UK government admits Capita pension portal was crapita at launch A UK government official has admitted Capita did not reach the expected level of performance following the disastrous launch of the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) web portal late last year. The Register reported in December that users experienced a string of issues with unrecognized passwords and usernames. They also …
> Capita pension portal was crapita at launch
In many romantic languages, the suffix -ita signifies a small or young subject. So for example señora (Spanish: woman) can be modified to señorita to address younger women.
I would therefore humbly suggest that crapita is not an apt description of Capita's deliverable. Possibly crapissimo would be closer?
I have three friends who are trying to get pension information out of the Crapita system.
Typical issues:
System doesn't recognise the user and login is impossible.
The system loops and asks over and over for the same information.
The information input does not get acted upon.
Phone lines not answered or else "you are number 130 in the queue".
Requests for call back never answered.
6-9 month delays in getting any retirement payment despite giving over 4 months notice of retiring.
One of my friends is looking to take partial retirement and drop down to 2.5 days a week. This has currently been going on for 6 months and he has no resolution in sight.
The whole thing has been a complete clusterfuck with Crapita blaming everyone else but themselves. MyCSP were bad, but Crapita are 10x worse.
I am some years off retirement but usually check on all my old pensions to make sure I still have access, this one in particular is annoying as the membership numbers change and the portal charges.
Imagine my surprise (having already heard about Capita) when I couldn't log in this year.
Credentials not recognised, I need to set up a new account as I haven't logged in in a while.
Email verification not sent. Sent only when I asked for it to be resent.
Phone verification, not sent. Not even sent when I ask for it to be resent.
I can't log in at all.
Crapita need debarred from future UK HMG contracts.
, like the Civil Service HR/Finance one just won… regardless
https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/04/370m_capita_government_deal/
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/procurement-act-2023-guidance-documents-procure-phase/guidance-debarment-html
Sadly, the bar for debarment is too high, not even Crapita have reached that. What does need to change is for the procurement rules to permit past performance to be taken into consideration when assessing tenders. At present the rules explicitly prohibit consideration of past performance, hence allowing repeated ... well Crapiness.
I get that large projects are complicated and the service provider will drop the project mid-flight if they perceive it won't make them any £££. But there needs to be a better way to structure payment terms so that something useful gets delivered. Hows this: add +50% to the cost up front to make it interesting. Failure to deliver to spec means all directors* are barred from being a company director (and from public office) for 15 years for failing king and country.
*Not just shell-company directors, but ALL directors who stand to make any money from this. All the way up.
One complication is that the original contract specification frequently gets changed by the customer. This can be due to political pressure, management reshuffles where the new boss wants to stamp their own identity on a project, legal requirements being added, technological improvements changes such as obsoleted operating systems, a new need to interface with some other system - possibly a legacy one, or simple budget cuts.
Most of the usual suspects who bid for government work know that some or all of these will happen. They can therefore low-ball their bid in the knowledge that all the piles and piles of changes can be charged for to turn a profit.
Hey, You been eavesdropping on Crapita senior management meetings?! AI is indeed going to solve everything - we're utterly sick of how brilliant it is/will be. Obviously, if it's a disaster, a 'Dot Com Bubble', senior managers will be...fine, retired, in another, highly-paid job.
"... there are features that we are successfully going live with this weekend"
Clearly Crapita can see into the future re this weekend's work being a success before it happens. Or maybe they're just carrying on with the usual fake it until you make it nonsense with the "surprise" twist that there's always lot of faking, never lots of making.
I'm a member of the said pension scheme, whilst one lying toerag of a senior official might say this, EVERYBODY inside the civil service knew this was going to be a huge pile of ordure the moment we heard about Crapita's involvement. What's even more alarming is that this isn't even a conventional funded pension scheme, there's no assets to manage, no individual member fund to reconcile.
What's more the officials involved knew that the previous administrator (myCSP) were already struggling with the large volume of "McCloud judgement" cases and the huge number of severance information requests due to Civil Service headcount reductions, and STILL the morons pressed on with the idiot plan to outsource it to these clowns.
It's Capita. We all know them as Crapita for a reason, how come the government hasn't cottoned on yet?
(Actually I know the answer to that one: apparently contracts are handed out to the usual suspects (see also Fujitsu) because they are big... with the view that when things go tits up there's a company they might be able to sue for reasonable damages. Which seems like it might be a reasonable idea until you remember that Crapita, Fujitsu, etc. never get hit in the pocket.)
The great sadness I feel is that there are so many competent, hardworking & talented staff employed by the company. Those at the coalface are embarrassed & disheartened by what Crapita too often 'achieves'. It also clouds the contracts that ARE working very well, providing a good service, genuine savings for taxpayers.
I worked as a sub-sub-contractor on a couple of Capita contracts. I've no insight into how the costs matched projections but our element was delivered on time as, I think, were the contracts as a whole. OTOH sometime afterwards I should have received one of the documents we printed for one of them and it never arrived.
Quite agree.
The Fujitsu Horizon support contract, by example, has been offered around the market many times but all the big players declined - there was no possible upside for them and nobody wanted their name attached to it.
When you bid against Capita, you know they will absolutely low ball the initial contract and agree to margins that are way lower than the industry average, force the client into lower SLAs, and ANYTHING above the base contract or ambiguity = change order (where they claw back some of their money)
Any of the normal players of scale CAN bid, but they often DON'T bid as they have done their due diligence...
Hi could anyone other than Fujshitsu support Horizon, due to it’s one of a kind nature.
That being said as part of the outgoing supplier we had to implementation support them endlessly for the abortion called Fujitsu Marketplace (inc added IBM WebSphere MQ that would not scale) that Primark bought as their replacement global PoS solution…. to graft into an ailing Oracle Merchandising Migration and failed Oracle Sales Audit project.
Sounds about right,
Must of employed the same experts that work at EON who bullsed up an utility move from the prior provider and both hand bagged so long and told not to worry then dropped a shit ton bill on my elderly parents.
Best bit even rang and threaten baliffs on the day on my fathers funeral, scum bags, told them to do one, and they were shit at sums too, worked out they owed 250 quid not the thousands previously advised and politely said to the call worker - i know this is not your fault, but this company I wouldn't piss on if it was on fire and especially the scum that rings up on funerals.
Crapita and TV License is an absolute con, as it includes everything under the sun, but I bet Virgin and Sky, Netflix and other VODs if dare show Live Tv gets a penny, but old Right Wing Platforming Corporation must have every penny. Funny if they cut the talent wages maybe it would be less costly and also hiding a lot of that now behind like the Studios and programs behind the Private Ltd arms, so Beeb looks like it barely functions what a con, about time the Fox wanna be as most of the decent content is just post VOD provider content due to funding and Bias reporting that GBNews could say must be our Sister channel for so called news.
About time it was taken out and shot.
I see you've found a new outlet for your ignorant rants Nigel now you've been booted off Cameo. Keep up the good work. Your paymasters are delighted.
Next time, try writing in coherent sentences with actual spelling and punctuation and everything.
It is not even an irony they get the slang Crapita,
The Boss claiming oh yes in Dec 1st we had basic functionality to support.
No you didn't :
* People couldn't login
* If you did register it would forget lol
* Half the site was unfinished
* Loop in and Loop out
Just be honest and say you fecked up, that in no terms is even a ready state product, should of done soft launch of beta a 1000 then 10000 and 30k , 50k and then they could see stress on issues, but the way it was falling apart it had cheap staffing - sacked off the original designer in suites who promised the earth then shat out the delivery lol.
If it was not ready then you freeze changes and development and fixes on MyCSP and then go live with a functional product - not oh well have this crap and when we get paid some more you can have another delivery with AI slop as we didn't pay for any support staff - to cream off even more.
Sounds like MyCSP was a crap shoot with issue, but known and they laughingly though Crapita would be better lol, must of been good steak and wine lol
Past and previous UK governments don't seem to have done much due-diligence when it comes to roping it some private sector organisation - Capita and the former G4S to name but two ugly ducklings, that gave "incompetence" and entirely new meaning when working in collaboration with government departments.
They were quick enough to siphon as much money out of the Treasury, but had little or no idea of responsibility or accountability for their poor handling of the services they were supposed to provide.
Not that any of that matters because inevitably it will be the Taxpayer who will foot the bill
There's a total lack of due diligence by both HMG and Crapita, whose line was "it was all in a worse state than we thought, nuffink to do with us guv". Except this revelation gives the lie to that - even the basic functionality that didn't depend on quality data from MyCSP didn't work.
Add in to that what must have been appalling - or nonexistent - client side management from HMG. Because, as I never tire of saying, if the client side contract management was properly resourced, the financial benefit of deep outsourcing would go Poof!!
A lot of the problem is that government tendering rules explicitly forbid taking past performance into account so we can't exclude bidders that we know are going to suck. Presumably that was inserted so that entities like Crapita and Serco can keep feeding off the public teat no matter how many times they prove themselves useless.
If HMG did do that, there would be nobody left to bid on these tenders. Result!
That could well be a very good thing. Just do the work in-house and bring an end the outsourcing fuckery. The end results could hardly be any worse than the shite the usual troughers supply over and over and over again. It would save the taxpayer billions too.
But there would then be no lucrative part-time directorships for senior civil servants to slide into once they "retire" early. And no third parties to blame if the work is kept in-house.
So, it's never going to happen until the revolution comes.....
Based on my experience of Infrastructure Outsourcing back in the period 2004-15 when I was performing assurance reviews on bids for one of the major Outsourcing companies, the success of Transition activities (defined as those required to take-on the services from either the previous supplier or in-house) and Transformation (changes from taken-on delivery model to supplier's full delivery model) are almost always underspecified (i.e. wrong) because some or all of the following:-
a) the customer is telling porkies (or at least withholding information) about the scale and scope of the current situation - or may not even know themselves if the process is being managed centrally or at a "Corporate" level
b) the previous supplier is telling porkies and withholding information and/or cooperation - sometimes at the customer's direction - or access to them is forbidden by the customer until very late in the bid/solutioning process (and sometimes only once the contract has been signed)
c) the new supplier's DD's process is inadequate and fails to establish real work volumes and/or deviations from 'norms' (how-so-ever defined - but frequently the 'standard' supplier delivery model)
d) the supplier's bid/solution team deliberately disbelieving evidence from DD activity and solutioning to their solution boilerplate and metrics from post-Transition delivery. (see note 1 below). This is frequently because solution has to be based on metrics and numbers and not real-customer-world.
e) Transition and Transformation Plans that are built on assumptions and not contractually agreed fact (... ker-ching Variation Orders!)
f) There is a major flaw in the new solution model which hasn't been picked up by anybody (possibly because of arrogance - very frequent in my experience - or ignorance by the new supplier) and effectively a new soluition needs to be designed and implemented post service start. (See note 2 below)
g) The new delivery model and design/implementation timescale to achieve it is a fantasy and just simply is not deliverable, and certainly not with the staff / resources available to the new team.
I don't know if things have changed over the past ten years, or Business Processing Outsourcing differs from Infrastructure Outsourcing (but my couple of examples of being involved in bids covering both suggests not).
===========================================
Note 1: One of the final bids I was involved with had widely distributed customer servers with broadcast-TV receiving hardware in many countries to capture live TV in that region for analysis of local adversing patterns. Proposed solution was for these to be centralised into major datacentres (i.e. one or two covering entire continents) and eventually virtualised either private or public cloud solution. Costs were of course based on the standard model for basic and standard hardware models. No amount of pointing this out in solution reviews that that this wouldn't meet the customer's obvious need was listened to. I never knew this actualy worked out in practice as I took redundancy and retired before the account Transformation was complete. One solution fits all - NOT!
Note 2: (Not a deal I was involved in reviewing, but one I subsequently was involved in reviewing in delivery and at renewal) A global infrastructure outsourcing deal in the Pharmaceutical Industry was signed before the supplier discovered and understood the constraints and additional working required to meet FDA/GxP requirements - no-one on the bid or solution design team had ever been exposed to this industry before. Cure - almost total re-solution at supplier cost (involving staff from other areas of the company, external experts and transferred resources (e.g. TUPE) from the customer that the origional solution would have removed ASAP) and delay of 2-3 years in moving to supplier delivery model (which was significantly more expensive to deliver than the contracted one).
The other thing is that government is as clueless as big corporates when outsourcing, in that they don't ask themselves where, how, and when does the provider make their profits.
As a result they wilfully overlook cheaper-than-cost bids, they encourage companies to backload costs, and they miss the obvious vast profit generator that is every future change that isn't in the original contract, and every non-standard service request where routine activities were not included in the billing rates. It seems bleeding obvious to me to want to know how much it costs a vendor to do the job being asked, how much various types of reasonably guessable change will cost (increase/decrease in volume, change in contracting entity, mergers/demergers, change in interfaced systems etc etc).
And if I was government procurement, I'd be looking to aggregate all government experience with each bidder, and score them on that.
in that they don't ask themselves where, how, and when does the provider make their profits
*DING* *DING* *DING* *DING* *DING* *DING*
Or, possibly more accurate, don't care. They done their bit & got their success bonus so why should they (from their viewpoint) and, most tellingly, as a Civil Servant like wot I am, it won't affect their career progression one bit.
Some costs are immutable. Hiring devs and webmonkeys is a fairly consistent thing across industries. So, when scalpers like Crapita promise to deliver something at a suspiciously low price, you have to ask yourself "where are they cutting costs"?
They answer is that they are not - because all the little 'contract extras' soon build up and the original headline contract price is a dim and distant memory. And the commissioning team and the outsource management will suffer zero consequence from non-performance.
That last one is key. Deliver a system not fit for purpose? That's 20% off the money we give you. With another 20% off if not rectified within a negotiated time. Oh, and the contracts team at the Cabinet Office? Expect a visit from the audit committee looking at your contract awarding process, inputs and outputs.
But no - once again the contracts team suffer no comeback, the outsource company screws up with no comeback and the people that get shafted are those, like me, that are members of the CSPS.
You have described West Berkshire's deep outsourcing (including the entire legal team.....) to Amey to perfection .
They were at the final contract award pont when I was in there in 2003 as an elected member part of the Audit Commission (remember that?) Best Value Review (remember them?) team
The leadership swore blind that Amey has shared their full financial model with them under commercial confidence and they were convinced it worked.
We were utterly convinced (from the sniff test) that it would only work if Amey were able to scale up the operation with further outsourcing deals with other LAs, and that if the point arrived when the penalty for walking was less than their losses, they'd walk, causing - however it was done - another round of service disruption and staff uncertainty. We said so in our report, IIRC. West Berks' leadership didn't like that very much, although when pushed in private they did sort-of grudgingly agree with us, but claimed they carrying on with the current delivery model was unviable.
Guess what happened 3 or 4 years later. All came back in-house, the very delivery model WB had insisted was unviable and outsourcing was the only option. They made a big play of the capital investment they'd received from Amey, which by omission implies the revenue budget took a hit.
See also: London Borough of Enfield.
No party political points here, either. Enfield was conservative. WB was LibDem.
I beg to differ.
One of the prime functions is to set who gets your pension if you kick the bucket. Capita semi-managed to import my nomiation (my wife) but not the relationship - she was just down as [name] - beneficiary (where name was her actuial name - I'd like to say 'obviously' but this *is* Crapita..)
Click on the 'manage beneficiaries' button and the website thinks about it for about a minute then say 'system connection failed, try again later' and has done so since I managed to get a login (mid-December).
And they have had *two* years! I mean, I've heard of MVP Agile coding but this is 'no viable product' coding, produced by someone far, far away using a spec scribbled on a napkin from the local $RestaurantOfChoice
Have no fear, AI is being slathered over everything & this will: Solve Absolutely Everything. But, in the meantime, normal Crapita service is all you get - I'm genuinely sorry, & embarrassed. Do write to CEO Adolfo & share your woeful experience - ask the hard questions of him & demand an apology.
Start with the government ministers. They must be made personally responsible for the actions they take while in office. They're the ones who tell the civil servants to spunk money up against the wall. The civil servants have to do as they're told and just get on with it.
Civil servants might well bugger up the odd contract or two. But that's long after the real damage has been done: build aircraft carriers with no planes, outsource everything to Crapita, pay billions to Deloittes(?) for Test & Trace instead of using community health, ensure nobody's accountable for privatisation fuckups (trains, water, electricity, etc), piss away hundreds of millions on OneWeb, buy overpriced weapons from BAe, shovel billions to BT for universal fibre, squander billions on Crossrail and HS2, etc
From "Behind the wire" - you ain't seen me, right?...
Crapita is selling its contact business to concentrate on 2nd & 3rd level work (basically backroom). We don't like talking to people - especially anyone with issues caused by...erm, Us. Officially, it's because we've improved the division SO much, but another company is needed 'to take it forward'. Why not keep it & make money, then? Aren't management admitting that we can't finish the job? Hmm...
This pension bollock-up isn't entirely down to Crapita (share the love around) but we did our usual sterling work. Never fear, CEO Adolfo (late of Amazon) is banging the AI drum like it's a cure for cancer, & everything else. Eggs in basket? Time will tell.
Hilariously, our internal 'AI Buddy' - launched to much fanfare...doesn't work. It's unavailable because of technical issues. They chose to represent HIM as a White dude; imagine a Disney/Japanese cartoon character with oversized eyes, sickeningly wholesome - you'd never tire of punching him. Choose a neutral character, a la 'Clippy'? No, someone didn't think that was important to an extremely diverse workforce.
Interesting. The projects I worked on as a sub-sub-contractor were in the end run as back-office by them - I dodn't even realise they did that as the project development got all the (bad) publicity. The only one where I had a meeting with them surprised me at how much everything was contracted out - including the project manager's role. The last might explain why one (or in my experience two) project(s) went well while others - shall we say not so well.
One thing that did strike me was that their core S/W development work was subcontracted to an Indian S/W house. My meeting, in fact, was due to my piggy-backing onto a trip by a couple of my client's people to a project meeting so that I could explain to their developer the use of entities in XML and why they couldn't just put a name like O'Connor into the middle of a string in an element. It was something that had to be repeated several times over the course of that and particularly the next contract as, presumably, a new, recently graduated, developer was rotated in on a 6 month visa and removed bits of code he didn't understand. (This was a time when XML was new and trendy. Why hadn't they covered it. And why didn't they run a check for well-formedness if not for validly on all the data they sent out?)
This may be another reason why projects go wrong - their S/W is not only developed by teams of recent graduates but the team finishing it might not even be the team that started it. Also, if their code goes straight to the web-server instead of to a subcontractor, it isn't going to get sanity checks by somebody other than the end user.
Someone clearly hasn't read anything relevant.
As a civil servant, part of the T&Cs is that if yo join the CSPS then you will pay a contribution at a set percentage of your pensionable pay (which isn't necessarily your gross pay.) This does not go into a pot like most other pensions schemes, it just goes into the general government coffers as a token contribution. It could just as easily be taken be offering lower pay and no contribution - but that would just make the Daily Wail readers froth even more at the mouth about how we have an unduly gold plated pensions scheme.
Your employer also pays a token (but much higher) amount. The net effect of this is simply that the treasury gives each department a pile of money, and each department gives a chunk of it back as "pension contributions".
All that maters is that the CSPS promises to pay you according to the scheme rules - and those payments also come out of the government's general coffers. As others have said, it's a giant Ponzi scheme that would be illegal in almost any other situation.
I've been approached to work in a senior role a few times and declined it every time.
Toxic leadership, everything is the fault of N-1/N-2. They frequently bin the mid management rather than looking inward...
VERY weak IT skills compared to any competitor.
BUT they are willing to do stuff for 3-5% net margin which makes them cheap.
