Employer bulletin November 2025

GMPF will close at 5pm on Wednesday 24 December 2025 and will reopen on Monday 5 January 2026 at 8.30am.

When our offices are closed, there will be a limited support service for employers with direct access to Altair and the GMPF employer website. If you experience any technical problems during the Christmas closure period, please telephone 0161 301 7020. A colleague from our Systems team will try to resolve your query. This facility is only available on 29, 30 and 31 December 2025 and 2 January 2026. Please do not call this number for general pension queries.

In our last bulletin we told you we would be running a session with Prudential to help you with administering your AVC payroll. The slides for this session are available for anyone who was unable to attend by visiting the technical and training guides section on our website. Prudential will be making some changes to the format of your upload in the new year, so it would be useful for you to view the slides to understand these changes in advance.

Technical and training guides - GMPF

In last month’s bulletin, we highlighted that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government launched a consultation covering four proposals related to pension benefits and access to the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS). The proposals focus on:

• Normal Minimum Pension Age

• Pension access for mayors and councillors

• Academies in the LGPS

• The new Fair Deal

A reminder that this consultation closes on 22 December.

You can access it by visiting: Local Government Pension Scheme in England and Wales: Scheme improvements (access and protections) - GOV.UK

Greater Manchester Pension Fund (GMPF) alongside its Actuary, Hymans Robertson, will be providing updates on the 2025 valuation to employers on 11 December 2025. Our valuation update meetings will discuss progress to date with the 2025 valuation and employer contribution rates for the period 1 April 2026 to 31 March 2029

We are conducting two sessions split by employer type:

This session is aimed at Finance Directors from GMPF employers. Please make your Finance Teams aware of this event.

• A valuation update event for academies and multi-academy trusts at 2pm – please book via this link Valuation Update Event (Academies) Tickets, Thu, Dec 11, 2025 at 2:00 PM | Eventbrite
• A valuation update event for all other GMPF employers at 3:30pm – please book via this link Valuation Update Event (All Employers Except Academies) Tickets, Thu, Dec 11, 2025 at 3:30 PM | Eventbrite

As part of our ongoing commitment to improving member experience, we will be upgrading our self-service platform, My Pension in the new year. This will include some new features as well as some improvements to the existing ones.

Further communications will follow shortly, outlining the transition process, key features, and the expected timescales. Please keep an eye out for these updates in the coming weeks.

We recently emailed superusers to inform them that we have identified an additional group of members who are protected by the McCloud remedy, and we will shortly be raising some queries for these.

These queries will come securely through Barracuda over the coming weeks, and we will only require you to provide data back to us if there are any changes that need to be made.

We continue to run employer training workshops on several topics. These sessions may be helpful if you are new or want to refresh your knowledge on subjects such as ill health, pensionable pay, retirements, leavers, topping up benefits, and employer discretions.

You can book by visiting the events section of the employer website. Spaces are limited and will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis.  

You can also access recordings of all these sessions on our website. You can do this any time and will find them under training webinars on the technical and training guides page of our employer website.  

The Local Government Association (LGA) has published Bulletin 269, which contains several LGPS updates.

 You can access Bulletin 269 and all previous LGPC bulletins by clicking here. 

The latest publications from our Actuary, Hymans Robertson, are available. The webpage allows you to filter subjects and audience types easily so you can read the publications that are of interest to you.