It has been clear for several years that Capita’s handling of GP pensions was a shambles, and accordingly GP Survival have been running a campaign since September 2017 to have doctors submit Subject Access Requests (SARs), under data protection laws, to obtain the data Capita and NHS England held on their pensions. The original request was via our facebook page, and resulted in just under 400 SARs going in to NHSE.
The campaign revealed just how rotten the pensions system is. No GP in the country had their pensions information updated for almost four years. GPs who retired due to ill-health were left without any access to their pension. When the responses finally came through, people were missing decades of contributions. The response from Capita was to ignore any and all requests to find the missing data, and from NHSE to release a “confidential” briefing which their comms team e-mailed out to everyone, which sought to blame the issue on historical difficulties, and – of course – on GPs not filling in the right forms.
Accordingly, in the absence of any meaningful response from NHSE, GP Survival wrote to them a month ago, (PDF) highlighting the scale of the problems they have created and calling for action on them.
In the intervening month, we have had no formal response from NHS England, and it is profoundly disappointing that they have failed to acknowledge the time and effort of around 400 GPs who have submitted SARs, waited months while NHSE breached the SAR response timelines on an industrial scale, and then pored back over their own records to highlight to NHSE the scale of the problems they have created in pensions.
In the absence of any meaningful action on this from NHS England, and of even the courtesy of a response, GP Survival will be restarting the SAR campaign in association with other interested organisations, and raising the shambles which NHS England have presided over in GP pensions with the relevant national bodies.