Request

Can you confirm the number of members, who have taken their NHS pension benefits on an Actuarial Reduced Early Retirement (ARER) basis, where the recorded annual allowance closing value for tax year that they took their benefit does not equal the value of their pension x 16 plus lump sum of the actual benefits taken?

Can you also confirm the sum difference between these values?

Where there is a difference, and the member has a scheme pays election, what is the sum potential overcharged annual allowance? (Happy to give guidance on how to calculate this)

Can the values be broken down by tax year, and occupation type?

Can you separately show this breakdown by scheme, i.e. 95,08 and 2015?

Response

I regret that we cannot provide the information you requested.

We have carried out some analysis on the annual allowance data we hold for pensioners and have determined that the required information is not held. While this data could be manually provided to the members on request, it is very rarely requested, and is not stored within our database after provision. We do not automatically provide annual allowance statements for pensioners.

Analysis shows that of the 208,000 members who have retired over the last 6 years, around 96% of them had not exceeded their annual allowance growth in the 3 years prior to retirement (where data is available), which mitigates the need to provide an annual allowance statement, however one will be provided on request.

Our awards process includes a robust quality checking aspect to ensure benefits have been implemented with the correct pension values. However due to retrospective changes in data, which may lead to a revised award, we cannot guarantee that this figure will match the expected closing balance in any annual allowance statements provided.