Guidance

Newsletter 162 — September 2024

Published 17 September 2024

Lifetime allowance (LTA) abolition

HMRC concluded a short informal consultation on the draft regulations to correct the legislation, following the abolition of the lifetime allowance on 14 August 2024. Thank you to everyone who responded.

We have considered the feedback and regulations will be introduced as soon as parliamentary time allows.

Lump sum reporting workshop

In Pension schemes newsletter 159 — April 2024 and Pension schemes newsletter 160 — May 2024 we invited pension scheme administrators to register their interest in a workshop to look at the Real Time Information (RTI) changes.

Thank you to those of you who have already contacted us. We intend to hold the workshop in early October 2024 and invitations will be sent out soon to those who have already registered their interest. The workshop will focus on the changes to RTI and how to report relevant lump sums through RTI from April 2025.

If you have not contacted us yet and would still like to be involved, email: ltaadministration@hmrc.gov.uk. You should put ‘lifetime allowance (LTA) lump sum reporting workshop’ in the subject heading.

Authenticated look up service to confirm protections and enhancements ― how you can help us

In Lifetime allowance guidance newsletter — December 2023 we told you that in 2025 we will moving the lifetime allowance protection look-up service onto the Managing pension schemes service.

This will allow us to provide additional information to registered pension scheme administrators and practitioners, when checking whether the protection that a member has informed them they are relying on, for a higher lump sum, is valid. We will also update the service to include if a member holds an enhancement as well as protections. We’re looking for scheme administrators and practitioners to help us develop this feature.

You can take part in this user research and give us feedback by joining the Managing pension schemes user panel. To sign up or to get more information email: pensionsuserresearchrecruitment@hmrc.gov.uk.

As a member of the panel, you:

• will only be contacted about the Managing pension schemes service
• can get involved in testing new features and providing feedback on the service

Your feedback will be invaluable to helping influence the future design and development of the service.

Relief at source — annual return of information for 2023 to 2024

The deadline for submitting your annual return of information and APSS590 declaration for 2023 to 2024 to HMRC has passed. However, there are still returns outstanding from scheme administrators who have submitted interim repayment claims in 2024 to 2025.

If a 2023 to 2024 annual return of information was due for your scheme and this is still outstanding, any subsequent interim repayments will be withheld until we receive both the:

• outstanding return
• APSS590 declaration

We want to remind pension scheme administrators that it’s important to use the right naming convention when submitting an annual return of information for 2023 to 2024. Using the wrong references on either the file name or within the annual return itself will mean our systems will reject your submission and you’ll have to resubmit the return.

You can find details of how you should name your files in:

• the relief at source spreadsheet
• the electronic flat text file specifications

Managing pension schemes service

You should take action now to migrate your pension schemes to the Managing pension schemes service.

2 steps to migrating your scheme — enrol and migrate

As a scheme administrator, if you haven’t already, you must first enrol on the Managing pension schemes service. You should use the Government Gateway username and password for your existing ‘A0’ administrator ID.

If you have multiple scheme administrator IDs, you must enrol on the Managing pension schemes service using the username and password for your ‘Master’ ID.  Read migrating your pension scheme to the Managing Pension Schemes service for more information on ‘Master’ and ‘ancillary’ IDs.

To migrate your pension schemes, you’ll need to: 

• sign in to the Managing Pension Schemes service
• select ‘Add a pension scheme from the Pension Schemes Online service’

In Appendix A, you can find further information that you’ll need to complete to migrate a pension scheme.

If you need further help, contact HMRC by email: migration.mps@hmrc.gov.uk.

System downtime

As a result of some routine updates, we will need to take the Managing pension schemes service offline for a few days.

This means that you will not be able to access the service from 4pm on Friday 11 October 2024 to 10am on Tuesday 15 October 2024.