One of the many, many confusing aspects of the NHS pensions scheme is the sheer number of organisations involved. By extension, this means individual members can get different accounts of their pensions from different places, adding to the complexity.
Total Rewards Statements
The best-known is the Total Rewards Statement (TRS), which is administered by NHS Pensions and has the lofty goal of providing “personalised information about the value of your employment package and include details about your remuneration and the benefits provided locally by your employer.”
“For members of the NHS Pension Scheme your TRS may also include an annual pension benefit statement.”
Unfortunately, for many GPs the TRS is blank – some of the reasons for this are listed in item 3 of our guide to pensions inaccuracies – and this self-evidently is alarming when you’ve been paying into a pension and the official record shows nothing. The commonest reason for this is that Primary Care Services England have not updated your pension records.
Statement of Contributions
However, it is also possible to request a Statement of Contributions (SoC) from NHS Pensions, and – unlike the TRS – this will contain details of all pensions information NHS Pensions hold. Although NHS Pensions say you have to send them a letter to request this, I called up and made clear over the phone that I was not willing to do this, and they organised it for me that way; mine is below for reference, as this helps explain how they work.
I’ve added the coloured text on the right to show how these marry up to my training jobs – because training started in August for me, 2009 covers part of my FY1 year, then 2010 is the rest of FY1 and part of FY2, and so on.
This is helpful because it sets out, clearly, what your pensions contributions were for each year for each job, and makes it much easier to cross-check these against payslips or your accountant’s records. My record isn’t especially helpful in that I went straight from training into GP partnership so only have a single employment; my understanding is that if you have more than one role, these are broken down by code (so for instance if you locum in multiple places, these will appear as individual lines).
This is also helpful as knowing your pensionable pay for each year means you can calculate your pension entitlement at any given point – but that is a subject for another post, which I will try to get done when time allows.
If you find this helpful, and manage to get a statement of contributions which shows multiple lines which you’d be willing to share (either in full or in part), please let me know!