Thank you for your request for information about the following:

‘1. How many requests to protect pension following a reduction in pensionable pay have been made over the last 5 years? 2. How many of these were eligible, according to the criteria stated in the factsheet 'Protection of pay and voluntary protection of pay factsheet-20220712'? 3. Of those which were eligible, how many were approved? 4. How many were deemed ineligible, and on what grounds?’

Your request was received on 24 October 2023 and I am dealing with it under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Response

Question 1 & 4

Since 1 October 2018, 4,383 work requests (from 1,601 unique members) have been received by NHS Pensions. These would need manual interrogation to determine if the work request related to an application for Protection of Pay.

To answer question 1 would require a manual search of all 4,383 applications. We estimate a minimum of five minutes per case.

4,383 x 5 minutes = 365.25 hours

To answer question 4 would require a manual search of the 1,601 member records. We estimate a minimum of five minutes per case.

1,601 x 5 minutes = 133.42 hours

Therefore, I estimate that the cost of complying with your request would exceed the non-central Government limit of £450. The limit has been specified in The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 and represents the estimated cost of one person spending 18 hours in determining whether the NHSBSA holds the information, and locating, retrieving and extracting the information. Under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act, the NHSBSA is not obliged to comply with your request and I will not be processing your request further.

Question 2

There have been 983 Protection of Pay entries (for 935 unique members) successfully completed since 01 October 2018. Only eligible requests are completed.

Question 3

All 983 Protection of Pay entries above have been approved, as no eligible cases are rejected.

Data Queries

If you have any queries regarding the data provided, or if you plan on publishing the data please contact foirequests@nhsbsa.nhs.uk ensuring you quote the above reference. This is important to ensure that the figures are not misunderstood or misrepresented.

If you plan on producing a press or broadcast story based upon the data please contact communicationsteam@nhsbsa.nhs.uk This is important to ensure that the figures are not misunderstood or misrepresented.

The information supplied to you continues to be protected by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and is subject to NHSBSA copyright. This information is licenced under the terms of the Open Government Licence detailed at:

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/

Should you wish to re-use the information you must include the following statement:

“NHSBSA Copyright 2023” This information is licenced under the terms of the Open Government Licence:

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/

Failure to do so is a breach of the terms of the licence.

Information you receive which is not subject to NHSBSA Copyright continues to be protected by the copyright of the person, or organisation, from which the information originated. Please obtain their permission before reproducing any third party (non NHSBSA Copyright) information.