Request

Please can you tell me the number of incorrect initial retirement benefit calculations NHSBA has made over the last 5 years. I would also like to know the size of miscalculations i.e. largest and average overcalculation of individual pensions during this period

Response

In order to provide a response to this FOI, we would need to manually interrogate 80,154 records. This figure represents the number of substitute awards that have been made by NHS Pensions for the period in question. For information, a substitute award is paid when the original pensions benefits require revision. This could be for different reasons, for example: a change notified by the employer in respect of pay or scheme membership which may impact the amount originally paid or could include a miscalculation of the original benefits.

It is estimated that it would take 15 minutes per case to manually interrogate each record. 1202310 mins = 20038.5 Hours = approx. 835 days

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.

Unfortunately it does not seem that there may be an alternative way of approaching this request, or a subset of the requested information which could be answered within the appropriate cost limit.

Please note that this request and our response is published on our Freedom of Information disclosure log at https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi30967