Newly launched civil service pension portal from Capita is crapita, users report

Pension scheme members are facing a string of errors and malfunctions as they try to log into and retrieve account details from the UK's civil service portal the government is paying Capita £239 million ($318 million) to build and run. After it went live on Monday, the refreshed and updated pension website for the Civil …

[ICL1900-G3]

Good grief!

Who would have thought it?

Why do people continue to give our money to these charlatans?

[KittenHuffer]

Re: Good grief!

Are we talking about Crapita? Or the Government? As both fit your final question!

[Ace2]

Re: Good grief!

Let us know when you identity a workable alternative

[KittenHuffer]

Re: Good grief!

Nothing is better for our country than our current (and previous) government ..... therefore we should have nothing!

And certainly not Reform!

-------> Mine is the one considering leaving this place for somewhere not run by, or for, assholes!

[RegGuy1]

Re: Good grief!

If you were to leave you would be in good company:

The number of British nationals who left the UK last year has risen from 77,000 to 257,000, according to revised immigration statistics.

news.sky.com 18 November 2025

[Ken G]

Re: Good grief!

That's good, isn't it? Your government are trying to reduce net migration.

[DancesWithPoultry]

Re: Good grief!

> assholes

*arseholes

[GeneralDisaster]

Re: Good grief!

If you find that place, please report back and let us know where it is. I'm in Ireland and they are speedrunning national destruction here like nobody ever.

[nemo omnibus]

Re: Good grief!

Yes, but they have been doing this for years, luckily they seem to be incompetent at being incompetent too but they do try their best.

[Extreme Aged Parent]

Re: Good grief!

If you find somewhere let me know, cos the alternatives i.e. USA, Oz, South Africa, Canada etc all seem to have their own inbuilt problems, my thoughts are :-better the assholes you know, then there is :- the grass is greener in the next field...

[nemo omnibus]

Re: Good grief!

The greener grass is due to increased, ahem, fertiliser...

[Tron]

Re: Good grief!

>Let us know when you identity a workable alternative.

Employing people and paying them a wage to do it with printed forms, and answering the phones to help people. Like it used to be done, before every aspect of our existence became nothing more than a means for tech companies to bilk our money via their corrupt, incompetent mates in government.

[cookiecutter]

Re: Good grief!

maybe crown commercial do stop being so lazy & instead of just palming everything off to repeatedly fraudulent or incompetent or foriegn suppliers that think project to project and there being no over arching thinking.... why not act like a service provider & contract or hire the staff yourself?!

Look at every job being advertised for govt contracts now.. MUST HAVE SC!! All of these useless outsourcers don't have their own staff, wait until they get a contract and then suddenly race round chasing for sc staff at the last minute! dumb arsery to the max

and WHY do the same firms keep winning contracts? the perm staff are just TUPED between providers & they supply no value.

it's literally a cash con with £billions of OUR cash sent offshore & to millionare/billionaire CEOs!

All we hear is whinging that gen z don't want to work & that people aren't lotal any more & yet all we see is even government facilitating this shit! Anyone who puts anything over 40% effort for an employer is mentally ill & these guys can rip off the tax payer, commit fraud, acs yet get more contracts!

why is fushitsu still getting work?! Ate your able to hire soldiers yet since capita fucked that national security issue up too?

WHO is getting the brown envelopes?

[JLV]

Re: Good grief!

I don't know if it makes sense to blame "the government" here. Not because I particularly want to go out of my way to defend them, but these projects take years to spin up and flush $ down the crapper and the litany of fails stretches way past any one PM, or party's, terms.

Procurement procedures, project management, vendor picking... that's all more of a "civil service" and, well, yes, legal thingy than "the government".

Public sector IT does not know how to build systems or get them built. That's true of the UK, but it's true of many countries as well, such as Canada (Phoenix Fed IT $1.5B , Long gun registry $2B)

Maybe it would take an incredibly competent and courageous government to rip up the rulebook and force change. Probably by defanging the mid-managerial "stakeholder & consensus" culture in public sector IT and their ability to flood systems with change requests. Probably by holding vendors' feet to the fire and refusing to purchase from serial failers. Probably by reducing project contracts to more comprehensible volumes (ever heard of a 6000 page spec to replace an existing payroll system? I have).

At that point of complexity a vendor's core competency isn't about successfully delivering a project, it is about who can successfully navigate the procurement bureaucracy. And Crapita seems very very good at that

But any one government seems much less at fault than it being the result of decades of plaque getting deposited into the procurement arteries, over multiple governments and by thousands of overpaid public sectors mid-managers. And thousands overpaid can-barely-code "consultants". And maybe too much "Agile" to boot.

p.s. I am not pissing on the public sector in general. The actual line workers and line managers deliver services that are needed, under challenging conditions. But the bureaucracy a few levels above is incredible - I worked for years as a consultant in the French public sector, direct experience speaking.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Good grief!

Remember if you are in the public sector and any good you will probably end up in the private sector earning double, and taking all that knowledge with you. But we have a tradition in the UK of wanting to pay public sector employees as little as possible (because then tax can be reduced, and that is a good thing, right?). And that won't change any time soon as long as many people read the shit in the press and think the public sector is full of 'incompetents'.

[JLV]

Re: Good grief!

Actually I agree with you there as well. Which is why I made the distinction that line managers and line workers are not the problem.

But you have a whole level of management who doesn't really know what the worker bees are doing, doesn't have the domain knowledge and in this instance, doesn't have project management/direction competency. They are far from the cheapest of the lot as well.

Of course, as you point out you have IT folk who, if they are any good, indeed ought to flee. Both for better pay, but also because mediocrity in your peers and superiors is depressing.

Does the salary grid in the UK public sector allow good pay progression based on high skills, rather than just management level and/or seniority? Honest question.

Could also be that the FANG and AI "economy" has been sucking up skilled IT to chase such important things as making Facebook feeds more shiny. Meaning public sector and smaller firms find it hard to offer competitive wages.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Good grief!

Does the salary grid in the UK public sector allow good pay progression based on high skills, rather than just management level and/or seniority? Honest question.

Honest question - and a good one. Short answer - no !

There's a fairly rigid grading system that essentially means that if you want progression, you do progressively less technical work and progressively more management work. There are some exceptions, but in general, if you want to stay as (for example) "an engineer" then you will struggle to climb the grades.

We've had years, nay decades, of real terms pay cuts - all manner of euphemisms, but all meaning below inflation pay rises. So as you've pointed out, if you are good and know your subject matter, then in general skills you can go to the private sector for significantly more. I'm not involved in that sort of procurement (mine's an engineering assurance role), but it is a bit of a niggle going to meetings and knowing that everyone else in the meeting is a) earning more than you, and b) has a decent travel and subsistence policy that means they aren't out of pocket because the allowances don't cover costs (you try getting lunch for a fiver when travelling by train, then factor in mid morning and mid afternoon drinks as well - still within that fiver !)

Look into the reports from "government IT" failures (in which I'll include late and/or over budget systems that do actually work), and the key component is lack of excellence in technical project management skills. I think we all know that a successful project is one where the requirements are complete and accurate (i.e. we know what we want), all tenders are scrutinised for technical accuracy (i.e. we are sure the vendor understands what we want), and where the project is properly managed (including managing expectations - such as the aforementioned deluge of change requests that somehow seem to be allowed). Unfortunately it seems that in general we don't have the skills and none of those three fundamentals happens: we seem to have poor/incomplete requirements, tenders that aren't sufficiently accurate to hold the supplier to a contract, leading to a deluge of change requests when what is delivered isn't what was wanted - by which time, the suppliers have our privates in a vice and can effectively charge what they want for changes to make the system work. Of course, "the usual suspects" know just how to work the system to their own advantage.

Until governments (of all colours) recognise that if you want excellence then you have to pay market rates, and are prepared to stand up to the inevitable Daily Wail headlines about civil servant pay, then that isn't going to change.

In my area of "the machine", we have a serious recruitment and retention problem. It's an area needing good engineering skills - but people with those tend to find the grass is greener almost anywhere else. Add in "temporary" recruitment freezes which prevent replacing people who do leave, and it can be a rather demoralising environment to work in.

Oh yes, don't believe the hype about "gold plated pensions". Yes, people who were in a long time before me had a pretty good deal (Classic pension scheme) that doesn't apply to anyone joining in the last couple of decades who only have access to the Alpha scheme which is "a lot" less generous.

[VoiceOfTruth]

Re: Good grief!

>> Why do people continue to give our money to these charlatans?

Do you really think the whole government procurement system in the UK is not riddled with corruption and incompetence? This is peanuts compared to the money peed up the wall during covid.

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Good grief!

Because corrupt government blocked independent small businesses from participating in the market.

[JLV]

Re: Good grief!

Kinda, but not exactly.

Each successive failure makes the system more risk averse and they aim to "solve" the problem by having bigger and bigger contracts, specs and rules to bid on public contracts. Meanwhile, since they don't want to be "led by the nose" by vendors they've learned not to trust, they insist upon flexibility and their ability to request changes at any point in the project timelines as their God-given right.

A small business could not navigate the procurement process. Granted, that suits the big serial failers like Crapita just fine.

But it's not like you can fix it by spotting which government manager got a brand new high end Fiat sedan when they decided to buy Olivetti ( an anecdote once told to me in France ).

The systems have evolved in that direction to minimize risk, but the approach taken is not working. A diagnosis over-focussed on corruption, rather than on a fundamentally flawed approach is unlikely to help much.

You see the same thing with the military industrial complex BTW. At least it seems like the Ukraine War has woken up some countries to the need to accept new blood in their vendors, and take smaller, faster projects on. Traditional drones cost 10x as much and are not as capable (see Switchblade).

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Good grief!

A small business could not navigate the procurement process.

I had navigated procurement process and it used to be "manageable", but IR35 stopped this completely.

Even if your company gets through procurement, you hit a wall with this - your business can't make profit.

Basically successive corrupt governments ensured that only big players, usual suspects can participate.

Remember that IR35 has been designed to stop businesses with up to 20 workers (and more in certain circumstances) from participation in the market.

Few smaller consultancies could also form consortia and bid together to get on larger projects.

[Ken G]

Re: Good grief!

It's not corruption. In fact all the due diligence used to avoid any perception of corruption or unfairness means that it's impossible for a small business to respond. Only companies big enough to keep a lot of trained people on the bench and ready to respond to procurement requests, and only big companies can survive losing one of those contracts. No small business is going to have a few dozen of their best people spend 6 months on a bid with no guarantee of winning it, or to respond to 5 or 6 of those in a row before success.

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Good grief!

I don't dismiss that bidding is difficult, but absolutely doable for small business (been there). The problem is elsewhere as explained in other post.

It is corruption.

[Lee D]

Re: Good grief!

Backhanders. Backhanders all the way.

[jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid]

Vast improvement

Sounds like an improvement on the old system. Now you get nonsensical or wrong responses instantly, rather than waiting for the mandatory 2 weeks.

[IGotOut]

Re: Vast improvement

Two weeks?

It took 17 weeks for them to tell me they needed more information for a Child Benefit transfer....which of course had to be via post.

19 weeks later, still waiting.

[UnknownUnknown]

Re: Vast improvement

I don’t know why they didn’t give it to a UK Based Provider who already has the ‘at scale’ systems like Standard Life or L&G or borrow/take a copy of another large one like NHS Pension System.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Vast improvement

I'm someone who has, in the past, worked at both those and at the DWP. Very different scale and requirements.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Vast improvement

I worked at one which is capable of running this and also at a different gov department who made me question their capability.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Vast improvement

A quick internet search indicates Standard Life have 3m pension customers…. so feel scaled to setup a public sector division with 1.5m. Yea but would be a significant expansion … but surely better than Cr@pita.

Their parent Phoenix Group obviously is even larger.

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a shit site before the "upgrade" and its a shit site since the "upgrade" so at least they were consistent.... How they expect people to make pension decisions with no real info and when it takes MONTHS to get a reply to any query IF you get ANY reply at all... its beyond me!

[wolfetone]

They don't want you to have the pension.

Now shut up and die already so they don't have to pay you!

[Recluse]

Sounds a bit like trying to get any sense out of HMRC (whom only seem keen to speak to you when they perceive you owe them money and not vice versa)

[Like a badger]

"How they expect people to make pension decisions with no real info and when it takes MONTHS to get a reply to any query IF you get ANY reply at all... its beyond me!"

I'm an unlucky peasant who will have to use this Crapita shambles, but having had extensive engagement with the private sector pension administrators for my three previous private sector pension schemes, I can assure you that in the field of pensions administration Crapita are no worse than their peers, including the likes of Lloyds, AON. All that I dealt with were universally appalling, slow, bureaucratic, obstructive, and incompetent. And just to gloss the turd, so is the laughable Pensions Ombudsman.

[Anonymous Coward]

From my experience Standard Life including their on-line offerings has been trouble free.

The only time they did shit the bed we on the run up to Covid where - along with everyone else - they did not covert some stocks to safer investments and my pension dumped 25% over a month and took about 2-3 years to recover. So much for the management fee.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was talking with a colleague recently who's been considering options. Apparently the only way they would give him the information he needed (which IIRC was what pension he'd get if he took early partial retirement) was if he'd put in his resignation. Then he'd have to hope that they came up with the information before it was too late to retract his resignation. And that's with the previous lot.

I hate to think what sort of shambles Crapita can make of it.

[tezboyes]

I'm still waiting for answers to a question I put a couple of months ago about how much I'd get - they may or may not want me to go down that route.

I suspect mine will have been lost somewhere in the transition. It will certainly be on the wrong form, as they have none of those to complete for enquiry any more.

[AMBxx]

on time!

It was on time but incomplete - Agile?

[markr555]

Weasels!

"argest ever on time transition" - its not on time if its unfinished you slimey cockwombles!

[cd]

Re: Weasels!

Transition in the Rosicrucian sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

On time?

How can they claim it's on time if it doesn't actually work? If that is true then everything I have ever done has always been on time.

[Adam Foxton]

Are you people never happy?!

You get mad when they don't provide access to your data, and you get mad when they leak it out to everyone for maximum convenience.

Will you never be satisfied?!

[Darkedge]

"We appreciate the patience and understanding of those affected. The service went live on 1st December as part of the largest ever on time transition of a public sector pension scheme in the UK,"

I think if it fundamentally doesn't work for quite a lot of users claiming it was delivered on time is bollocks. But yeah par for the course from Crapita

[AndrueC]

And apparently it's all the fault of the previous providers.

[Fruit and Nutcase]

First Division

I wonder if the senior mandarins have a special section for dealing with their pensions/paper based/separate phone lines etc, separate from the rest of the civil service

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: First Division

Given that Sir Keir has his own eponymous Act of Parliament for his pension, I wouldn’t be surprised.

[elsergiovolador]

Pocket

Once you pocketed the millions, you don't have to deliver.

I mean why would you?

Just coast to the next contract.

Then watch your yacht fleet grow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Encrapittification

[turd icon]

[ComicalEngineer]

Re: Encrapittification

A friend of mine who works for Sellafield is currently trying to get his pension figures out of Sellafield's pension provider Equiniti Group. He has been told that it will be 3 months before he gets the figures that will enable him to make a retirement decision.

It's not just Crapita, it seems to be any government agency that takes incompetence to new depths.

[LessWileyCoyote]

The reason MyCSP took over was that Capita's first attempt at running it was rubbish. Why have they been allowed a second attempt?

[FirstTangoInParis]

And I’m guessing this is a bunch of databases because of changes to pension schemes over the years linked to a web front end with quite a bit of logic and user management in the middle. How is that difficult? If an undergrad submitted such an assignment in such an unfinished fashion I would have thought that they would get pretty low marks. You submitted on time? Didn’t even finish!

[Steve Foster]

Launch timed to coincide with current XKCD?

How fortuitous that Crapita managed to time that launch so well, as it meshes with the current XKCD beautifully.

https://xkcd.com/3175/

[IGotOut]

Nothing new

I apparently have two government ID's, both registers to the same email address.

One can't be used for tax purposes and I can't get the information reset for the other because, guess what, it only will accept my information for the useless account.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Nothing new

Don't worry. It will all be sorted out by 2029 so you can have your new national ID.

[Doctor Syntax]

"We appreciate the patience and understanding of those affected."

Typical non-apology. Why do these mouthpieces assume those affected are patient and understanding? Why do they think they're entitled to patience and understanding?

I can only assume that they speak a language which uses words which look as if they're English words but which are not and have non-English meanings.

[ajadedcynicaloldfart]

Bigger/heavier brown envelope?

@LessWileyCoyote

See title...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just signed up for it (like I have a choice). Gives my pension service history as 17 years, 429 days.

[tezboyes]

Ah you must be a part timer, mine's 31 years and 1216 days. Seriously.

I'd definitely look forward to taking that pension, no need for partial retirement any more.

Sadly that figure wrong in so many ways.

[ilovesaabaeros]

The previous version had my start of service as 1906 for many years. Unfortunately the extra 90 years of benefits were not part of the calculation.

[Judge Mental]

Biter bit?

At least the Civil Service now know what it is like to be on the receiving end of a Capita project. Do you think Capita will get other contracts when the people that decide have had their pensions system trashed?

[Da Weezil]

Re: Biter bit?

The poor sods at the sharp end of government departments know full well the misery of suffering the crud heaped onto the public sector by the likes of Crapita. They suffer daily from systems that don't work as intended or are so old they are digital museum pieces, with little apparent concerned from the upper echelons of the amount of anger and aggravation the public and the staff experience.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Biter bit?

And those of us at the not so sharp end as well.

But if you work in defence, Defence Digital make Crapita look like amateurs.

[Brl4n]

The apologized

They apologized so there's that. All done!

[Tron]

They paid for software.

They didn't pay for software that worked.

[tezboyes]

Re: They ask for Feedback

The form has no way of recording extreme dissatisfaction, and pointing out that the issue is a complete failure to login...

[JLV]

Seems to me a solid start at improving the UK govt's apparently crap IT procurement would need only 3 words:

NEVER BUY CAPITA.

That's it. Just bake into your procurement rules. Now, that doesn't solve the problem, of course. But at least it gives you the possibility of solving the problem, by picking someone less guaranteed to fail.

p.s. I'm Canadian, so we'll just pretend Phoenix - IBM doing PeopleSoft payroll for the Feds, 1.5$B nuked - never happened ;-)

[tezboyes]

I can name a bunch of other consultancies and outsourcing companies who are just as bad.

[tezboyes]

"on time transition"

It isn't on time if it doesn't work :(

And why oh why oh why, does the computer system used to administer pensions belong to the service provider rather than the service.

Oh yeah, outsourcing.

And as they've lost folks login details, wonder if they've lost the backlog of queries too ?

[alanbowling]

Shocking...will we get paid this month?

Absolutely awful.....if I had put this live I would have been fired. Speaking as an ex CIO in the Civil Service....in a very brief first use, couldn't access beneficiaries said I didn't have any registered, well I did in the previous system. When I tried to update all i got was the spinning wheel. Previous years P60 summaries show value of zero for gross payments. When sending a message after sending and receiving a confirmation that a message had been received it then asked me to upload a file with the message that had already gone. So bad and the presentation is very slow and clunky.....all this for how many million? I have set up an outsourced complex website for DfE with 1.5 million potential users and it cost about 200th of the money spent...just shocking.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Shocking...will we get paid this month?

As an ex CIO in the Civil Service are you sure you would have been fired? Genuinely? There will be a CIO in the Civil Service who has done exactly what you have said..."put this live"...what's his/her/its employment status? I bet it isn't "Fired"...it's not on Capita...they're just useless and shit...a CIO from the Civil Service outsourced this fiasco...the buck stops with him/her/it...well...obviously NOT, but that's the idea isn't it? Being the Chief?

Having worked in a Finance IT function in the Civil Service for a few years the biggest problem was leadership...or the astonishing lack of it. I had to leave because of the inertia, the complete incompetence that started at SCS and just went up from there. Being in hock to a capricious bunch of venal humans (the government of the day) doesn't help either. Having a bunch of yes humans riding the gong carousel after Grade 6 means any project is doomed before it has even begun, before it is even conceived: failure is baked in.

The Oxbridge PPE to McKinsey/Deloitte/PWC sausage factory spits out another "leader" to "work at pace" to get themselves a gong while failing to deliver anything of worth and turning everything they touch into indecision and failure.

Long may it continue. God save the King.

[Fizzypo]

Other providers

Was there not an off the shelf software/cloud solutions

[wiggers]

Re: Other providers

I find it bewildering that these systems appear to be written from scratch for each organisation. Surely there must be solutions available off the shelf for running a large pension scheme? Or are they created in such a way as to be completely unique to each customer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Other providers

They are available, you only need to ask and someone will sell it to you.

[Eric 9001]

Re: Other providers

Typically existing solutions are only 90% of the way there and you can't get the last 10%, as it's proprietary software.

As a result, everything is always written from scratch, except with 9999 proprietary dependencies, with the end result being as much as 50% of the way there.

It appears that the website consists of a few pages of HTML forms used to submit information for pension applications, but that was royally screwed up due to a love for JavaScript frameworks and/or microsoft software.

Most of what you'd need for that sort of thing is a server that runs GNU/Linux and nginx+fastcgi+postgresql, a designer for the HTML5 form pages that check the inputs with regex and submits the form via a POST (with an electric shock administered every time the designer tries to add JavaScript), a designer for the database and a sysadmin that is capable of setting such software up and writing the needed SQL functions (perl wouldn't be a bad language for fastcgi, as many perl programs have been known for keep working over 20 years with newer perl versions without needing to be modified).

Ideally each form submission would either be handled automatically, or have a ticket raised on a staff webpage, who would then handle the submission.

But that wouldn't be a £239M contract (as it would be a few months of work at most, with extra submission forms and corrections only taking a few hours to implement and all the staff needed would be one or two sysadmins that keep the server up, updated and keep the database clean and a few staff to handle the applications), so that will never happen.

[Derezed]

Re: Other providers

Highly likely the winning bid was pitched as such...just required "configuring"...

[Fizzypo]

Capita

They got hacked at least twice this year they had private contracts .Also were they any off the shelf / cloud solutions. The government is not the only employer that provides pensions

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Capita

Off the shelf pensions systems probably have built-in assumptions such as employee and/or employer makes contributions, contributions are invested and at the end the accrued value of the contributions is used to buy bonds or the like to pay out the pension due.

The CS pension scheme differs from a Ponzi scheme only in so far as not only are there no investments there are no contributions either, the employee is on a salary sacrifice without it actually being called that, especially as we're now going to make salary sacrifice schemes pay NI. As Ponzi schemes are illegal I can't imagine anyone offering an off the shelf solution.

By doing things differently the govt. has cut itself off from COTS opportunities.

[tezboyes]

It was less shit before, in that whilst it couldn't handle the concept of more than one period of employment, it did at least have previous annual benefit statements and online calculators that worked. Oh yeah and links to scheme guidance that actually, well linked to something other than the top of the webpage.

Oh yeah, and it knew who my beneficiary is.

How many people already in receipt of their pension will even know that their pension provider has forgotten that?

Now it has basically has nothing, ok not quite nothing - it has a crazy concept of how long I've been a civil servant. Plus a number of disconnected Excel spreadsheets that they call calculators. Interestingly one that has a version on was clearly created in 2019.

Not much use without the data to put in them though.

[tezboyes]

PS the post code box on their address from doesn't work, so I can't add my chosen beneficiary back in without saying it's a non UK address!

At which point it crashes, losing all details...

[Doctor Syntax]

"to ensure the transition is a success"

If you launch something with the number of faults listed here it's a failure. It might come as something as a surprise to the Cabinet Office to be told that failure is not success but they certainly need to be told.

Fortunately my CS pension is already in payment and not with the main UK CS and its site appears to be unchanged so not in scope for this mess. Perhaps UK CS should have asked N Ireland CS to run the scheme for them.

[Anonymous Coward]

What?

239 million to mange pensions for 1.5 million people? Please make the headline numbers make sense??

[Anonymous Coward]

Makes you wonder

Who’s looking after the actual investments…

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Re: Makes you wonder

Investments? What investments?

Isn't the CS pension just a Ponzi scheme in anything but name funded by tax?

[eamonn_gaffey]

Corruption and Ineptitude

The usual BAU combination of the above : promise the earth, deliver non functional rubbish, rely on weak procurement sanctions, maintain corporate hubris in the face of abject failure, disguise entitlement to tax payers money etc.......

Crapita and its like remain unchallenged because of the hegemony of entitlement that has worked successfully for decades to enrich themselves from public funds. Probably started in anger from Blair onwards, but always a present I guess.

[Anonymous Coward]

They sent a Refund for a TV Licence after my Dad died

and then subsequently said that they were going to send investigators around asking why the house did not have TV licence.

[Paul Slater]

> part of the largest ever on time transition of a public sector pension scheme in the

North Norfolk.. area

[DartfordMan]

So reading between the lines: delivery date is 1st Dec else there is a clawback clause. Therefore the decision is taken to deliver "what ever we have because we are on the hook to fix any subsequent bugs anyway, so we can carry on developing it then". The problem is civil service are run rings round by these slick IT negotiators. They aren't alone in that; any time an IT company says it wants to 'help the customer" it actually means they want to help themselves to large amounts of cash for a minimum of effort. That's their raison d'etre, and why wouldn't it be? They are there to make a profit, they aren't a charity. There must be a solution, but I've no idea what.

[cookiecutter]

brown envelopes

how the fuck are these people & fushitsu still getting contracts

[headrush]

I think there's something going on with pensions overall. My company pension is with L&G. This has been running fine for years, the payment goes in within 7 days every month and the beneficiaries can be entered and updated on the L&G website and app.

This year the company decided to move to an L&G mastertrust pension. Apparently it will save money and be more efficient.

Except now it takes 15 days for the monthly payments to appear and beneficiaries have to be submitted via a pdf printed from the website and posted to my company's head office.

Trying to get anything done about it or even just getting information from anyone is an exercise in futility.

I really hope the pension funds aren't under the control of the company I work for as implied by the beneficiary problem.

[xyz123]

Wait til you see how much of the civil service overall pension pot has been quietly moved overseas into shell companies where it'll never be found......

They just have to delay the system having reporting capability and access sufficiently for there to be a 'horizon level' bug (claimed) but it'll be sorted out in a year or two......

Meanwhile Capita execs quietly exit the country to somewhere without an extradition treaty

You currently CANNOT analyze all the records, so there's no way to prove just how much has been 'oopsied' to China or Russia etc.

But they'll 100% claim "it wuz the ai that did it guv'nor..honest as the day is long"

[Acrimonius]

Tried to log in

I tried to log in but it would not accept my password. Tried recovery but then email not recognised. Kept on trying but nothing. Realised that you had to create a new account. This should have been in large letters. Why could they not transfer the old database? Not part of the contract but I suspect it would have been a big cock-up. Anyway I went through the re-registration. Found these issues:

Could not paste into or from any of the fields. Ideal when you want to copy codes from your email. A fundamental flaw

It did not check if username and password are similar.

You have to select recovery questions. One was 'Whats your first company'. Apostrophe!

It welcomed me with Welcome B. Was this meant to use my first name?

When typing password and username it validates while typing and so you get the mesage in red that it does comply or match. Annoying!

[Dan Glover]

Re: Tried to log in

Stupidly, I thought it would be a good idea to register. I'm someone who is about to receive a pension from the CS scheme.

Weird typeface on some headings.

Now in a loop where I can't use my e-mail address because it's already known. It all went wrong because their SMS message which "may take several minutes but is only valid for five minutes" didn't arrive. I requested another, then the magic number was refused. Maybe it was the first one, delayed.

"Help" facility is shocking. No results returned for "Registration problem" or just "Registration". "Can't register" returned the message: "Please enter a valid alphanumerical input."

What the contact details page doesn't tell you is the opening hours. Too late for today, will have another go tomorrow.

Gave feedback but there's no place to enter any useful comments. No, of course I wouldn't recommend them to a friend or colleague. It's not as though this is a service which one can decide whether or not to use, it's tied in with previous employment.

Also it is S L O W - which is perhaps why it says the signup process may take 15 minutes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Idiots - CRAPITA

They are always the same - having been employed by them through proxy, they are the absolute pile of utter shite! The sooner they go under the better (sadly not sure that will ever happen)

Never EVER get a job there is my advice!

[tatatata]

Lessons learned

"The Cabinet Office awarded the contract months after Capita suffered a massive data breach in which sensitive details including bank account information, addresses, and passport photos stolen from the IT outsourcing giant were reportedly put up for sale."

Would Capita learn from this experience? Apparently yes:

"More worryingly, personal details were unavailable, including pensions statements and beneficiaries information."

[vordan]

Off with Their Heads!

Thise comment section is increasingly becoming Reddit-like: random 'specialists' giving capital sentences to all, without really knowing what's going on.

Childish, foul-tempered idiots. Internet is a vile place to be.

[Thicko]

I tried the site some months ago and it was a joke. It couldnt even let a new user open an account.

As someone who had the misfortune to work for Cap I can only tell you that the site will definitely be working to the agreed contractual standards and uptime etc. and that the customer is deliriously happy with its performance!