Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will take steps to increase the number of GPs with up-to-date pension records.

NHS England is working with NHS Pensions and Primary Care Support England (PCSE) to support general practitioners (GPs) to reduce the number of missing records. For the 2025/26 financial year, PCSE is maintaining a dedicated team to support GPs to resolve missing years. The Department and NHS England are also working with NHS Pensions and the British Medical Association to use their networks to encourage GPs to submit missing certificates.

PCSE is reliant on GPs submitting the required forms to enable PCSE to update their pension record. NHS England will continue to work with PCSE to ensure they are undertaking their obligations upon receipt of the forms, and to support joint working with stakeholders to ensure pension record gaps are promptly resolved.

PCSE is also working with those GPs who need to provide certificates to resolve missing years in their pension records, as GP’s pension records must be updated in sequential order, and if one year of data is missing all future years will also show as missing from the GPs annual pension statement issued by NHS Pensions. Any received information remains on the PCSE system until the missing year is received, at which point all information is then recorded on Pensions Online, which updates the NHS Pension record.

PCSE has contacted GPs with missing certificates detailing the action they need to take to bring their pension record up to date. Webinars with supporting communications have been regularly organised by PCSE to ensure GPs are supported in how to access and resolve missing information and how to submit certificates at the end of each financial year.

The NHS Pensions has also recently written directly to NHS Pension Scheme members affected by the public sector pensions remedy, McCloud, to highlight the need to ensure that PCSE records are up to date.