Request

1. Please provide the number of members that have not had a pensions increase, that have submitted LTA1 forms and are in the pipeline waiting for LTA1 forms to be processed. Please provide this information for each of the last 5 tax years, and this year to date, and break this number down by practitioners, hospital doctors and others

2. Please provide the number of members, in each of the last 5 tax years and this year to date, that have not had pension increases applied, and that have NOT returned LTA1 forms. Please break this number down by practitioners, hospital doctors and others

3. Please provide copies of any correspondence (anonymised) that alerts members who were over 83.33% lifetime allowance that they did not have their pension increase applied i. making them aware they have not had a pension increase
   ii. informing them what they need to do to get their pension increase i.e complete the LTA1 forms or the new process post April 2024

4. Please provide a breakdown of the average and total amount of pensions in each group from questions 1 and 2 above. Please break this down by practitioners, hospital doctors and others

5. Please provide a breakdown of the number of pensions that required a reduction following the submission of an LTA1 form, and what the average value of that pension adjustment was.

Response

I can confirm that the NHSBSA holds some of the information you have requested.

Please read the below notes to ensure correct understanding of the data.

Question 1: Please provide the number of members that have not had a pensions increase, that have submitted LTA1 forms and are in the pipeline waiting for LTA1 forms to be processed. Please provide this information for each of the last 5 tax years, and this year to date, and break this number down by practitioners, hospital doctors and others

and

Question 2. Please provide the number of members, in each of the last 5 tax years and this year to date, that have not had pension increases applied, and that have NOT returned LTA1 forms. Please break this number down by practitioners, hospital doctors and others

2,237 members have not received any Pensions Increase (PI) over the last 5 years. Until we examine the case, we are unable to identify who has and has not returned an LTA1 form due to how these are recorded as part of the business process. We understand that you have received further details regarding this directly from NHS Pensions.

Question 3. Please provide copies of any correspondence (anonymised) that alerts members who were over 83.33% lifetime allowance that they did not have their pension increase applied i. making them aware they have not had a pension increase
ii. informing them what they need to do to get their pension increase i.e complete the LTA1 forms or the new process post April 2024

Since 2021 we have contacted members by telephone to request confirmation that nothing has changed since they claimed their benefits and advise that if there had been a change, they needed to complete the LTA1 which we would send to them. Such cases were recorded on our system as a 2nd Bite Initial Action task.

Question 4. Please provide a breakdown of the average and total amount of pensions in each group from questions 1 and 2 above. Please break this down by practitioners, hospital doctors and others

see attached file

Question 5. Please provide a breakdown of the number of pensions that required a reduction following the submission of an LTA1 form, and what the average value of that pension adjustment was.

We have considered this request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) and are issuing a refusal notice under section 17 of the FOIA.

The NHSBSA does hold the requested information; however, we estimate that the cost of compliance with the request would exceed the appropriate limit under section 12 of the FOIA.

We 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, extracting and checking the information.

Since August 2019, we have completed 111,716 substitute awards. We don’t believe there is a way of identifying reductions which resulted from receipt of an LTA form. Every single substitute award would have to be manually checked to identify if an LTA form was the cause of the revision, and also if a reduction in benefits took place.

To provide the breakdown would require manual interrogation of the 111,716 records with an overpayment. We estimate that this would take 10 minutes per record.

111,716 records x 10 minutes = 18,619 hours

Reusing the data and copyright

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 2024” 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.