Newsletter No. 52

 HALCROW PENSIONERS ASSOCIATION 

 Newsletter No. 52 : March 2023

This is a newsletter of the Halcrow Pensioners Association (HPA). More details of HPA's objectives, organisation and its activities are here. You have been sent this newsletter because you are on the HPA's mailing list. Membership of HPA is open to all to all former Halcrow employees, sub-contractors, spouses and dependants who consider themselves to be part of the Halcrow "family". If you do not wish to receive the HPA newsletters then please either use the unsubscribe link at the bottom of your email or email the webmaster to remove your name from the mailing list. If you know anyone who may be interested to receive the newsletters then please forward them this newsletter using the link at the bottom of this email and encourage them to sign up for their own newsletters here.

The 2023 Annual General Meeting
In accordance with HPA's constitution, the Annual General Meeting shall take place in April. It is proposed to adopt the format used previously of a virtual meeting in a sub-forum of the HPA forum and all members are entitled to attend. The meeting will be the members' annual opportunity to contribute to the direction and operation of HPA. The 2023 AGM will be held in the HPA forum between 21st and 30th April. The proposed schedule, which has been based on the pace of previous AGMs, for the meeting is:

The agenda is here and links to the other documents will be posted in the HPA forum prior to the commencement of the AGM. Nominations or proposed items to be discussed at the AGM can be posted in the 2023 AGM forum to provide opportunity for others to view and, if appropriate, comment on them. Alternatively, please email them (also any apologies) to the secretary. An updated agenda will be issued before the meeting. The AGM is the opportunity for the members to provide their views on the direction and strategy of HPA. Please attend and provide your input.

At the April 2022 HPA annual general meeting the members approved the suspension of annual subscriptions which means that anyone who has ever paid a subscription to HPA since its establishment is entitled to attend. Anyone new wishing to join HPA, however, will be required to pay a one-off subscription of £10. Please contact the treasurer for guidance on payment methods.

While the 2022 AGM voted in favour of HPA developing a role for social networking among the members, this has not progressed because no one has volunteered to head the initiative.

New Jacobs Pensions Website
Jacobs recently launched a new website to serve its various inherited UK pension schemes. One useful improvement over the previous Halcrow pensions website is that the contact details for the pensions administration team are no longer hidden from public view (which should, in time, mean that people no longer email the HPA webmaster on such matters because they can't find any other contact details). Access to the specific scheme information on this website needs an email address and a password.

Those who had previously registered to access the HPS2 website should have received an email with this information. However, that email was sent to the address used when originally registering for the HPS2 website, which may now be dead and not be the same as the email address registered with the pensions team for other correspondence. The email informing members of the new pensions website includes a link for changing the default password but this doesn't work for those with @btinternet addresses (and maybe some others). We have discovered that people who were registered with the HPS2 website can access the new Jacobs pensions website by using the email address used when registering and this default password. At the moment the new website contains no option for users to change their access credentials such as email address or password although the site contains no personal information.

Perhaps the wrinkles with this website will be ironed out over time but it does appear to be an improvement over the old, neglected, HPS2 website, but any website (including HPA's) is only as good as the updating of the information that it contains.

Burderop Park
The new houses at Burderop Park are featured in this Youtube video. Have your sick bag ready!

If anyone is wondering about the big building under construction about 500m of Burderop Park, it's an Amazon data centre. There used to be a smaller data centre there built on what was originally the site of the Burderop hospital.

Deceased Former Colleagues
The HPS2 website maintains a list of deceased HPS2 members. A copy of the list of those who have departed in the past two years is available here. An update to the list is overdue and it will not include anyone who either did not transfer to HPS2 or has subsequently transferred out of HPS2.

Future HPA Initiatives
The need for HPA continues and among the possible ongoing tasks to look after HPA members' interests are:
1.    To keep HPA members informed about HPS2 and other pension-related matters.
2.    To closely monitor HPS2, the HPS2 Trustee and Jacobs UK (the scheme sponsoring company) to see whether adequate contributions are being made to the pension scheme.
3.    To examine and comment on proposals for changes to pension-related laws or regulations where we think they would affect our interests.
4.    Take opportunities to press for better supervision of pension schemes and their sponsoring companies.
5.    To facilitate social networking between former Halcrow employees.

Previous Newsletters
If you haven't been with HPA from the start or want to remind yourself of previous events then you can browse through the previous newsletters for which there is a full list here.