Response

I would like to make a request for the following information from the NHS BSA under Section 1 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. In England, what was the average time elapsed between an employed doctor submitting their retirement application and receiving their pension payment for each of the following financial years? Please provide the mean average, median average, and range for each year. 2015/16 2016/17 2017/18 2018/19 2019/20 2020/21 2021/22

Response

To provide the information you have requested, NHSBSA would need to manually interrogate 19,352 individual GP/ Doctor records in order to establish date of receipt, and then calculate an average. Working at a minimum estimate of five minutes per record, this would result in a total working time of 1612.6 hours or 215 days. This is in excess of the statutory appropriate limit of 18.5 hours or 2.5 working days.

Therefore, in accordance with Section 12 of this Act we feel that on this occasion the data you have requested is exempt from release as the cost incurred in providing a response to your enquiry would exceed the appropriate limit outlined above.

Owing to the fact that we are applying an exemption to the information requested, please accept this e-mail as a refusal notice issued in accordance with section 17 of this Act.

Please note that this request and our response is published on our Freedom of Information disclosure log at:

• https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-27616

If you have any queries regarding the data provided, or if you plan on publishing the data, please contact nhsbsa.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 nhsbsa.communicationsteam@nhs.net. 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 2022” 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.