The Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association (HCSA) discovered that changes to NHS pension tax has resulted in staff scrapping waiting list initiatives, forcing trusts to outsource at a “significantly higher cost”. Changes to the way pension savings are taxed as taken the reward from doctors of taking on extra work – driving some to leave the service completely. According to HSJ, since 2016, the amount of tax relief available to those earning over £110,000 has been reduced from £40,000 to as low as £10,000.
The government are looking at solutions to stop senior doctors paying excessive amounts of tax, by looking at clinicians halving their pension contribution in exchange for halving the rate of pension growth. President of HCSA Claudia Paoloni said that refusing to scrap the taper is in fact “undermining hospital budgets as well as waiting lists and services”.
“The costs of diagnostic outsourcing are higher; the quality is lower and the scale of the backlog is growing.”
Full story in HSJ, 29 July 2019
