Resolve requirements around NHS clinical scales, pension schemes and salary exchange
Description
The introduction of a new clinical salary grade has raised some questions as to how this is used and how it should feature in the On-Costs tool (and by extension, potentially Research Dashboard.
These questions are:
Should NHS have their own clinical scales?
As per Matt Wright's email quoted in comment below, yes - ideally we would obtain this data from CHRIS as we would not necessarily use all those available
Should the NHS pension scheme be an exchange scheme because it requires salary sacrifice?
As per MW - no, it is not salary sacrifice
Should USS (not exchange) even exist?
As discussed at stand-up this morning (26/8), it seems that whilst a 6.1% employee contribution is mandatory for USS membership, there are reasons to not opt to pay this contribution by salary exchange (ie. for the employee to instead pay the contribution after pay). The most common scenario would appear to be for staff who are members for less than 2 years. In this scenario, the member can opt to have their employee contributions refunded if they have not used salary exchange.
Also, there may be other negative impacts of using salary exchange. For instance, in CARE (Career Average Revalued Earnings) schemes - which the USS in part (Retirement Income Builder) and the NHS scheme from 2015 onwards appear to be - salary exchange reduces the salary figure used for calculating the career average salary, which would result in lower benefits.
Update 28/8: As confirmed my MW, the findings above are correct - non-exchange schemes should be included as the employee electing to pay non-salary-sacrifice will raise the employer cost
Are there any other schemes that are always exchange schemes, and the non-exchange scheme shouldn't exist?
The findings so far in response to the question above appear to suggest that this isn't the case. There may however be usability benefits in assuming a different default (eg. USS Exchange)
Update 28/8: again, Matt's response confirms that we should include non-exchange schemes in the tool
Outputs
- The questions above having been satisfactorily answered - the summary to the answers can be added to the description above
- Issues created to cover any modifications needed based on our findings