Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what recent assessment he has made of the administration by Primary Care Support England of GP salaries and pensions.

NHS England has been closely monitoring the administration and performance of Primary Care Support England (PCSE) and reports that it has made good overall progress in improving the quality of the services provided.

Improvements in administering general practitioner (GP) pensions are currently underway. NHS England is working with PCSE to address a range of historical and current issues, and implement new, consistent national processes. These replace a range of different local legacy processes. PCSE does not administer GP salaries.

There is no data available on the average length of time taken to process changes in a GP’s circumstances in 2016-17. The speed of processing changes in a GP’s circumstances depends on the availability of complete information from the applicant, and appropriate authorisations for the change from relevant parties. NHS England has reported that recently received changes are typically being processed in two to six weeks.

Information on the number of overpayments and underpayments of GP pension contributions at 31 March 2017 is not yet available. It will be possible to calculate pension contributions for the year to 31 March 2017 in February 2018, once GPs have submitted details of their earnings for the financial year 2016/17.