Response

Questions 1 to 4

Under Section 21 of the Act, we are not required to provide information in response to a request if it is already reasonably accessible to you. The information you requested is available from the following web links:

Years 2011/12 to 2015/16

https://apps.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/FOI/foiRequestDetail.do?bo_id=6888 

2016/17

https://apps.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/FOI/foiRequestDetail.do?bo_id=7512 

Question 5

In order to identify which ill health retirement cases were taken to the Pensions Ombudsman, a manual interrogation of member records would be required, as no figures have been captured which would provide this information. As there are thousands of cases, work would be required to determine: 

a) Did the member go to the ombudsman?
b) If the member did go to the ombudsman, was this in relation to an ill health retirement application?
c) If the case was in relation to an ill health retirement application, what was the outcome?
d) Record the outcome.
e) Record the year the outcome was reached.
f) Collate the outcome figures to give an overall number.

Although an estimate has not been made, even with a conservative estimate of 5 minutes per case, only 216 cases (12 cases per hour, multiplied by 18) could be interrogated to provide an answer, and that would just be a very small percentage of overall cases.

Therefore, I estimate that the cost of complying with this part of 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 and extracting the information.  Under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act, the NHSBSA is not obliged to comply with your request and I will not be processing this part of your request further.