FOI-03979

##Request ‘For each of the following years, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 How many ambulance staff were paying into an NHS pension’ The NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) received your request on 20 July 2026. We have handled your request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA). ##Our response We have considered this request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) and are issuing a refusal notice under section 17 of the FOIA. 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 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2004/3244/contents/made 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. A member’s job title is not usually held within their pension record. This is because job title is not needed to calculate their pension benefits. We do hold employment types and capacity codes, but these do not identify specific roles such as ambulance staff. For example, capacity code 4 identifies non-medical staff, which would include ambulance staff. In some cases, we may hold job title information on documents such as retirement forms or death certificates, but this information is not held for all members. To identify the members who fall within the scope of your request, we would need to manually interrogate each individual record. There are 1.4 million members with a capacity code of 4 during the period in question, and we estimate it would take 5 minutes to manually interrogate each record. Please see the following calculation which sets out the estimated cost for compliance with this request: 1,400,000 x 5 minutes = 7,000,000 minutes (116,666.67 hours) Furthermore, a manual interrogation of every pension record would likely not provide a complete and accurate response to your request. 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.