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England’s health secretary, Matt Hancock, has urged doctors not to take early retirement because of punitive pension tax charges and has promised to consult with the profession and the Treasury to fix this “very serious” problem by the start of the next financial year.
In response to growing concern about the impact of the charges, the government announced a plan in June to allow senior clinicians to halve their pension contributions to avoid large tax bills.1 The NHS pension scheme does not currently offer any flexibility in the rate at which pensions build, and the highest earning consultants contribute 14.5% of their pensionable pay each month.
But last week NHS trusts reported that the plan was not working,2 as significant numbers of key clinical and managerial staff were declining to work extra hours because of the financial penalties involved. A recent poll of senior staff by NHS Employers3 found that more than four in 10...