Thank you for your request for information about the following:

Request

How long it is currently taking you to process sub awards pension recalculations when employer revises best last 12 months salary. Specifically:

a. When were the requests that were processed in April 2025 received

b. How many requests you have pending

c. On average how many requests on average do you process each month

The NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) received your request on 7 May 2025.

We have handled your request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA).

Our response

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.

Please see the following calculations which sets out the estimated cost for compliance with this request:

Please be advised that due to the way that the information is held by the NHSBSA, it is not possible to submit a refined request under the appropriate limit.

Please see the following link to view the section 12 in full - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/36/section/12.

Question 1a

When were the requests that were processed in April 2025 received

In April 2025 4,165 sub award cases were cleared. Manually interrogating these cases would take 347 hours and 5 minutes.

Question 1b

How many requests you have pending

The number of current Sub awards on hand is 23,022. To manually interrogate these cases to identify how many of these are received when employer revises best last 12 months’ salary, would take 1,918.5 hours.

Question 1c

On average how many requests on average do you process each month

For the last financial year, the following amounts of sub awards have been cleared month by month, please see below. If we were to interrogate cases to understand how many were received when employer revises best last 12 months' salary, it would take 2,556.75 hours.

• April 24 – 1666

• May 24 – 1793

• June 24 – 1725

• July 24 – 2244

• August 24 – 1960

• September 24– 2067

• October 24– 1915

• November 24 – 2052

• December 24 – 1881

• January 25– 4139

• February 25– 4196

• March 25 - 5041

In accordance with the duty to advise and assist under section 16 of the FOIA 2000, please be advised that you may be able to submit a refined request by removing the detail of “recalculations when employer revises best last 12 months’ salary” and to request data regarding substitute awards in general. Please be advised that any subsequent request may be subject to applicable exemptions under the FOIA.

Please see the following link to view the section 12 in full - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/36/section/12

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-02813

Your personal details will be removed from the published response.

Data Queries

Please contact foirequests@nhsbsa.nhs.uk ensuring you quote the above reference if you have any specific questions regarding this response; or, if you feel you may be misunderstanding or misinterpreting the information; or, if you plan on publishing the data.

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 2025”. 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.