We pride ourselves on being an employer of choice, offering a range of training and development opportunities and career progression allowing you to manage your own development journey and empowering you to control your career. Perhaps most importantly you will be welcomed by talented teams.
We positively encourage productive, flexible working and we provide you with the technology you need to work from our Barnsley office and at home (we also offer a home-working allowance to all staff who work part of the week at home).
If you are interested in joining our team and are inspired to help lead the next phase of our journey, we look forward to your application. In the meantime, following an initial conversation with our recruitment partners at The Resourcing Solution I would be delighted to discuss this opportunity with those who might wish to learn a little more.
George Graham, Director of the South Yorkshire Pensions Authority.
Job title: Assistant Director – Pensions
Location: Barnsley / Hybrid Working
Contract: Full-time / Permanent
Salary: £79,596 to £90,692 (23/24 pay award pending) plus benefits & relocation support
The Assistant Director – Pensions is one of three Senior Management roles supporting SYPA’s Director in giving leadership and direction to the Authority’s operations. The diagram below shows how this role fits into the overall structure of the organisation and illustrates the difference between SYPA as an organisation, and a conventional LGPS administering authority where many support services are provided by the host council.
More detail about the structure of the organisation is available on our website here.
The portfolio of functions for which the role is responsible represent the Authority’s key customer facing functions and include the largest portion of the Authority’s staff with a current headcount of around 63 Full Time Equivalents.
Following a review of organisational resilience last year which addressed management capacity across the organisation a capacity planning exercise is currently underway which will address any identified shortfalls in “production” capacity in the Pensions Service.
The current high-level structure of the Pensions Service is shown below. The responsibilities of management roles are currently being reviewed to assist in addressing some capacity challenges.
The agenda for the Pensions Service, as with its peers across the Local Government Pension Scheme is dominated by a small number of major projects such as the McCloud remedy. However, we are ambitious to ensure that we do not just address these major industry wide challenges but also begin to roll out a series of smaller scale, but nonetheless significant, improvements in the way in which we deliver services to our scheme members such as the introduction of an on-line retirement process for all members. More details of the areas we are currently planning to improve over the next three years are set out in our Corporate Strategy here.
Finally, while a degree (or equivalent) is desirable, it is not essential if you can lead with credibility and demonstrate a compelling background working within a Local Government Pension Fund.
Come and join us!
We are a growing public sector organisation with a team of around 100 staff who run the workplace pension scheme, managing a Fund of over £10 billion on behalf of nearly 600 employing organisations, including Local Authorities and other public / not-for-profit sector bodies.
South Yorkshire Pensions Authority is responsible for administering the Local Government Pension Scheme in South Yorkshire. The Authority was created in 1988 as part of the arrangements put in place following the abolition of South Yorkshire Metropolitan County Council. The Authority itself is made up of 12 Councillors drawn from the 4 districts in the County.
The Pensions Authority's workforce is headed by the Director and is organised around three streams of activity, each led by an Assistant Director, reflecting the focus of its work in relation to:
- Scheme members
- Investment of the Pension Fund's assets, and
- The running of the organisation
The diagram below shows how the different elements of our governance arrangements fit together and how they relate to the various elements of the Border to Coast Pensions Partnership in relation to investment matters.
The beginning of last year saw the country still in the grips on the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, with staff still working from home but the vaccine programme beginning to get things moving once again. The end of the year saw war breakout in Europe after almost 80 years.
These events create significant challenges for the Authority in terms of its operations and from the impact of volatility in the financial markets on our investments. Despite this, we have had a range of successes and delivered a significant amount of work over the last 12 months including:
- Processing 61,000 individual transactions with scheme members within the administration service.
- In October 2021 £574m in assets transferred to the new Border to Coast Multi-Asset Credit Fund and we awarded a contract for actuarial services to a new provider, Hymans Robertson, following a competitive procurement exercise.
- From September 2021 to January 2022, we invested over £35m (as part of a £80m allocation) in local development loans to provide regeneration to the Eyewitness and Ceylon works sites in Sheffield for housing and industrial redevelopment at the former B&Q site at Darnall, Sheffield, Gateway 36 in Barnsley and the Advanced Manufacturing Park in Rotherham.
- In November 2021 we were awarded the Impact Investing Adopters Award from Pensions for Purpose for our adoption of an impact focussed approach to our investments and March 2022 saw us publish our first impact report which sets out the impact of our investments on people and planet for our stakeholders.
- February 2022 saw the official opening of our new Oakwell House Office in Barnsley, providing a modern working environment for our staff and designed to support the move to a hybrid working arrangement.
- It also saw £191m of assets transfer to the new Border to Coast Listed Alternatives Fund, meaning that just over 70% of the Fund is now managed by the Pool.
This is just a small sample of some of our achievements over the last 12 months.
We operate a flexible working policy which allows for a hybrid of home and office working, with a superb, newly refurbished office tailor-made for hybrid working, offering free staff parking. We are committed to providing a healthy work-life balance and so you will benefit from between 27- and 35-days’ annual leave depending on length of service together with access to a flexitime scheme, as well as the opportunity to join the generous Local Government salary related pension scheme. There are plenty of learning and development opportunities too, including access for all our staff to LinkedIn Learning. A relocation package is also available for eligible applicants, details of which can be found above.
Corporate Objectives
SYPA operates to deliver a number of corporate objectives the achievement of which will allow us to deliver on our mission which is:
Making sure we deliver against the objectives below will allow us to achieve this:
Values and Behaviours
How we achieve our objectives is as important to us as what we achieve, and we operate with a framework of values and behaviours which signify the type of organisation we want to be:
| Values | Behaviours |
| Honest and Accountable | Telling it like it is, and taking responsibility for our actions even when we have made a mistake
|
| Progressive | Welcoming of change, while taking sensible risks and learning from our mistakes and from others
|
| Professional | Being highly skilled and competent and managerially applying rationality to decision making processes
|
| Empowering | Providing the freedom for individuals to identify and implement solutions to problems
|
In addition, if we are to live those values then our managers must demonstrate specific management behaviours as shown below:
| Management Behaviours | Demonstrated by: |
| We model positive behaviours to each other and to all staff |
|
| We take responsibility for improvement - within a clear framework |
|
| We all get behind a common goal |
|
| We involve and engage people in decisions that will affect them |
|
South Yorkshire is full of pleasant surprises. Once an industrial heartland, the region has been transformed into a 21st Century playground with a passion for music, sport and culture.
Surrounded by ancient villages and historic parkland, Barnsley has grown into a lively shopping and social hub with a range of independent shops a new