Chambers pensions announcement - Managed Pension Uploads
Coming soon - direct uploads of your pensions data from chambers to PCSE. From August we will be managing all our members pension Form A uploads to the new PCSE pensions portal. In fact, all our members will have to do is make the payment to PCSE and register this. Practice managers will not need to confirm the forms validity and members will not be required to enter and upload the data, The Medical Chambers has it all covered taking the stress out of managing your pension forms.
So things are changing again with PCSE but this time chambers are ahead of the game. Despite the bad press, the principle behind the new changes are actually sound. If you pay into the NHS Pensions scheme it has always been difficult to see the progress of your pension and as a locum it has always been a nightmare to process your pension forms. Now at last in real time it is possible to see what is going on with your pension. The pensions portal gives you a view of all your pension forms and payments and also allows you to submit directly to PCSE, including things like type 2 pension forms! It draws together all the players in the system, practices, members and other pensions organisations, bringing a number of old legacy systems which worked independently of each other into one shiny new system.
So what is new for chambers? Well there have been the inevitable cock-ups that we tend to associate with Capita and PCSE, glitches on the system, buttons that don’t work, too much access etc. However let's give them some credit, they have worked with us to create an easy upload for chambers which allows us to send all our members pension data directly into PCSEs system. All a our members have to do is pay the money over to PCSE. Chambers continue to collate all the forms and chase all the invoices but now there is no need for members to sign them and upload them to PCSE then wait for the inevitable email confirming or rejecting their submission. Instead they can just log on once per month to view the forms and make payments. All the hard work done for them! Even better because we work closely with practices as well, they don’t have to go onto the system at all, we upload the data for them as well so no need for them to ratify the forms on the locums behalf.
I can only speak for the bit of the system we use, the new pensions system reaches into lots of other areas and organisations, however this area seems to be an improvement, its early days but eventually I hope we can all trust the system to manage our pensions data, no need to hold onto old form A and Bs just in case. This seems to be movement in the right direction.
