Contracted Out
I wrote to the pension people in Newcastle and asked them how they had come to the figure that they had. It is a complicated way that they get your starting figure of 2016 when the new pension came into force. Eventually I gave up and put all the sharp objects away. The really galling point is that there is no correlation between a contracted out and a contracted in year despite there being well documented figures (CO we paid 88% of CI). What this appears to mean is that you could have made more than enough equivalent payments to make 35 years of contribution but that would be too easy.
Also lets not forget that NI goes towards the NHS which we did not use so much when we were serving esp when we actually had service hospitals.