Capita scores £239M contract to manage mega public sector pension scheme Capita has scooped up a ten-year £239 million ($298 million) contract to oversee the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) on behalf of Britain's Cabinet Office, giving the under-fire tech services biz a needed boost. The CSPS is among the UK’s largest public sector pension schemes, and is clearly comfortable with Capita’s …
I just cannot believe that this has been approved and it shows the unbelievable level of incompetence in procurement.
After the USS fiasco, Captia should have been immediately blocked from the process.
We are in the crazy situation where it simply does not matter how bad these outsourcing operators are, they are still guaranteed more contracts.
It's not incompetence, it's corruption.
They aren't dumb - they know exactly what they are doing, and getting some lovely backhanders somewhere for it. Or they have shares, or whatever.
Nobody who was merely incompetent would be dumb enough to do this. They are instead incredibly competent, will be making money and chums hand over fist, are doing it explicitly and deliberately, and know PRECISELY that they will get away with it long enough to be profitable because there is no oversight and what oversight there is will be complicit anyway.
Every facet of Capita's, and similar company's, work is predicated on this happening. Bids are made so that someone goes "Oh well, guess we'll have to use Capita *again*, because nobody else is bidding on this incredibly dumb, specific, doomed-to-fail, over-priced project that we change the specs to every week".
I have to say, since passing the age 40, I've totally given up caring because there is nobody in power, or with any chance of power, that will end this. Capita etc. will continue on for centuries like this, and never be brought to account, and successions of multiple governments of all colours will all do exactly the same once they get into power too.
It simply doesn't matter how bad these providers, or politicians, are any more. Nothing changes. Nothing ever stops. Things just move from one hive of corruption to the next.
We've got a layer of people in charge, behind a glass ceiling, who couldn't care less and are in it only for personal profit.
Capita was founded in 1984 with the express purpose of being this company that they are. Nothing's changed, they've just got bigger and with more fingers in more pies. In 2006 the chairman resigned because of links to donations to Labour, etc. Nothing changes. It's a personal profit machine and nobody with the power to do so will shut it down. Same for countless dozens of other quangos.
The most obvious recent example is Michelle Mone - her of 'fast track VIP lobbying for literally useless PPE via dodgy contacts oops all the money has vanished into myriad offshore holdings and trusts nevermind I'm in the Lords' fame. And breathe.
Of course, the OG at this was Transport Minister Ernest Marples, who kicked off the motorway building boom and shut the branch lines via Beeching. Worth reading his lengthy Wiki on conflicts of interest, but the main point was he formerly managing director of Marples Ridgway and held 80% stake in them. Marples Ridgway, entirely coincidentally, were one of the biggest road engineering firms in the country.
Plus ca change.
Oh, it could be far, far worse than that. Currently pension providers don't really have that much information about you and your lifestyle - sure it's important information about your salary and investment with them, but that's all. But now imagine them integrating your "socials" with the AI their actuaries are spinning up - rah rah, you can now have "personalised" deals on annuities, lump sums, commutation etc. But like all asymmetric markets, the House wins over the players.
You get the bullshit, they keep the money.
"The cost of cleaning the breach was estimated by Capita earlier in the summer to be near to £25 million ($31 million)."
They're not quite covering their costs -- at one breach a year they'll finish up in the red by around £11 million.
" Capita initially said 4 percent of its servers were accessed but after part of an investigation downgraded this to 0.1 percent"
My best guess, they went to <insert cloud provider here>, spun up a few thousand servers for an hour, recalculated the number and then shut them down. Wunderbar
See the VIP contracts route during Covid, if you think civil service mandarins have much say in contract awards.
Politicians, yes, civil servants no. The reality is that civil servants are beholden to public sector procurement rules and cannot bend those, so even when we know a shit outcome is inevitable, we (I'm one) can't do anything about it.
Unfortunately, CSPS is actually (by pensions industry standards) very well run - but to please the arseholes of the current government it is being outsourcing to the useless bunglers of Crapita, so costs will go up, standards of service and security will go down. But it's being delivered by the private sector, so that's inherently a good thing, it seems.
It's like all outsourcing - the CFO can prove with a spreadsheet that it's cheaper to outsource services than do it in-house. Then, when you book half a day's waiting time because your new keyboard has to be brought from Portsmouth because that's where IT support is, the CFO tells you that's not a valid use of waiting time and that you have to book it to the project. HR tell you that outsourcing is good because it makes it easier to "right-size" departments and reduces management costs but when you ask how many HR jobs are going now that we've outsourced IT, Facilities, Cleaning, etc. you get labelled as a troublemaker.
As my old mate Dave used to say - "It's only funny if it's not true".
What possible purpose - other than making their bid for the work sound "sexy" - is there in using AI for pension payments, for deities sake?
Pensions are about as simple as it gets: "Pay X the sum of £Y until he / she / it dies".
It's worked for many years without AI.
And it's Crapita. What possibly could go wrong?
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You’re not concerned about Experian being hacked? I wouldn’t go near them with a shitty stick. Yes I know they’ll have tons of info on me, I can’t really help that unless I want to live in the woods and exist by bartering alone - but choose to use them? Not a cat in hells chance.
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