Thread by @gdcuk

Found a way to save doctors £11m🤯

I had a hunch retired members had not used Individual Protection 16

Big thanks to #NHSPension FOI team for listening & using my methodology and to @ChrisD4wson & team for agreeing with our proposal to fix it👏

Pls RT

thetimes.co.uk/article/doctor…

2/ Individual Protection 16 (IP16) is a form of lifetime allowance (LTA) protection that was introduced when the LTA was reduced to £1m from 06/04/2016

You are able to protect your pension savings up to £1.25m, depending on the value at the time

gov.uk/guidance/pensi…

3/ The tricky bit is finding out the value of your NHS pension as at 5th April 2016

You can pay NHSBSA £120 to work it out for you nhsbsa.nhs.uk/sites/default/…

or you can apply some maths to some annual allowance information you might already have

4/ We were originally told that our FOI would take too long - working out LTA values can be complex as you need to work out member's pension benefits first

FOI team were awesome, they said 'let's meet and chat' when they were well within their rights to say refuse our FOI

5/ I showed their data team how you can use existing Annual Allowance statements to work out pension benefits at 5th April 2016, which reduced the data analysis time to hours rather than days, so they agreed to proceed with original FOI

Details on how to calculate IP16 value 👇

6/ During this process I reached out to @nhs_pensions @ChrisD4wson and suggested how they could help remedy the situation

NHSBSA have done nothing wrong here, IP16 is an individual's responsibility, so it's really great news that they have agreed to help hundreds of members

7/ It will take a while to fix this, but members should collectively save at least £11m - the final saving is likely to be higher as those impacted could have had other pensions to increase their IP16 protected value

8/ Unfortunately pension taxation is too complicated

Combine that with a very complex defined benefit NHS pension, and the few that understand all this, you end up with costly mistakes

This £11m correction is from only one issue...there are other 'hunches' in the pipeline...