PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
General Practitioners: Pensions (10 March 2022)

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made on the potential merits of replacing PCSE as the GP pension administration contractor with NHS Business Services Authority .

Asked by:
Feryal Clark (Labour)

The NHS Pension Scheme requires participating employers to perform certain duties, including remittance of scheme contributions and providing information on employment and pension records. NHS England and NHS Improvement are the responsible employers for performing such duties in relation to general practitioner (GP) contractors, surgery based salaried GPs and freelance GP locums in England. In September 2015 Capita was contracted to provide a service administering these functions, which established PCSE to carry out these duties on its behalf. The Department has not made a specific assessment of its performance. NHS England and NHS Improvement have a monthly governance board in place to monitor and assure the delivery of PCSE’s service, which includes an assessment of quality and performance indicators.

No assessment has been made on the potential merits of moving the pensions administration service to the NHS Business Services Authority. NHS England and NHS Improvement are considering the future requirements and configuration of the PCSE’s services ahead of potential procurement processes at the end of the current contract in 2025.

Whilst PCSE are reliant on GP practices submitting information promptly, there have been issues relating to the administration of GP pension records. The NHS Business Services Authority advise that there are currently 19,681 pension records in error, of which 7,127 refer to leaver information and 12,554 relate to a year-end update. These errors could relate to any employment on the member’s record and may not be related to their GP posts.

There are currently 34,662 GP pension records which have at least one GP post awaiting a 2020/21 year-end update. There are several reasons why year-end updates may not have been received, including GPs not having submitted their annual figures, PCSE being unable to process updates due to previous missing years or updates not submitted to the NHS Business Service Authority.

Answered by:
Edward Argar (Conservative)
18 March 2022