Request

‘In response to a previous FoI request relating to General Practitioners pay you provided a response https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-01569 [Ref: FoI-01569]. Could you now supply a similar response on the same basis but updated so that it shows pay as of the 2023-24 financial year?’

Response

The attached file contains an individual table for each of the last five scheme years (2019/20, 2020/21, 2021/22, 2022/23 & 2023/24). The data is grouped by employing authority and Total Pensionable Pay (TPP) Bracket.

Caveats

All general practitioners (medical & ophthalmic), who have a contributing post in the period, are in scope for this data. General Dental Practitioners have been excluded.

TPP brackets are based on the sum of available TPP data for the respective financial year. This will include all employments which contributions were paid on, including non-practitioner posts.

TPP has been grouped in brackets of £50k. This does not accurately match the initial request (cumulative sums) however offers more detail as disaggregated data. The cumulative sums can easily be identified where necessary.

Annual contribution data is only available when an annual update has been processed onto the member record for the respective employment.

A post not being fully updated does not mean the information has not been submitted by the employer; it may have been submitted and been unable to process onto the member record due to validation issues. Practitioners generally submit their contribution data in the year behind officers, hence why the YE 2023 non-updated figures are higher than previous years.

An employment record must be updated in sequential order – if one year of data is missing, all future years will also be missing.

Employing Authority is split into ‘England’ and the five respective Welsh Authorities requested, based on the individual employment code. This does not mean all Welsh practitioners are counted under a Welsh employing authority; for example, there are practitioners held under EA code 0604 - NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership (GP & Non-GP Partners) which by default will be categorised as England.

Members having multiple employments with different employing authorities in the same year are counted only once under ‘England’ as the employing authority.

Fewer Than 5 Pensioners

Please be aware that I have decided not to release the figure where the total number of Pension members falls below 5. This is because individuals could be identified when combined with other information that may be in the public domain or reasonably available.

This information falls under the exemption in section 40 subsections 2 and 3A (a) of the Freedom of Information Act.

This is because it would breach the first data protection principle as: a) it is not fair to disclose personal details to the world and is likely to cause damage or distress. b) these details are not of sufficient interest to the public to warrant an intrusion into the privacy of the Pension members.

Please click the web link below to see the exemption in full.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/36/section/40

Definitions

General Practitioner – An employment marked as having capacity code 03 (Medical Staff) or 10 (Ophthalmic Practitioner), and Employment Type 5 (Principal Practitioner), 6 (Assistant Practitioner) or 9 (GP Locum/ Locum Practitioner)

TPP – Total Pensionable Pay. The pay in which contributions have been based on – this is not uprated to wholetime equivalent and does not reflect a person’s annual salary or reckonable pay.

Employing Authority – The organisation responsible for updating each member’s pension record and managing their employment.

Publishing this response

Please note that this information will be published on our Freedom of Information disclosure log at:

https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-02088