Earlier this year, Capita announced a three-year extension to its primary care support services contract with NHS England. Pulse’s recent investigation has analysed the performance of Capita’s service delivery arm Primary Care Support England (PCSE), how it has affected GPs and patient care, and the justification for the extension. As part of this we spoke to GPs about their experience with the organisation. These are their stories.
In 2017, Dr Adrienne Crockett started planning for retirement. She was working as both a GP and consultant psychiatrist at the time and planned to take her pension and return to work part-time the following year.
But when she requested a total rewards statement, she was told that no pensions contributions were recorded in her GP pensions record for the previous five years. She was asked by PCSE to supply all of her information again. After speaking with colleagues and the GP survival campaign group, her case was put forward as one of the test cases looked at by consultancy firm PwC, which had been commissioned by NHS England to investigate the issues with GP pensions data.
Dr Crockett’s case was successfully resolved by PwC but the long delay in getting this sorted had a two-fold impact. Firstly, she had to delay her retirement by a year while PwC investigated her case. Secondly, a large chunk of her pension was due to come from her work in secondary care, and this was calculated on the best of the last three years. In 2018, Dr Crockett had the best year already banked, but the delay in resolving her GP pension issues meant she lost this.
‘I was placed in a position whereby had I retired at that point, once the [GP] figures were agreed, I would have had a lower pension, so what I had to do was go back to full time for another complete year in order to get my best pension. This took me to May 2020, when I then retired,’ she says.
‘I’d actually spent the two years prior to that having stepped back, and by then I was in my late 50s, so I didn’t really want to have to step up to working full time again for a year, that was most unacceptable to me. It felt very, very unfair.’
She adds: ‘My husband is disabled, and I could not afford to retire and not get my pension. I knew I just had to go back and get as much pension as I possibly could.
Dr Crockett says of the contract: ‘This has been grossly mismanaged and there must be hundreds and hundreds of us who have had a problem. I regard myself as fantastically lucky to get chosen as a test case because I could not have afforded to pay for the amount of accountancy work that they did, and I did not have that expertise. But colleagues have had to employ accountants and incur rather massive bills in order to try and sort this out, and nobody should have to pay that.’
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Deliberate of incompetent? my pension was delayed by nearly 6 months. £200000 not paid out for 6 months. multiply that by 1000 GPs and they have sat on 200 million pounds for 6 months.