NHS Pension Retirement Benefits with MHO Status

Pat38493

Hi - I asked here quite some time ago about my wife's NHS pension - she retired on April 30th this year and she was in the 1995 scheme with Mental Health Officer status.

Under MHO status, you get doubled up pension years from 20 years of service, with a cap of accruing 40 years (i.e. 30 years of actual service ) up to age 55, but you can then get some more doubling up years for each full calendar year worked form your 55th birthday.  At least this is what it always said on the NHS details that I had.

Therefore she retired on end of April 2022 with the express intention of receiving one extra doubling up year after her 55th birthday.

NHS pensions calculated a different lesser number.  After chasing them for months, they have finally replied.

It turns out that their information about all her service record and everything is pretty much correct, or at least close enough not to have made any difference to what I calculated.  The issue hinges on how they have treated her final year of work after her 55th birthday.

What their reply seems to state is that she could never have received any more doubling up years from age 55 because on 1st April 2022, she was forcibly moved into the 2015 pension section due to the McCloud judgement.  (by the way she had never been told this or received any correspondence about it according to her).  She says she had never heard of the McCloud judgement and didn't think it applied to her - she had seen it mentioned on pension forums like this one, but never was told that it affected her personally.

They are saying that she has one month of pension for the month of April 2022 under the 2015 section which hasn't been claimed but which has no MHO status so she can't claim it (without deduction) until she is 65).  By the way they never mentioned this at the time even in passing or in any way whatsoever - this is the first time it's been mentioned 6 months later.

Does anyone know if this is correct that effectively from 1st April this year it would be impossible for anyone who had MHO status in the past to double up any years any more?  I had never even heard of the McCloud judgement until today.

Even if this is technically true, isn't there some kind of legal duty to inform people about these things in advance?

hyubh

Pat38493 said:

I had never even heard of the McCloud judgement until today.

Even if this is technically true, isn't there some kind of legal duty to inform people about these things in advance?

There's a section on the scheme administrator's website:

https://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/changes-public-service-pensions

The link there for 'Your NHS Pension after 1 April 2022' goes to this:

https://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/changes-public-service-pensions/your-nhs-pension-after-1-april-2022

Near the end that page it says,

We're writing to all affected members

If you're currently a member of the 1995/2008 Scheme you will move to the 2015 Scheme on 1 April 2022 and we'll be writing to you in January 2022 with more information on the changes. 

The letter will include more information on how the changes may affect: 

Special Class or MHO status 

[...] 

Does anyone know if this is correct that effectively from 1st April this year it would be impossible for anyone who had MHO status in the past to double up any years any more?

The BMA's webpage on the topic does agree with that at least:

As from 1 April 2022 all members, regardless of age, will move to the 2015 scheme and the guidance below will refer to the time after this transition.

The 2015 scheme calculates benefits for all members in the same way. When you join the 2015 scheme, MHO status has no bearing on your prospective accrual. Doubling of service ceases on moving to the 2015 scheme.

https://www.bma.org.uk/pay-and-contracts/pensions/additional-pensions-advice/1995-section-mental-health-officer-status

Purplelady65

Yes everyone in the 1995 and 2008 NHS schemes was moved to the 2015 scheme on 1st April 2022. It was actually in 2015 that the changes were brought in and NHS staff were written to in advance of that so around 2013/14. Depending on retirement age the changes impacted on employees differently. I work for the NHS and I definitely received a letter a couple of years before the changes and there were also communications about it within the workplace. I also received a letter from NHS Pensions about the McCloud judgement. The McCloud judgement is actually a remedy to a legal challenge around when NHS employees were moved to the 2015 scheme as at the time it was dependent on their age and favoured people closer to retirement than those who were not. It didn’t force people into the 2015 scheme on 1st April 2022 as you’ve stated above as for most employees they were moved to the 2015 scheme on 1st April 2015. This probably didn’t impact on your wife as with MHO status she would have been too close to retirement age to be moved to the 2015 scheme at the time. The McCloud judgement enables those who were moved into the 2015 scheme from 01/04/15 onwards and up until 31/03/22 to choose whether they take their benefits from the 2015 scheme or from their legacy scheme. 

Pat38493

hyubh said:

Pat38493 said:

I had never even heard of the McCloud judgement until today.

Even if this is technically true, isn't there some kind of legal duty to inform people about these things in advance?

There's a section on the scheme administrator's website:

https://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/changes-public-service-pensions

The link there for 'Your NHS Pension after 1 April 2022' goes to this:

https://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/changes-public-service-pensions/your-nhs-pension-after-1-april-2022

Near the end that page it says,

We're writing to all affected members

If you're currently a member of the 1995/2008 Scheme you will move to the 2015 Scheme on 1 April 2022 and we'll be writing to you in January 2022 with more information on the changes. 

The letter will include more information on how the changes may affect: 

Special Class or MHO status 

[...] 

Does anyone know if this is correct that effectively from 1st April this year it would be impossible for anyone who had MHO status in the past to double up any years any more?

The BMA's webpage on the topic does agree with that at least:

As from 1 April 2022 all members, regardless of age, will move to the 2015 scheme and the guidance below will refer to the time after this transition.

The 2015 scheme calculates benefits for all members in the same way. When you join the 2015 scheme, MHO status has no bearing on your prospective accrual. Doubling of service ceases on moving to the 2015 scheme.

https://www.bma.org.uk/pay-and-contracts/pensions/additional-pensions-advice/1995-section-mental-health-officer-status

Thanks - I think I had already found those links yesterday.

My wife was transferred by TUPE from the NHS into a separate service provider quite some years before she retired, but was able to keep all her NHS terms and conditions including pension.  According to her, she has never received any letters or communication about this, and certainly never received a letter in January this year about it.

The question is, would she have a case for some kind of compensation because she was not informed about the changes with sufficient notice - I suspect they will simply try to claim that they informed her employer and it was up to her employer to inform her or something like that....?

Also, she had several conversations with NHS pensions over the year before she retired, where she explained to them that she was delaying her retirement until after her 56th birthday, specifically so that she could get an extra doubled year.  At no point did any of them say "why are you doing that because on 1st April 2022 you will be moved to a different scheme and therefore it will be categorically impossible for you to double up any more years from now on".

There is also another issue, or at least something that to me doesn't make sense.  NHS have sent a detailed summary of how her pension was calculated.  There was a period of time between 2004 and 2014, some of which was during doubling years, and some not, when she was working part time, but for quite a lot of this time it was only just half time - she was doing 36 hours or suchlike instead of 37.5.

Her total calendar service up to age 55 was 48 years and some days, but her reckonable service was 46 years and some days (including doubled up years but before adjusting for the maximum allowed double years before 55).

In my mind, it seemed very clear that 46 years service is more than enough to accrue the full 40 years available up to age 55.

According to NHS pensions, this is not correct because they have introduced a new rule in the document which I've never seen before "Reckonable membership with part time hours is a proportion thereof and must be less than 40 years at age 55".  That's a pretty arbitrary rule when your actual amount of time worked is way more than what would be needed.

The even more arbitrary part is that they have calculated the proportion of doubling up that would have been removed if she had been working full time for the entire period which is around 17%.  They have then deducted the same amount of time from her reckonable service, but then re-applied that 17% number back to reduce the deduction to give an arbitrary doubling up reduction of 7 years and 36 days - I cannot really see any real-work logic to the point of re-applying the 17% again to that number with no reference or dependency on the proportion of part time hours worked - it could have been 1% or 99% but the 7 years 36 days would still be the same!  How is this a representative calculation?  Surely if they are going to do those kind of adjustments it should at least have some level of dependency on the part time adjustments themselves?

Besides that and in the end, any normal person would think that if they had worked a total of more than 46 years of actual work hours, they would for sure get the full 10 years of available doubling.

So in the end NHS is "correct" in the sense that they have just come up with a bunch of new rules and strange calculations which can't be found anywhere that I have looked except in a document that it takes them 6 months to type out - question is, should we then challenge them to give us the actual legislation or pension rules behind that?