Steve Barclay, the health secretary, got it wrong when he claimed in an interview this week that NHS consultants received tax-free pensions, the Department of Health has admitted. Barclay had come under fire after trying to defend the government’s stance on junior doctors’ pay demands in England by claiming that consultants retiring at 65 would get a tax-free pension of more than £73,000 a year. The consultants branch of the British Medical Association (BMA) challenged Barclay in a series of Twitter posts after his interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday, describing his claim as “categorically not true” and calling for an urgent correction. “The value of pensions is also highly individual and it’s misleading to suggest this is what consultants would typically expect to receive,” it added.
Full Fact, an organisation that checks information in the public sphere, also described the minister’s claims as incorrect, pointing out that pensions were considered a form of income and therefore subject to tax rules like other forms of income. “This means tax is due on any sum above an individual’s personal allowance,” it said in a blogpost. Barclay is in Gujarat, India, which is hosting the G20 meeting of health ministers, but the Department of Health and Social Care issued a statement on Wednesday. “A newly qualified consultant who retires at 65, having worked full-time throughout their career, could expect to receive an inflation-proofed pension of around £78,000 per year,” said a spokesperson. “After listening to the BMA’s request for reform to incentivise consultants to carry on working in the NHS rather than take early retirement, the government changed the annual allowance for tax-free pension saving, increasing it by 50% to £60,000, and removed the £1m lifetime cap. These two issues were conflated in a recent broadcast interview and we are happy to correct the record. This pay award is fair and final and we urge the BMA to end their harmful and disruptive strikes.” Accusing junior doctors’ representatives of being “politically motivated”, Barclay had told the Today programme that many of its listeners would view what he described as a fair pay offer from the government through the lens of the “long-term career incomes” of those doctors. Junior doctors in England took to the picket lines last Friday for a fifth round of industrial action organised by the BMA. The government, which has accepted the recommendations of the NHS pay review body on doctors’ and dentists’ remuneration, announced a final offer last month of a 6% pay increase for doctors and stated that departments must use their existing budgets to fund the pay rises. The BMA rejected the offer, saying it failed to address “a decade’s worth of sub-inflation pay awards.” It is campaigning for what it describes as a 35% “pay restoration” for junior doctors, and an inflationary pay uplift for consultants with a commitment to reform the pay body to address past losses. A BMA spokesperson said that Barclay was “at best not across his brief, or at worst deliberately setting out to mislead the public”. “As acknowledged by the Department of Health, the figure Mr Barclay gave is a hypothetical future upper limit and is based on a number of unrealistic assumptions; the reality is that the vast majority of consultants retiring now and in the future won’t receive anything like this and certainly not tax free,” they added. “So even now he is continuing to mislead the public in an attempt to undermine consultants in their fight to fix pay.”