FOI-03944

##Request ‘I wish to know the average length of time taken by NHS Pensions to provide NHS pension members with a pension statement that provides them with an estimate of their pension should they wish to retire. The information should exclude those applying according to your prioritisation criteria of those members who are up to one year away from retirement, are terminally ill or need to comply with a court order or legal proceedings such as divorce proceedings or mortgage application. i.e. all NHS pension members who do not meet that criteria and who have applied in the past 6 months from 1st January 2026 to 1st July 2026 and failing the availability of this information for this 6 month period of time, then the most recent period of time when this data is available.’ The NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) received your request on 3 July 2026. We have handled your request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA). ##Our response The NHSBSA does hold the requested information; however, we estimate that the cost of compliance with the request would exceed the appropriate limit under section 12 of the FOIA. We estimate that the cost of complying with your request would exceed the non-central Government limit of £450. The limit has been specified in The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 and represents the estimated cost of one person spending 18 hours in determining whether the NHSBSA holds the information, and locating, retrieving, extracting and checking the information. The requested data is not recording in a way which would allow us to exclude those which are set out in your request. We would therefore need to manually interrogate all estimates which have been issued in the requested timescale. Between 1 January 2026 and 28 July 2026, we have issued 36,639 estimates, and we estimate it would take 5 minutes to check each file to determine whether it was a priority or not. Please see the following calculations which sets out the estimated cost for compliance with this request: 36,639 x 5 minutes = 183,195 minutes (3,053.25 hours) Please see the following link to view the section 12 in full - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/36/section/12 __Data Queries__ Please contact [email protected] ensuring you quote the above reference if you have any specific questions regarding this response; or, if you feel you may be misunderstanding or misinterpreting the information; or, if you plan on publishing the data. __Reusing the data and copyright__ If you plan on producing a press or broadcast story based upon the data please contact [email protected] . This is important to ensure that the figures are not misunderstood or misrepresented. The information supplied to you continues to be protected by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and is subject to NHSBSA copyright. This information is licenced under the terms of the Open Government Licence detailed at: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/ Should you wish to re-use the information you must include the following statement: “NHSBSA Copyright 2026”. Failure to do so is a breach of the terms of the licence. Information you receive which is not subject to NHSBSA Copyright continues to be protected by the copyright of the person, or organisation, from which the information originated. Please obtain their permission before reproducing any third party (non NHSBSA Copyright) information.