Pension Schemes Bill [HL]

Lord Warner Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 2nd reading (Hansard)
Tuesday 28th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Warner (CB)]

My Lords, I rise with the rather dubious proposition that, as the last Back-Bencher to speak in the debate, I should be brief. I will have to take a bit of time because I will talk about something that has not really been discussed this afternoon and I hope to persuade the Government to add something to the Bill that is not already there.

The issue I wish to raise is that of senior doctors’ pensions, where anomalies in the pension taxation system are resulting in doctors having to reduce significantly the contribution that they are willing to make to the NHS, sometimes by retiring early and sometimes by reducing the time they are willing to devote to NHS work. The problem is caused by the tax charges many senior clinicians incur due to exceeding their pension threshold and which can result, in some instances, in them in effect paying to go to work.

Let me illustrate the problem that the current pensions taxation situation has caused with some figures provided by the Royal College of Physicians from a survey of nearly 3,000 members. Of these members, 45% of respondents reported that in the past two years they have decided to retire at an earlier age than planned. In the past two years, 38% of clinicians aged 50 to 65 have reported having had an annual pension tax charge due to exceeding their pension threshold. These numbers are rising, not diminishing. Once the decision to retire is taken it is much less likely to be reversed. We know that senior doctors told the royal college that they are doing so as a result of these tax charges. Some 62% of senior clinicians said that they were avoiding extra paid work such as waiting list initiatives or covering for colleagues; 43% are bringing forward their own retirement; 25% have reduced the number of programmed activities they work. Similar data is available from the Royal College of Surgeons and the Royal College of Emergency Medicine.

I know from my conversations with the BMA—as an ex-Health Minister I still have a reasonable relationship with the BMA—that its members have the same concerns, with the most recent BMA survey of more than 6,000 doctors from hospitals and general practice across England, Wales and Northern Ireland revealing that 42% of GPs have already reduced the number of hours spent caring for patients because of actual or potential pension taxation charges. In addition, 34% of GPs now plan to reduce their hours. Some 30% of hospital consultants have already reduced their hours and 40% have told the BMA that that was also their intention. Data from an earlier BMA Scotland survey had similar findings.

The impact of the pension tax charge is hitting direct patient care. A recent survey by the British Society of Gastroenterology showed that 40% of its consultant membership had dropped at least one endoscopy list. This resulted in 74% reporting a rise in two-week waits for endoscopy for patients suspected of having cancer, with 22% saying that the increased wait was an extra four weeks. It is now the case that figures for cancer waiting times, routine care waiting times and A&E performance are the worst since records began and 11 million patients are waiting more than four weeks for GP appointments. A lot of this is directly related to the pensions problems.

These are big numbers and they relate to an experienced group of doctors that the NHS relies on very heavily. We are seeing losses of senior doctors on a scale not seen before, seriously damaging the NHS and putting patients at risk. These doctors realise that they are in society’s higher earnings band, but even high earners can reasonably expect to be paid for their labour rather than working for nothing or, in some cases, paying to go to work.

In the time available to me I have struggled to find out who is to blame for this mess. It is somewhere in the territory of the Government and employer failure to understand how these tax arrangements would impact many public sector workers, not just doctors. Whoever is to blame, it certainly is not the fault of doctors. They have often been presented with an unexpected tax bill at the end, or even after the end, of a tax year. As far as I can judge, doctors were given too little advance explanation and warning about the tax and pension changes to plan their finances in advance and to mitigate the financial risks. As a result, doctors are now taking understandable steps to limit their financial exploitation.

The profession’s leaders have made all this information available to the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and the Health and Social Care Secretary as part of the ongoing review led by the Treasury. However, in the meantime, senior doctors continue to leave and cut their workloads. Waiting times lengthen. Unless something is done urgently, we will soon reach the end of another tax year and another tranche of senior doctors will receive a tax charge. They will add themselves to the growing numbers deciding to retire early or cut their hours working for the NHS. Every month that passes without a government solution being implemented, the more experienced doctors leave the NHS.

I expect the Minister will tell me that this is a very complicated matter and that a review is under way in time for an announcement in the Budget. However, we are now on to not our first but our second review. So far, the Government have produced just a couple of modest tinkering moves, including a temporary scheme for refunding annual allowance payments at the point of retirement, so doctors can put off paying the debt. The catch about that is that they also charged 5% a year for the pleasure of doing so. These measures have not convinced anybody that the Government are serious about fundamentally resolving this problem.

In contrast to such totally inadequate tinkering is the solution, supported by, among others, the Royal College of Physicians, the BMA and the Treasury’s own advisory body, the Office of Tax Simplification, that the Government should remove completely the annual allowance, including the taper in defined benefit schemes. I recognise that this might cause convulsions in Great George Street and I suggest that maybe a more modest approach would be to require the Secretary of State immediately after the Bill’s Royal Assent to make regulations that enable doctors and NHS workers in the NHS Pension Scheme to pass for payment by the scheme any such transfer of payments tax charges from HMRC, with any such payments attracting no interest or detriment to the scheme’s participants.

Before deciding what to do in Committee, I would welcome the Minister’s response to my two suggestions. One way or another, the Government will have to remove this unplanned tax burden from scarce senior doctors. If they do not, even more patients will suffer and NHS England’s long-term plan will not be delivered. I wish to hear what the Minister has to say.