In December, ESR provided NHS Pensions with a data cut that gave access to employees’ work email addresses. The intention is to hold these email addresses on the member records so that we can contact members about their pension and associated matters directly, reducing the reliance we have on local Pensions Officers and departments.
As part of our agreement with ESR, we have to send an initial email to the provided email addresses setting out our intentions with using the email addresses, and giving members the option of opting out or changing the email address we hold.
We have carried out a successful pilot exercise with one Trust to assess the impact of sending a bulk email. The exercise created little noise with the majority happy for their work email address to be used with less than 100 (out of more than 7,000) requesting the email address is changed.
We are now planning to roll this exercise out across the country on a regional basis. We will provide you with more information on the roll out plan in the next Employer Newsletter. In the meantime, please speak to your local IT departments to check if there are any limitations that may affect how many emails we can send to your organisation. If there are any restrictions please let us know as soon as possible by emailing nhsbsa.pensionsemployernewsletter@nhs.net. You can also use this email address if you have any queries about the exercise.
Please note, this exercise only applies to ESR employers.