Part three-  how do we get to a £200 billion figure for last March 31st  2025?

We have extracted our information base from each annual report from every one of the 97 local government pension funds In England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland for the last 10 years. We have also cross-referenced this with the big city and metropolitan councils through their annual statements of accounts over the last 10 years.

We have collated better the DHCLG's own inexplicably inadequate publications of every England and Wales pension fund's SF3 annual returns  for the last 10 years.

We have similarly extracted all of the appropriate information from the once-every-three years valuations published by the actuaries of every one of the 97 pension funds.

These millions of data points have allowed us to model the performance of these funds since their last report For March 31st 2024.

It allows us to 'roll forward' that data with some accuracy using the pension funds' own sensitivity analysis in particular.

All funds include a 'what if' section of their assessment of assets and liabilities (and so each deficit/surplus) in both their valuations and annual reports. This enables us, in particular, using all of the other data points,  to calculate each pension fund's deficit or surplus on the 31st of March 2025 and aggregate them for UK total figure.

The statutory body which advises the LGPS, the Scheme Advisory Board has just this month published some useful information from their first dive draft analysis  of last year's England and Wales annual report, which serves also to confirm our analysis.

We have In particular used March 31st 2025 industry data on up-to-date observed practice across the wider defined benefit pensions industry as to investment returns since March 31 2024. Most importantly we have in particular applied currently  observed use of discount rates to calculate assets and liabilities. We have used the more conservative of these estimates

We have used aggregated roll-forward calculations from each of the 97 pension fund's discount rates in both their last valuation and annual report, and their own actuaries'  sensitivity analysis in their reports. We have, as a cross reference, done the same with the now more conservative IAS 19 Discount rates and sensitivity analyses in Pension fund Annual Reports and City Council Statements of Accounts from 2024.

To add a further check and balance we have used a general overview that each basis point change in discount rate creates a 2% change in the liabilities of the pension fund and rolled this forward.