I’m conscious that we have not provided members with an update regarding the current situation of the second options exercise, this has mainly been due to awaiting confirmation that the government will agree to extend the exercise for a further 12 months until 31 March 2026. While at the time of writing we still have not received official notice that the extension has been agreed, in reality, the government will have no realistic option but to provide a 12-month extension.

For those of you who are still awaiting your financial illustration, let alone receiving payment, we fully understand your frustrations and scepticism as to why this process is taking so long.

Fire authorities are at differing stages of the process, and this is purely down to management and how well an authority prepared in advance of the then impending pension exercise. Authorities were given plenty of notice to get their house in order and had previous experience of undertaking the first options exercise back in 2014/15 (which also needed an extension of time created in legislation).

The FRSA has been lobbying government and the LGA since the process started to take the necessary action to ensure original timescales were met, but as soon as the national calculator required to produce some of the claims was delayed, it was inevitable that the original deadlines would be difficult to achieve.

The role we can and have been playing in this process is to ensure that all eligible members receive the opportunity to take part in the exercise and claim what is rightfully theirs. Secondly, once a member has received their illustration, we at FRSA HQ will provide the opportunity to check for accuracy.

Our intervention has stopped incorrect payments being made to our members on numerous occasions, some ad-hoc miscalculations, and more alarmingly we have identified some service-related systemic errors which were having wide-reaching consequences that without our intervention would have required correction at a much later stage requiring potential legislative changes.

We acknowledge that the calculation of pensions is complex, particularly when historical data either unknown or untouched for decades is used as part of the formulation, however, it is imperative that final calculations are accurate, and we make no apology for our interference.

So, in short, the process continues albeit slowly and we will continue to share the frustrations of our members but will do all we can to provide timely support on an individual basis, we are here for you.