The British Medical Association – the trade union and professional association for doctors and medical students – has been lobbying for improvements to the administration of the NHS Pension Scheme after member complaints and a motion by GPs last year to address issues with third-party administrator Capita.
Capita has come under scrutiny in the past over the quality of its pensions administration in a number of industries. Recent cases include worries from members over its handling of teachers' and coal miners' pensions. Last year, locum GPs called for an overhaul of their pensions administration.
NHS England awarded Capita a seven-to-10 year contract worth around £400m to run Primary Care Support England from September 2015. Pressure on the health service to examine the outsourcer’s performance could increase this year.
Capita still are not providing a service as full as we need. There is room for improvement
Dr Krishan Aggarwal, British Medical Association
In November 2017, the England local medical committees conference, which brought together NHS England GPs, passed a motion in full calling for NHS England to deal with issues in Capita’s service delivery.
The three-part motion by LMCs included a call for the General Practitioners Committee England to “urgently address Capita’s failure to correctly collect superannuation contributions in England and seek recompense for those practitioners affected”.
This statement of disapproval from GPs could become BMA policy if it is ratified at its annual representative meeting in late June.
The BMA has already attended monthly meetings with NHS England and Capita in order to improve administration. It is also behind a series of blogs on NHS England pensions entitled ‘Capita and the NHS pension fiasco – what is going on?’
The blogs by Krishan Aggarwal, deputy chair of the sessional subcommittee at the BMA, show concerns over unallocated monies, the absence of bank details for online transfers, and poor communication with members.
Capita is now on its own
Since the beginning of Capita’s contract, NHS England has provided a support team to help the outsourcer deliver the contract. Last month, the decision was made to withdraw this support.
In his blog, Aggarwal describes “great unease as to how the service will continue and whether [Capita] will be able to deliver”.
He told Pensions Expert that in his view, the burden of responsibility over pensions administration ultimately lies with NHS England, given that it was the body’s decision to outsource. NHS England had previously administered the scheme in-house.
“Our main concern is that individuals who are paying into the pension scheme are not penalised due to the fact of Capita processing the pension scheme,” he said.
Meetings between the BMA and Capita have been productive, according to Aggarwal. For example, Capita adopted a BMA recommendation over unique referencing for scheme members to submit payments.
“Capita were very open at the time, and they implemented it quite quickly,” he said.
Contributions cannot be made in top gear
Bank details for making pension contributions are absent from the PCSE website. According to Aggarwal, this is due to a security concern from NHS England, and partly to unallocated cash within NHS England’s bank account.
NHS England holds these contributions, while Capita is charged with processing them. Capita does not have access to the funds directly.
Aggarwal said he was told that the security concern arose at NHS England following news of TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson having a direct debit set up from his bank account to a diabetes charity in 2008. Clarkson had published his own bank details in his newspaper column to prove his view that fears over bank fraud were exaggerated.
NHS England has advised individuals who do not know the bank details for making contributions to contact PCSE either via telephone or online form.
Monies remain unallocated to members
Unallocated cash to members is the second reason for the decision to withhold bank details from the PCSE website.
Some cheques have been lost, and Capita has struggled to allocate these monies. “We don’t officially know how much is unallocated,” Aggarwal said.
The BMA has been advised that these monies have been ringfenced until they can be allocated to individuals and there is no risk that the money will be lost.
Daniel Taylor, director at administrator Trafalgar House, expressed concerns over these unallocated monies.
At high volume, contributions are “difficult to independently identify unless they’re associated with a unique identifier”, Taylor said.
“You do run the risk, unless that process is kept on top of all the time, that there will be gaps and errors, and... they simply can’t allocate back to individuals.” He added that if that happens, there will be gaps in the service history.
Members are struggling to contact Capita
Contacting the administrator has proven challenging for some members. When Aggarwal visited Capita’s Blackburn office in September, the administrator had allowed a backlog of 30,000 email enquiries to build up. These are understood to have been dealt with up to this month.
In his blog, he writes: “I am not convinced that all of these have been resolved as I have heard a number of individuals receiving emails to state that their queries have been resolved when they have not.”
Members have submitted complaints on the BMA website. There is particular focus on a lack of understanding over required documentation from doctors, and an absence of acknowledgment of enquiries.
Dorothy King wrote: “I am vey (sic) concerned about the Type 2 annual self-assessment forms. I have faithfully sent mine in every year, to various different addresses (most recently Darlington); by my reckoning they owe me money but I can’t get anyone to even acknowledge receipt.”
Type 2 annual assessment forms need to be completed by Type 2 medical practitioners, a term that covers a range of GPs. According to Aggarwal, many doctors are not aware of the need to complete these forms. A number of GPs have expressed this view anonymously on the BMA website.
The problem appears to predate Capita’s contract, with one anonymous commenter writing: “Never heard of it, looks like I should have been doing them the last six years.”
Richard Fieldhouse, chairman of the National Association of Sessional GPs, spoke of lengthy waiting periods for responses to queries and described the online enquiry process as “an exercise in obfuscation”.
“I have no idea what my pension is like,” he said. “It’s like you’re dealing with space aliens, with Capita; a radio time delay that has to ping across the other end of the galaxy before it comes back again.”
Fieldhouse said that prior to the appointment of Capita he would receive “a really quick response” from “a local person in a local office” over his pension.
British Coal members raise Capita admin concerns
The £9.4bn British Coal Staff Superannuation Scheme has had to calm member concerns at its 2017 annual meeting over its decision to appoint Capita as its administrator last year.
Room for improvement
A Capita spokesperson said: “GPs now have access to a new online contact form that simply captures all required information, speeding up the process for progressing requests and resolving queries. PCSE continues to work closely with NHSE and the BMA to help increase practitioners’ understanding of the correct pensions processes to follow. As has always been the case, we rely on practitioners providing the required information to us in order to progress their request and queries as quickly as possible.”
An NHS England spokesperson said: “NHS England has been working closely with the BMA, including Dr Krishan Aggarwal directly, and Capita to address the concerns which Dr Aggarwal has raised and we are all committed to resolving these issues as quickly as we possibly can.”
But Aggarwal remains unconvinced: “Capita still are not providing a service as full as we need. There is room for improvement. With NHS England stepping away, it does cause us unease.”
