action on the global stocktake.

The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) has published a member factsheet - The McCloud judgment and your LGPS pension - that summarises the McCloud judgment and changes the Government are making to the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS).

On 9 March 2023, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) laid the LGPS (Amendment) Regulations 2023 (‘the regulations’). The regulations move the annual revaluation date from 1 April to 6 April. The regulations are effective from 31 March 2023.

The Government is launching a new initiative which will allow users to securely view all their pension savings in one place. Savers will be able to choose from a range of Pensions Dashboards and, after verifying their identity, users will be able to trigger a secure digital search across virtually the entire pensions industry. A summary of the pensions found will be displayed back to the user on their smart phone, tablet, or desktop browser.

The SCAPE discount rate is used to set the employer contribution rates in the unfunded public sector pension schemes and to determine the actuarial factors across all public sector schemes. The discount rate was reduced on 30 March 2023 to the consumer price index (CPI) plus 1.7% from CPI plus 2.4%.