NHS McCloud statements: the backlog grew in May and June 2026, even at record output

Educational, not advice. This article explains what the NHS Business Services Authority’s published data shows about the delivery of McCloud remedy statements to NHS Pension Scheme members. It is general information, not personal financial advice, and Pension Plain is not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. For free and impartial guidance, see MoneyHelper.

In short

• NHSBSA sent 3,097 Remediable Service Statements in June 2026. That is the biggest single month since the programme began in May 2025.
• The number of statements still waiting to be sent went up anyway, from 439,796 in May to 441,422 in June.
• This is not a one-month blip. The queue fell every month for twelve consecutive months, then rose in both May and June 2026.
• The reversal lines up with the moment output climbed. May and June were the two biggest sending months on record, and they are the only two months the queue has grown.
• The reason is in NHSBSA’s own definition of the figure: it counts statements still due, and it “may increase over time as members reach the trigger point for requiring an RSS”. People are joining the queue faster than they are leaving it.
• 13,865 statements have gone out in total. Set against the 441,422 still outstanding, that is roughly 3% of the affected population after fourteen months.
• There is still no new statutory deadline for issuing them. The minister said in May she expected to set one before the summer recess. As of late July that had not happened.

What the June 2026 figures actually say

On 30 July 2026, NHSBSA refreshed the open dataset it publishes on Remediable Service Statement delivery, adding the June position. It is a small file with a big story in it.

Three numbers matter. NHSBSA sent 3,097 statements in June. The running total since the programme started in May 2025 reached 13,865. And the count of statements still due to be sent stood at 441,422, against 439,796 the month before.

Read those together and the shape of the problem appears. June was the programme’s best month by a distance, and the queue still got 1,626 longer. Roughly 4,700 people must have joined the queue during the month for that to happen while 3,097 were leaving it.

Twelve months of falls, then two months of rises

One month on its own proves very little. The full series is the story, because the June rise is not an isolated wobble. Here is every month NHSBSA has published.

The pattern is clean. Twelve straight monthly falls from May 2025 to April 2026, then a reversal in May and again in June. And the reversal arrives at exactly the point the sending rate takes off. December 2025 saw 20 statements go out in the entire month. By June the figure was 3,097, more than 150 times as many.

So the two things happened together: the machine started working properly, and the queue started growing.

Why the McCloud backlog can grow while output rises

This sounds like an error until you read what NHSBSA says the figure counts. Its own published definition of the outstanding number deserves quoting in full, because it does the explaining:

The total number of RSS items still due to be sent to members as of the reporting month. This excludes any already issued. The figure may increase over time as members reach the trigger point for requiring an RSS.

That last sentence is the whole explanation. The pool of people needing a statement is not a fixed list drawn up once in 2015 and worked through in order. It refills. Members reach retirement, claim benefits, or otherwise hit the point at which a statement becomes due, and they join the back of the queue.

For twelve months that inflow was slower than the outflow, so the number crept down. Since May 2026 it has been faster, so the number has crept up. The uncomfortable part is that this happened in the two months when NHSBSA was clearing more cases than it ever had.

Put plainly: at June’s record rate, the queue was not merely failing to shrink fast. It was not shrinking at all.

What changed in spring 2026: the automation arrived

The jump in output is not a mystery, and it was announced in advance. In a written statement to Parliament on 11 December 2025, the Minister of State for Health, Karin Smyth, set out the findings of a review into NHSBSA’s remedy capacity led by Lisa Tennant, Independent Chair of the NHS Pension Board. The statement said NHSBSA:

expects that their capacity to produce RSS will increase materially when software to automate a significant proportion of the calculations required comes online in Spring 2026.

On the evidence of the data, the software did what was expected of it. Output went from a floor of 20 statements in December to 1,225 in April, 2,398 in May and 3,097 in June. Whatever else is going wrong, the calculation bottleneck appears to have eased.

Which is what makes the growing queue interesting rather than merely disappointing. The obvious explanation for a stalled remedy, that the administrator cannot produce statements fast enough, has just been partly removed, and the backlog still went up. The constraint has moved somewhere else.

How many people are still waiting for a statement

Adding the 13,865 already issued to the 441,422 still due gives an affected population of roughly 455,000. Against that, the statements issued so far represent about 3%.

Some arithmetic, clearly labelled as arithmetic rather than as anyone’s forecast. Across the fourteen months of the series, NHSBSA has averaged a little under 1,000 statements a month. If the queue were frozen at its current 441,422 and June’s record rate of 3,097 a month held indefinitely, clearing it would take about 142 months, or just under twelve years.

That figure is not a prediction and NHSBSA has not published anything like it. It assumes a frozen queue, which is precisely what the last two months show the queue is not, and it assumes no further improvement in the rate, which would be pessimistic given what the automation has already done. It is offered only to give a sense of scale to the gap between 3,097 a month and 441,422 outstanding.

When NHSBSA says your statement will arrive

If you are waiting for your Remediable Service Statement and wondering why it is delayed, this is the timetable it is late against. NHSBSA publishes forecast dates rather than promises, and it splits retired members into two groups depending on whether their benefits are still being affected by the original discrimination.

• Retired members whose benefits are still affected: forecast to receive a statement by the end of December 2027.
• Retired members already receiving 1995 or 2008 Scheme benefits, whose remedy period benefits are no longer affected: forecast by the end of June 2030.
• Active and deferred members due a Remedial Pension Savings Statement, which is a different document covering annual allowance tax rather than the benefit choice: forecast by the end of March 2027.

Each of those carries the qualifier “subject to key dependencies” in NHSBSA’s own wording. The June 2030 date is the one worth sitting with. For members in that group, the published forecast is more than four years away from today.

The statutory deadlines that still have not been set

The original statutory deadline for issuing these statements was 1 April 2025. On 31 March 2025, the day before it fell due, the Department of Health and Social Care announced an extension. NHSBSA’s notice of it is candid:

We know this extension may be disappointing for affected members who will be waiting longer than expected for their statement. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause. Technical complexities, that extend beyond the NHS Pension Scheme, have affected delivery timelines for RSS.

What has not happened since is the setting of a replacement. In a written statement of 21 May 2026, the minister said she expected to be able to issue new statutory deadlines “with confidence before summer recess”. Trade coverage in late July reported that the department had again held off, on the basis that more time was needed before the timings were certain enough to commit to.

So the position in August 2026 is that the deadline for setting the deadlines has itself slipped. The forecasts above are what exists in their place, and forecasts are not enforceable.

The same May statement gave a progress snapshot for the prioritised group of retired members: 10,462 statements issued, 5,804 returned, 5,368 decisions enacted, and a further 11,457 calculated and scheduled to go out.

What a Remediable Service Statement is, and what happens when it arrives

A Remediable Service Statement is a choice letter. We have a fuller guide to reading your RSS, but the essentials are short.

It covers service between 1 April 2015 and 31 March 2022, the remedy period. It sets out, with personalised figures, what your benefits for that period look like under the 1995 or 2008 Scheme, and what they look like under the 2015 Scheme, so the two can be compared side by side. NHSBSA describes it as including “a personalised decision guide with 2 tables, showing the same choice in different amounts of detail”.

Two mechanical points follow, and both are rules rather than suggestions. Members have 12 months from the date on the letter to give a decision. And if no decision arrives, NHSBSA applies a default. In its own words: “If we don’t hear from them, we’ll revise their benefits permanently to pay them 1995/2008 Scheme benefits for the remedy period.” Doing nothing is therefore an election of the legacy option, not a forfeiture of anything.

Where the choice is not straightforward, NHSBSA points members to an independent financial adviser and notes that the cost may be recoverable through the NHS Cost Claim Back Scheme.

One protective note. Nobody can move you up this queue, and there is no fee to pay to have your statement produced or expedited. If anyone contacts you offering to speed up a McCloud statement or to process a McCloud claim for a charge, that is not a service that exists.

How NHS McCloud progress compares with other schemes

The McCloud remedy runs across all the main public service schemes, and they are not moving at the same speed. Our cross-scheme tracker covers this in more detail, but for context:

• Civil Service. The National Audit Office reported that MyCSP had issued statements for 58,000 immediate choice members, 44% of those affected, by 26 March 2025, and that this progress was “ahead of what most other major public sector service schemes have achieved”.
• Teachers. 68,307 statements were still outstanding as at 1 April 2026, on the most recent figures reported.
• LGPS. Structurally easier, because the LGPS remedy works through an automatic statutory underpin. Members are not asked to make a choice at all, so there is no equivalent letter to issue and return.
• Police and firefighters. Progress is harder to state centrally. Police administration sits with a single administrator, while firefighters’ pensions are run separately by each fire authority, so no single outstanding figure exists.

The NAO’s line about the Civil Service being ahead of most others was written in June 2025. The NHS data since then does nothing to overturn it.

Two sets of numbers that do not match, and why

Anyone comparing sources on this will run into figures that disagree. Rather than pretend otherwise, here is where the differences come from.

The May 2026 written statement reports 10,462 statements issued. The open dataset reports 10,768 for the same month. These are not in conflict: the ministerial figure is explicitly scoped to retired members “most likely to be facing financial detriment”, a prioritised sub-group, while the dataset counts every statement sent to every cohort. They answer different questions.

Separately, trade coverage in July reported 13,982 members as having received a statement by 24 June 2026, against the dataset’s 13,865 for the month of June. The 117 difference most likely reflects a different cut-off date. We have not been able to reconcile it exactly, and say so rather than quietly picking the more convenient number.

One further caution for anyone working with the dataset directly. The historic rows are not frozen. The same month reads slightly differently between successive monthly files, by single digits to low tens, as returns are logged and records corrected. The trend is unaffected, but a figure quoted from an older file will not always match the current one.

Common questions

Pension Plain’s take

The story most coverage tells about McCloud is that administrators are too slow. The NHS data has quietly stopped supporting that story, and something more awkward has taken its place.

NHSBSA has fixed the thing it said it would fix. The automation arrived on schedule, output rose more than a hundredfold from its December floor, and May and June are the two best months the programme has ever had. On the measure everyone was watching, it is working.

And the queue got longer in both of them.

That is the finding worth holding on to, because it changes what a fix would have to look like. A backlog that grows while throughput triples is not primarily a throughput problem. It is a problem of scale: an affected population of roughly 455,000, a programme that has reached about 3% of it in fourteen months, and an inflow that has now outpaced a record outflow twice running. More capacity helps. On these two months, more capacity alone does not close the gap.

Which is also why the missing statutory deadline matters more than it looks. A forecast of June 2030 for one group of retired members is a long time to ask people to wait on a promise that carries no legal force, and the department has now twice declined to convert its forecasts into commitments. The published data is the only hard accountability there is. It deserves more attention than it gets, and it is to NHSBSA’s credit that it publishes the number at all, including in the two months the number went the wrong way.

Information, not advice. This article explains published data and scheme rules. It does not take account of anyone’s individual circumstances and is not a recommendation to take, or not take, any particular course of action. Pension Plain is not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. For free and impartial guidance, contact MoneyHelper. For a recommendation about your own position, speak to an FCA-authorised financial adviser.

Key official sources

• NHSBSA open data: RSS delivery dataset, June 2026 file, published 30 July 2026. The source of every figure in the table above.
• NHSBSA: Remediable Service Statements. What the letter contains and the 12 month response window.
• NHSBSA: making your remedy choice. The option A and option B mechanics and the default.
• NHSBSA: when you will make your remedy choice. The December 2027 and June 2030 forecast dates.
• NHSBSA: extension to RSS delivery deadlines, 31 March 2025.
• Written ministerial statement, 21 May 2026 (HCWS55). Progress figures and the commitment on new statutory deadlines.
• National Audit Office: administration of the Civil Service Pension Scheme, June 2025. The cross-scheme comparison.

Related reading on Pension Plain: the McCloud remedy explained, NHS McCloud and retired members, and the NHS Pension Scheme guide.

Fact-checked: 6 August 2026