Firefighters’ Pension Schemes

Matthews second options exercise – Update from our administrators, West Yorkshire Pension Fund

What is the ‘Matthews second options exercise’?

In 2022, following further legal challenges, the Government accepted that retained firefighters should be entitled to claim service going back to the beginning of their employment.

This means a second ‘Matthews’ exercise was needed to allow eligible retained firefighters to buy pension service as a special member of the FPS 2006, backdated to the start date of their employment.

For information about eligibility and to understand more please visit the national member site fpsmember.org here.

Current situation

FRAs have been collecting information and in some cases payments from members to buy the pensionable service. This information has then been sent on to us as the scheme administrator.

Regrettably we’ve not been able to process the bulk of claims up to now. We’re very sorry for that delay, and also for not keeping you up-to-date and informed.

Unfortunately, most of the processing work involves manual calculations due to our software not being able to cater for this project. This exercise is also complex in nature and in some cases overlaps with the wider Sargeant Remedy project, adding to the complexity of the task. This is not an excuse for our failure to provide an acceptable service, but it is one of the reasons for the delay.

We have also had to balance a number of competing projects and system incompatibilities against ongoing ‘business as usual’ work to make sure that people retiring now receive a pension and that no member is without an income upon retirement.

Processing cases

To start processing cases and working through the backlog of claims as quickly as possible, we have created a special project team and recruited additional skilled resource so that experienced administrators can be used for this project. Unfortunately it has taken longer to put this project team together than we hoped.

If you have sent in a claim or payment to your FRA please be assured we have received that from them and we are starting to work through the backlog of claims.

Regrettably we were not able to acknowledge receipt of cases as we received them, but from November we will be writing to members to acknowledge receipt of every new case. Please be aware we will not be going through the backlog to acknowledge older cases, but we will contact members as we start processing their case.

We will be working through cases as quickly as we can. As we are at the start of this project we do not know exactly how long it will take to work through the backlog of cases and catch-up, but if you could bear with us until we address your case that would be greatly appreciated.

Keeping you up-to-date

We will keep updating this page with more information and we will also provide your FRA with periodical updates like this that they can share with you. We plan to provide more information about timescales in our next communication once the project team is up to speed.

We sincerely apologise for the delay in processing cases and communicating with you.