Official Report search · Parliament Workbench

Committee

Public Audit Committee 17 March 2026 [Draft]

17 Mar 2026 · S6 · Public Audit Committee

Item of business

Section 22 Report: “The 2024/25 audit of the Scottish Public Pensions Agency”

Dr Stephen Pathirana (Scottish Public Pensions Agency) Watch on SPTV

Thank you, convener. Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity to engage with the committee on the SPPA’s progress to deliver the McCloud remedy, following the publication of Audit Scotland’s section 22 report. We welcome Audit Scotland’s unqualified opinion of our accounts and the recommendations in the annual audit report. We continue to work constructively with Audit Scotland as we address all areas for improvement.I would like to start by reiterating the apology that I made to members, when I appeared before the Finance and Public Administration Committee in December, for the delays in delivering remedy. We have always sought to give accurate information to our members and, with the best possible intentions, shared estimated timelines based on our knowledge at the time. Knowing what we know now, I wish that we had communicated better earlier. I am sure that other pension administrators feel the same way. We recognise that transparency must accompany delivery in order for members to have confidence in the agency, and we continue to report openly on progress.I would like to express my on-going gratitude to our pension scheme members for their continued patience as we work to achieve the outcome that we all want, which is for everyone who is eligible to have been offered their remedy choice, made their choice and seen that reflected in their payments. Members have still been able to retire and receive their full pension based on the rules in place at the time. In fact, we estimate that more than 70 per cent of retired members are already on the scheme that is most advantageous to them.As I said to the Finance and Public Administration Committee earlier this morning, there was a collective underestimation of the scale and complexity of this project. Our pension scheme provider, along with others in the United Kingdom, was unable to provide us with technical solutions for remedy. To make the dual retrospective calculations needed to issue choice letters to approximately a third of our 600,000 members, we have had to develop our own solutions. Through advances in our pilot approaches in the police pension scheme, we have achieved economies of scale that are benefiting the pension schemes for firefighters, national health service staff and teachers. For example, we have cut the processing times for basic NHS pensions from two hours to under half an hour through a new calculation module.In fact, we have made significant progress in delivering digital transformation over the past 12 months. Our on-going investment in people and information technology will help to deliver remedy and raise service levels for members in the future. We have digitised employer data for police and fire schemes, and we are now actively on-boarding the teacher scheme, with full digitisation expected by the end of 2027. We have launched a new member portal—Engage—across all four schemes. Functionality is evolving, and the portal will give instant access to a range of self-service options, pensions information and historical documentation and scheme guidance. We have released online pension modellers for police and NHS pension members, offering instant remedy-compliant pensions projections. The development of the teachers pension modeller is in progress.As we look to the future, we are committed to completing remedy and investing in the IT and data management services that are required to deliver to members the service that they are entitled to expect from a modern pensions administrator. I am confident that we have the right governance structures in place to support that journey. Our management advisory board, audit and risk committee and scheme-specific pensions boards all support us in delivering our work and ensure that we meet our statutory obligations.We are delighted with the progress that we are making under our new audit and risk committee chair, Mark Tarry, who brings 20 years’ experience of executive leadership in the rail industry, and with the success of our recent recruitment process for our management advisory board, which included welcoming Paul Gray, who, with more than 40 years’ experience in the Scottish Government, needs no introduction to members of this committee.That is in addition, of course, to the direct support and oversight from the Scottish Government, and I am delighted to appear alongside Lesley Fraser, director general corporate, who is the SPPA sponsor. We both look forward to answering any questions that you might have.

Search Hansard contributions

Public Audit Committee 17 March 2026 [Draft]

In the same item of business