The Government Actuary’s Department (GAD) has launched a new online hub designed to help administrators of public service pension schemes access actuarial factors and related guidance.

The GAD Factors Guidance Hub brings together scheme factors and accompanying guidance in a single online location, enabling administrators to more easily locate the information required to implement pension calculations and member options.

Actuarial factors are used to enable members to vary how they take their benefits from public service pension schemes, including retiring earlier or later than the scheme’s normal pension age, converting pension into a lump sum at retirement, or purchasing additional pension.

GAD provides thousands of actuarial factors to support these options, alongside more than 400 sets of guidance explaining how they should be applied.

Previously, this guidance was produced individually for each public service pension scheme, with sharing practices differing across schemes.

In some cases, factors and guidance were made available on scheme websites, while others did not publish them publicly, and where they were shared, this was often limited to the most recent guidance.

The introduction of the hub also reflected additional guidance requirements following the McCloud judgment remedy, which in some cases required schemes to reference historical factors and guidance to ensure the correct implementation of benefits.

According to GAD, the hub consolidates both historical and current guidance, including material related to the McCloud remedy, alongside actuarial factors in a standardised format.

As part of the hub’s development, GAD also reviewed and revised the structure of the guidance to improve usability and streamline future updates.

Generic information previously repeated across individual guidance sets has been moved to scheme home pages, allowing updates to be applied across schemes more quickly.

Assumptions underpinning actuarial factors have also been moved into consolidated factor workbooks alongside the factors themselves, reducing the need for multiple updates during reviews.

In addition, factors have been removed from the body of guidance documents so that factors and guidance can be reviewed independently.

Commenting on the launch, GAD actuary and project lead, Sam Watts, said the hub would make it easier for administrators to access key information.

“The GAD Factors Guidance Hub provides a wealth of information that previously was difficult to track down and time-consuming to update," Watts stated.

“The vision for and implementation of this Hub used skills from a range of people across the department who collaborated brilliantly to produce this product, of which I am very proud.”

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