How do you solve a problem like Capita?

OPINION Capita's share price tanked 9 percent last week after it told investors it was taking a hit on its contract with the UK government's Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS), which has left some of its 1.7 million members unpaid following a disastrous launch. A trading update said operating profit would be down between £25 …

[Paul Herber]

Reverse IR35. Problem solved.

[Guy de Loimbard]

That would be good

I hate IR35

[cookiecutter]

Re: That would be good

it's not IR35 that's the problem per se.. the idea was a good one. you can't have "contractors" who leave a perm job on the friday & come back on the monday as a "contractor" and sit at the same desk for the next 20 years.

Whst happened was that suddenly the big 4 consultancies had a big stick to beat smaller better firms who were showing them up...a few stipid civil servants & politicians (stupidity & corruption going hand in hand) so cocaine boy makes public sector liable for ir35 screw ups & lazy fat civil servants decide to just palm it out to the big outsourcers who can afford to keep large numbers of staff benched between projects that shape better firms can't do & relied heavily on contract staff to ramp up and down.

Then you have Sunak supported by lazy greedy civil servants who extended the shit show that happened to public sector to the private sector & oh look!!!!!! suddenly infosys wipro tcs hcl etc are getting government contracts & sunaks share holdings are going up as are the share holdings of his father in law & his father in laws best mates.

Corruption all round

[elsergiovolador]

Re: That would be good

You called the idea good and then spent four paragraphs describing what the idea does.

Read the Act before praising it. Chapters 8 and 10 of ITEPA 2003 set out conditions that all have to be met before any of it applies. One of them is that the worker owns more than 5% of the company supplying them (ss.51 and 61O). A consultancy employee fails that condition at the door. Nobody ever gets to the hypothetical contract, CEST, substitution or the rest, because there is nothing left to test. Exempt by ownership category. The entire consultancy channel operates as if IR35 never existed.

So your same desk for 20 years scenario is perfectly legal today. It just needs Crapita, Infoshite or Accidenture badge on the lanyard. The client can even name the individuals it wants. Key personnel clauses are standard in consultancy contracts and on every government framework. Personal service, same desk, indefinitely. The Act does not care. The only thing it ever checks is who holds the shares.

Notice the language you picked up along the way. A worker supplying labour through a company he owns is a "disguised employee" and a tax dodger. The same worker supplied through a company somebody else owns is "professional services". Same human, same desk, same work. The sneer only attaches when the worker keeps the margin. That framing was manufactured by the people who benefit from it and you are repeating it for free.

Your Friday to Monday story also runs the other way round. The move that actually worried the big firms was their own staff leaving on Friday and coming back on Monday as independent suppliers, same service, without the 200% markup. IR35 killed that exit. The employer can bench you, bill you out at three times your salary and know you cannot undercut them, because the moment you own the vehicle the client inherits liability and blanket bans you.

If parking humans at client desks for decades is the mischief, ban it for every supplier. They banned it for one ownership class and left the other to hoover up the work. Liability sits on one class of supplier, so procurement runs to the exempt one. The legislation was never about tax. It decides who is allowed to sell labour.

And yes, that's corruption all round.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: That would be good

Stipid?

[elsergiovolador]

Just to mention, IR35 is ownership-based. It was created to exclude small businesses from competing with companies like Crapita, which are exempt from it.

If a company is worker-owned, then IR35 legislation applies, clients have to do assessments etc., and if personal service and employee-like working are established, then the company cannot make a profit.

Whereas if a non-worker-owned company supplies named workers and they work like employees of the client, IR35 doesn't apply at all, and they can make a profit.

Contrary to popular belief it's not only about one man band type of business, but applies to small consultancies too, as long as anyone participating in delivery for the client has more than 5% of shares. Many are probably not aware of this.

This was to prevent situation where whole team leaves big consultancy and start offering the same services cheaper.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not transfer ownership to a second company to own the first company?

[Doctor Syntax]

"Problem solved."

Not a solution but it would aid in solving the problem which is to start regaining the capacity to run things themselves. That requires rather more than the ability to hire specific expertise as and when it's needed. Nevertheless, having that sort of expertise available as required would be necessary. The rest of the UK economy would also benefit from that being made available again.

[elsergiovolador]

specific expertise as and when it's needed.

That has been an excuse to buy "interim" labour. But in reality that expertise is needed all the time, always.

These "temporary" contracts run for decades in practice.

[Doctor Syntax]

These "temporary" contracts run for decades in practice.

That was not my experience, neither from my time as permie bringing an freelancers not my subsequent time as a freelancer.

[Yoshi]

How would that solve the problem exactly? I ask for the benefit of my own education

[Philip Storry]

Nope

That doesn't solve the problem.

The problem at the moment is that Capita are an external company who have no commitment to the services they work on, and whose incentives are to extract the maximum amount of money from their customer.

If we remove IR35 then all we get is more contractors and/or consultants. Who will have no commitment to the service that they work on, and whose incentives are to extract the maximum amount of money from their customer.

Both of these lead to the same underlying issue, which is that the government department has chosen to not employ its expertise directly or to develop expertise of its own. Without that expertise all it can do is throw taxpayer's money at the problem and hope.

Under your plan we replace firms like Capita with an army of highly paid contractors and consultants, all just working for the billable hours and able to take their expertise away at any point in time.

All you are doing with an IR35 reform is altering the shape of the problem slightly, by distributing it across many more contracts. It won't be better, and would probably be worse. At least if Capita's expert on $technology leaves they're still on the hook to get another expert, under "repeal IR35" that's not even the case, the department suddenly has all those overheads.

The real solution is to do it in house with their own employees, who they can try to encourage and enthuse, and perhaps even instil with a sense of pride in their service.

Poor effort. 2/10, try harder next time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Nope

The problem at the moment is that Capita ...

Is Crapita.

And nothing else but that.

Get rid of Crapita* and get rid of the problem.

Problem solved.

* and other similar, well known (and very expensive for the taxpayer) nuisances.

.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Nope

I worked for Crapita on a London benefits contract in the 1990s.

Treated the public badly by delivering a poor service and employed managers who bullied staff.

Recruited incompetent under -performing staff on rubbish pay after the good staff quit.

Didn't care that keeping poor people waiting weeks for their benefits to be paid was causing huge stress and resulting in angry people threatening staff in reception sites.

So long as they bid low and win a contract, their M.O. is to worry about performance backlash after and they don't care that they damage people's lives.

I still pray they collapse one day- their continued existence fills me with disbelief and despair.

.

[Tachi]

Re: Nope

We need a national programming service. Base it out of a few universities so you can offer placement years to promising students too.

You would have to make sure each team only works on one big project and have an apprenticeships scheme to raise up support staff who actually know the products.

[Like a badger]

Re: Nope

We need a national programming service. Base it out of a few universities so you can offer placement years to promising students too.

Let's start them on a FOSS local government ERP, to try and stop idiots like Birmingham City Council (and many others of all political complexions) from throwing away hundreds of millions on poorly designed, poorly implemented systems.

[Steve Foster]

Sticking Plaster

IR35 is an attempt to fix underlying problems with the tax system without actually fixing the underlying problems.

It's a classic "add more complexity" solution when what is really needed is a ground-up rewrite. But the politicians aren't up to the job as they fear it will be unpopular and make it less likely that they'd be re-elected.

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Sticking Plaster

If IR35 was meant to fix any problem with the tax system, it wouldn't have exempted big consultancies, which do the very thing the IR35 was supposed to stop but at industrial level.

[Guy de Loimbard]

Outsourcing

Has long since lost its appeal.

There is so much knowledge and capability being lost, over time, by giving out contracts to the like of Capita.

The alleged savings are nowhere to be seen, not when you factor in delays, or in this case, people not receiving their rightfully due pensions.

UK PLC used to be good at so much stuff, but, unfortunately, successive ministers are increasingly gullible to the sales pitch of "look how much you'll save" from the sales teams of all these outfits.

Technology has it's uses, but bums on seats, doing good things and seeking to improve, without having think about profit, shareholder revenue, or targets, is desperately needed, i.e.an actual job held inhouse, not outsourced, may well help here.

I'm sure there is anecdotal evidence to the contrary, but I can't remember the last time I heard a soundbite extolling the virtues of how awesome an outsourced contract has been and actual benefit the the public purse, or the poor bastards on the receiving end of the shite service being delivered.

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Outsourcing

If these companies offered added value beyond the labour they supply they wouldn't have to be protected by IR35. The business model is: send bums on seats that essentially work as client's employees, charge massive day rate for service, pay workers fraction of it, capture the difference.

[Like a badger]

Re: Outsourcing

"UK PLC used to be good at so much stuff, but, unfortunately, successive ministers are increasingly gullible to the sales pitch of "look how much you'll save" from the sales teams of all these outfits."

Speaking as a current civil servant, but with 40 years private sector experience, there's little difference between public and private sectors in the gullibility of senior leaders, and if there's a balance on honesty and integrity, the civil service wins hands-down, although a toss up between ministers and business c-suite. In terms of the use of outsource service providers, the private sector make far more use of them than the private sector. But there's a reason for this gullibility, and despite all the bitter, poorly informed whining up-thread about "lazy, fat, corrupt civil servants" from know-nothings, it's simply a question of information asymmetry and decision support asymmetry. I've been round the block on services in-source versus outsource, I've run benchmarking exercises for one of the world's largest companies, I know how much various functions cost, what the range of costs between companies is, what the service considerations are, so read on and find out.

Consider a first time outsource review could be IT, or back office support functions. Doesn't matter whether the prospective client is public sector or private, the mechanics are identical.

As it's a first time, there's already an in-house team. These are seen purely as a cost, because most companies leaders are cynics who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. In the case of ministers they will likely have zero organisational management experience. The in-house function will be tightly resourced so service standards are so-so. The functional leader is at best a lower level senior manager, maybe even a middle manager grade. That their boss (a higher senior or board level) is even considering an outsource decision says the boss perceives some downsides to the current approach, and benefits of some sort in outsourcing. Put another way, the starting position is they don't have confidence in their own team. The board/ministers making any decision are very time poor, and will be able to spare limited time to properly review the case, so everything is in play.

Let's start with the outsource vendors, and invent one called CrapIT-Fershitshow. C-F will already have played a long game, cultivating senior level relationships, inviting client decision makers to conferences and international "fact finding" site visits, they will be on first name terms with any senior leader that they can entrap. When the opportunity comes to make a pitch, they will deploy very smartly dressed, eloquent sales people with grand sounding job titles on big salaries and huge incentives; these people will interact with client leadership as peers. They - like you - do much the same job day in day out, and so they are good at their jobs which for them means exuding calm confidence, gravitas and experience. Their job is persuading senior leaders to outsource. They will come supported by a small posse of attentive boot-lickers posing as functional experts, push glossy "white papers" at the prospective client that name big company success stories, knowing that the client aspires for their company to be mentioned in the same breath as <insert any well known very large company here>. The pitch will start with plenty of prattle about "best practice" and sector expertise, accompanied by a rich side dish of FOMO, claiming that outsourcing is what all modern companies need to do, so they can concentrate on their core business - you know it makes sense...etc. The bootlickers will present beautifully crafted Powerpoint presentations that lull the client into a hypnotic stupor of believing that C-F have some magic sauce that will enable them to do the same job better, yet so much more cheaply that they can charge the client 18% less* than current costs and still make the 20-30% gross margin that a services outsourcer expects. Clearly that's bollocks, but it doesn't matter, because that's the prosecution team and case, its proven, it works. Now think about the defence team and case.

The defence team is at best a nervous functional manager, wholly unused to presenting their function as a case, and selling anything is outside their experience. They won't be wearing a tailored suit, they won't have a team of bootlickers, they won't speak to the board with confidence and gravitas. And all of the facts (as in costs) are already known so they can't spin them like C-F do. In fact, chances are the functional manager won't even get to speak to the board. More likely a dull CFO will sit in the corner and read off what the YTD costs of the function are, without conviction, without any real knowledge of the benefits of insourcing, and compare that to the mendacious promises of C-F. Even the client procurement team are pathetically outgunned by the vendor team - how often do they outsource or resource a back office service? Once every two-five years perhaps, compared to day after day after day for the vendor sales team. The procurement team will likewise be paid less, and have very poor incentives. they aren't paid to be challenging a make versus buy choice, nor to challenge the vendor's made up business case, they're simply there to turn the handle and pretend that a discount was screwed out of the vendor (who had that priced in from the start anyway). Nobody will analyse the business model of the vendor and find they routinely bid low and then back load the margins through out of contract changes, resulting in much higher overall costs; Nobody will take up proper references from prior customers (who may be unable to unwilling to give a true account anyway); Nobody will consider the consequences of what happens when the in-house team have been TUPE'd and then quietly terminated, and the service is provided by cheap staff who don't know the client and don't care about the service; and nobody will consider that the vendor will be world class at writing easily met SLA, and evading the penalties if they don't meet their own SLA.

It's not a difficult decision for ministers or the board. No bribery is needed, for them it is a simple, logical decision because they don't have sufficient time, and they don't seek and respect a broad enough base of internal advice..

* 18% is a magic figure when promising outsource savings - low enough to sound vaguely plausible if the client doesn't think too hard, but not high enough to immediately set alarm bells ringing.

[Paul Garrish]

Re: Outsourcing

Sounds spot on....

However after 30 years of this happening there is no longer any excuse for not knowing how it works on the side of the client. So it very much comes down to the 'senior engagement' tactics.

But I suspect an even larger part of the decision now is the CFO pointing out the size of the pension liabilities of those existing staff and how much nicer the finances will look if they can be offloaded to someone else.

[Like a badger]

Re: Outsourcing

In the past that was certainly true, but pension liabilities are only a consideration for private sector companies offering defined benefit schemes, and they're rarer than hems teeth now. The civil service scheme is currently a "notional defined contribution" scheme, whereby government deducts an employee contribution from salary and makes a generous but notional contribution as employer that (if they were made and invested) would drive a scheme that worked out at the same value as (from memory) about 35-40% of career average salary. The specifics are all public, but ICBA to go and check them. However, because it's notional, government just take the employee contribution as a lower net cash salary cost, and the employer contribution doesn't exist. With the five year maximum outlook of our politicos, they're not worried about that, in the same way they aren't worried about the spiralling benefits bill, and the escalating cost of triple lock.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Outsourcing

“How do you solve a problem like Capita?

Bringing troubled contracts in-house requires skills Whitehall is already struggling to recruit”

A couple of hours on the cesspit that is LinkedIn will illustrate there is a vast army of experienced, qualified and reliable IT and Project resources unable to make much headway past the automated slop of Automated Tracking Systems (ATS) that is standing between workers - many made redundant because of outsourcing, offshoring, penny pinching and ill conceived IT efficiency driven projects - and vacancies.

Recruiting staff into a reconstituted IT Civil Service or NHS is the least of issues. Paying them a fair wage is more of a challenge.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Outsourcing

Paying them a fair wage is more of a challenge.

That is the corrupt element of civil service. This is on purpose, so that a case can be made: "We couldn't find anyone to fill the role, therefore we need to bring in a consultancy".

This cycle should be stopped. It is destroying the finances and quality of public services.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Outsourcing

I don't agree with that (mostly.)

There are a lot of CSs - from memory, 480k people in over 200 departments comes to mind. Doing an amazing array of things, many things that people might not even imagine exist.

It doesn't take much imagination to realise that 480k sets of salaries is a large number - Daily Wail "this is bad" levels. So politicians issue soundbites about cutting back - both cutting the headcount by some arbitrary amount (regardless of whether those left can still do the work), and cutting (in real terms) the pay for each of those left, will cut the headline cost.

I can only speak for my own little corner - which is reasonably complex engineering. We struggle to recruit the right people we need, to be able to adequately oversee what our contractors are offering us. The result is that things are overlooked, contractors slip things through, and the end (military) product ends up with the front line services in a "poorer state than we'd like" as professional engineers.

To a certain extent, we've got better pay than many of our peers, but our employing organisation is still hamstrung by the need to keep rough alignment with other gov departments, and constraints from the treasury as to what they can offer us (yet another real terms pay cut disguised as a pay rise.)

[Doctor Syntax]

Capita is not the problem. It's a symptom of the problem. The problem is the loss of ability of HMG to do the job themselves.

[elsergiovolador]

And the maths is not mathing. Why would they pay for worker + consultancy margin, if they could employ the worker directly, pay actual market rate and it would still be much cheaper for the tax payer.

The argument that they don't need capability all the time is absolute nonsense. If that was true, they wouldn't be buying services from those companies for decades.

[cookiecutter]

we are seeing this happening; the NHS has its own internal recruiters now and internal agencies and internal "outsourcing firm"

[Doctor Syntax]

This particular instance is HMG's not running (or no longer running) its own pension system. That applies to other areas that it has outsourced. It wanted to reduce headcount (possibly a motive that you would support as you seem to be persistently anti-civil service). (It also applies to a lot of other companies who want to tell their shareholders that they are reducing headcount.)

One of the things lost - by both client and outsourcer, - is the institutional memory that kept things working effectively. Even if some of the initially TUPEd staff remain with the outsourcer for a while after a few contract cycles even that resource is lost. From the outsourcers' PoV it's purely transactional and the clients' abilities are hollowed out. This seems to be the point they're reached.

It's becoming clear that this state of affairs can't go on.

"The argument that they don't need capability all the time is absolute nonsense."

I assume your vague "they" refers to clients - HMG or others. I assume your even vaguer "capability" is the requirement to run operations on an ongoing basis. That they don't need that certainly isn't an argument I made. They clearly do need that. But bringing it back in-house would be a project and projects are apt to require temporary additional expertise. That's why destroying the industry with IR35 comes back to bite.

[elsergiovolador]

I am not against civil service, I am against corrupt civil service.

The hokey cokey with artificial reduction of headcount is nonsense. They should employ expertise directly at market rates also for the reason you stated - institutional memory.

would be a project and projects are apt to require temporary additional expertise

Those experts could be moved between projects whilst retaining institutional knowledge and insights and that could achieve more coherence. Idle experts could upskill other civil servants or be left to keep their skills up to date.

[Like a badger]

It wanted to reduce headcount

A very common tactic in both civil service and business. Doesn't matter if costs go up, because in the short term either CEOs or a minister can stand up and announce headcount reductions and "savings", knowing that the "savings" will never be sufficiently accounted that the audience can check that they are real enduring savings.

In the case of the civil service, there's a challenge that the Cabinet Office (who effectively run the CS) have themselves had their headcount slashed, and have no idea now or in the past what the size of the shadow civil service is. By shadow civil service, I mean civilian employee FTE doing work that is paid for by government. So that's all staff working on government paid contracts, regardless of work type or location at Crapita, Fujitsu, IBM, et al, consultancy FTE at PA, Accenture, BCG etc, delivery work like prison staffing, transport, food, young offender support, Citizens Advice, facility management companies, MoD aircraft maintenance, ASR helicopter staff. Arguably, because both rail and energy are entirely controlled by government policy departments including the prices they charge, those sectors should also be included.

But nobody knows what this number is, and that's quite convenient for some.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh Hokey Pokey!

You put the right folks in

You throw the consultants out

You do the job in house

And then you turn things about!

[Guy de Loimbard]

Re: Oh Hokey Pokey!

With that level of lyrical wizardy one shouldn't need to be A/C, surely it's off to Eurovision for you!

Come on! Reveal one's good self!

[Winkypop]

Re: Oh Hokey Pokey!

OK KOKEY

[FirstTangoInParis]

Pay the market rate

Don’t know about now, but some years back a civil servant doing the same job as me in industry was getting paid half what I was.

I agree that outsourcing has had its day, but if the CS pay is significantly less than industry then the people they need are not going to even look at this.

[cookiecutter]

Re: Pay the market rate

technical wages in the civil service are a joke, even WITH the 28% pension! I need to pay rent NOW, not in 20 years time.

I've seen technical architects positions paying £45k which is less than the 3rd line Wintel position I had in 2006! PLUS trying to get through the joke of Civil Service hiring is a nightmare - so bad that I'm genuinely not going to apply for those jobs anymore.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Pay the market rate

Time was technical (i.e. engineering) grades were behind even scientific. Then there was a recruitment problem and they went ahead. So things could change.

[Boris the Cockroach]

Re: Pay the market rate

That was my experience.

The boffins got a below market rate and us engineering types who turned their demented dreams into a physical item got even less.

The only fun we had was on the jollys involved with making said item fly, float, sink, or explode (or indeed a combination of all 4)

Then I left . My pay rose by 75-80% compared with the previous week. and I did look at a civil service job before the pandemic... they nearly spat out their tea when I said how much I expected to recieve in pay.

But the whole 'outsourcing' thing can be shown to be a big pile of steaming yak shit, as proved when british rail was privatised and the knowledge of why things were done bled away until the Hatfield disaster.

[Bebu sa Ware]

How do you solve a problem like Capita?

Slightly ambiguous. How do you solve a problem like Capita (is)? v How do you solve a problem like Capita (does)?

The first, presumably behind the back of the barn with a .22; the second, blame it on the previous supplier(s).

[TimMaher]

Re: .22

I’d use a 9mm magnum.

More bang for your buck.

[Fr. Ted Crilly]

Re: .22

9x22 Largo?

[steelpillow]

And Ninthly

1. Allow Crown to give away code to F/LOSS under other people's licenses.

2. Pay staff what they are worth, be they employee or contractor.

3. Allow Crown to give away code to F/LOSS under other people's licenses.

4. Revoke IR35.

5. Allow Crown to give away code to F/LOSS under other people's licenses.

6. Total transparency.

7. Allow Crown to give away code to F/LOSS under other people's licenses.

8. 100 % F/LOSS

9. Allow Crown to give away code to F/LOSS under other people's licenses.

[Tron]

There will be a lot of committees, but nothing will change.

Anything involving government works badly. If it is (accidentally) OK, like online tax, they will keep at it until it works badly (MTD).

Anything outsourced by government will work badly and cost lots more.

Plus kicking out all those foreigners, including foreign students, and keeping them out, isn't going to help with the staff shortages.

Oh, and sterling down 25% from what it was, remains the icing on the fail cake.

So lower your expectations.

[cookiecutter]

offshoring jokes

MAYBE if the government hadn't been using PWC, accenture etc & outsourced in the firstv place and didn't facilitate the offshoring of jobs by outsourcing firms; there would be plenty of technical staff available!!

As it is, self important Sir Humphrey types wangled themselves directorships and consultancy positions with the big outsourcing firms who "advised" them to outsource everything to shockingly-Them!

The government doesn't NEED to hire buckets of technical bods; it just needs the internal management capability to manage the projects and hire contractors directly to provide project work or hire BRITISH based SMEs of the type that a govt department would be their main customer & who would provide excellent customer service because they know they'll get canned for another british SME.

As itc stands the system is a circle jerk of fuckery...I worked as a contractor for a dept that had initially been an internal IT department - got outsourced to Crap Gemini, everyone being tuped over - then to another firm- then another firm - then a tower model - then back to a single supplier.

At each stage your experienced staff are demotivated more and more; there is no upward movement; no pay rises; outsourcing firms not interested in anything but offshoring what they can & making life shit for the experienced staff so they leave or retire.

Anyone who's worked for an outsourcing firm knows the only contact you have with it is via the service delivery manager whose only remit is to ensure you don't get training, don't get a pay rise & don't get too uppity. so of course you have massively overworked and under motivated staff.

I personally refuse to train offshore staff & regardless of what the idiot project managers or sdm have promised - no weekend work without double time. And DEFINITELY no providing support to senior management who don't want to deal with an indian service desk.... even if they HAVE seen me fixing a receptionists laptop even though i'm an architect.

[DJV]

How do you solve a problem like Capita?

Take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Re: How do you solve a problem like Capita?

Cockroaches and Capita survive...

[lglethal]

How to fix Government Contracts in the short term...

... make the C-Suite personally liable for failures in delivery and excess costs.

I guarantee you would get bids with actual expected values (not the grossly undervalued bids you get nowadays), and there would be enough bums on seats to guarantee on time delivery.

Admittedly, maybe we should also make sure that the civil servants defining the contracts no what the hell they are wanting/doing/signing up for...

Ahhh a pipe dream I know... No one with a netwroth over €10 mil ever needs to worry about being held personally liable for anything these days...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: How to fix Government Contracts in the short term...

This is the global answer to the shitshow we are in - make bosses personally liable for their choices. Lie about the costs - sacked and bankrupted. Let pollution kill people - sacked and jailed. Use govt money to but stuff from your dodgy PPEmate in the pub - sacked and jailed... Operate a platform that hosts child porn - sacked, bankrupt and jailed.... gamble all the money on made up financial products - sacked and jailed etc etc...

They dont improve or change because there are no real consequences for failing and all the upsides for lying and cheating.

[Gilbert Wham]

McCloud? NEXT MARCH?!?!

Bwahahahaaaa. I deal with McCloud all day, every day, for another Very Large public sector scheme Which Shall Remain Nameless, and there is no freaking way Capita is fixing that particular Cameron-era fuckup by next March. Like ALL Cameron's fuckups it's going to take generations, and cost billions. Given the knock-on effects of McCloud in my job, six will get you four that a good percentage of the delays with civil service pensions are directly attributable to McCloud. And a soupcon of general bureaucratic weirdness of course.

[Anonymous Coward]

To be hugely cynical about this...

Everybody wins. Capita get paid (to take a beating).

The civil service escapes with not having to reform the absolute shambles on the client side that persists forever more and allows this to happen because that would mean dismantling empires (dear boy).

Message dispatched by carrier pigeon from a different part of the public sector front line trenches living the same life :(

[xyz123]

They need to admit there is a huge unexplained hole of over £500 million in the pension pot that appears to have been stolen.

Stop stonewalling everyone, as thats just buying time for the thieves to obfusticate their escape, making the money harder to recover.

[Doctor Syntax]

You really are gullible if you believe that crap you read on social media somewhere.

CS pensions are paid direct out of current taxation. They always have been.

Read the following sentence several times until you understand it and its implications.

THERE NEVER WAS A POT TO BE STOLEN.

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Simple

Hand over the management of the MPs pension scheme to Crapita. Though, in their ineptitude, they'll make the already generous scheme even more by paying the retired MPs more than they are entitled to, thereby ensuring they continue to get government contracts

[Anonymous Coward]

As a former contractor ......

I jumped out of the contracting game before IR35 hit. Luckily I went into a consultancy business working for multiple customers and doing lots of fixed price jobs.

The government wants to outsource as much as possible because it keeps people off the books.

From grim experience of doing government contracts up to £250k, the civil service could not run a booze up in a brewery if you gave them glasses and a bottle opener.

Government procurement is wrapped up in more layers of red tape than an Egyptian mummy has bandages.

Example: We spent 10 man days quoting for a £500k project. We were excluded because our business continuity plan did not meet with approval. This despite the facet that we had 3 of the UKs' leading experts in the particular project.

The job was given to a large company who did not even list the particular job skill set on their flashy website.

The company who got the job then tried to sub-contract the job to us - at a reduced rate.

We told them [not very politely] to involve themselves in sex and travel.

They then tried to poach two of our consultants to work for them under IR35. They were then told to extend their travel to further locations.

One of the main reasons that the big outsourcing companies get government contracts is simply that they have teams of people who do nothing but tick all of the boxes on the RFQs. This often includes a list of certifications which has sod all to do with the job. On one design job the RFQ included compliance under CDM, construction industry certification for our consultants, ISO 14001 environmental certification etc even though there were no site or constructional aspects to the task.

As a SME it's virtually impossible comply with the list of requirements for government works.

[MrGreen]

If you are in government and you own a massive amount of shares in Capita, guess who’s going to win the contracts?

If you’re in government and your mate tells you who’s going to win all the contracts, guess what shares you’re going to buy?

THEY ALL KNOW WHERE THE TAX MONEY IS GOING.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think mobs with burning torches and pitchforks would my preffered choice.

[James R Grinter]

“Does the government have the management skills …?”

Does Capita have the management skills to run contracts, design the services, and build the technology?

Apparently not.

[oldandgrey]

"How do you solve a problem like Capita?"

Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. Nice caseic reference!

[Aging Hippy]

Employ Fewer People

You need;

1 project manager to go to committee meetings and publicise the project. They are the only way in for the "outside world".

1 project leader (a technical person) with total knowledge of the project and in sole control of the project. Has the ability to remove anyone incompetent.

Sub-teams as needed with no excess of members.

As many competent users as you can find to check specifications and do user training.

Brooks's Law: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." - As a project always starts late this applies throughout the whole project.

Sir Humphrey (words to the effect of): The size of your department and your budget is the only measure of status in the Civil Service.

[JLV]

Not necessarily directly applicable but after the initial disastrous go-live of the Obamacare website, a team of private sector techies went in and cleaned it up. They may even have started a govt dept for IT excellence or some such, which IIRC recently got DOGEd.

Govt needs to bring project implementation in in-house, at competitive, premium, pay but with also a strong meritocracy and dismissal culture, i.e. exempted from union rules. Also cross-dept, going from deployment to deployment.

Sustainment IT can stay as is.

[Gavsky]

Working for Crapita, nothing is a surprise - sadly. We've seen some of our staff redeployed to help with the Civil Service pension fu...er, fandango. We're already short-staffed, with loads of work to do. So, we'll fall further behind & that's classic Crapita: too few, too late, everyone's impacted.

As I've commented before, we can do a good job & have some great success stories; it's unfortunate that our reputation is further damaged by contracts like the Civil Service one. I suspect that 'Amazon Alfonso', CEO, may jump ship after this.

[Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck]

Shoot the CEO, upper management, and board members and start clean.

[Taliesinawen]

A failure to communicate :o

I worked for a tech company where management didn't even speak to the techies. You would read in the tech press what the latest vision was. Which is ironic considering they had communications in the title. There was a lot of staff churn /s

[RJW]

Capita could have delivered the Civil Service Pension Scheme, if were not for some daft decisions at management level.

Why didn't they use their existing pension management software Hartlink? Why did they decide to write bespoke software for the Civil Service Pension Scheme?

Capita manages loads of pensions; this should have been easy for them.

[Joe Gurman]

In two steps

1. Secure all pension scheme data, encrypted, held by Capita at least two government locations, with encryption keys held only by trusted government employees (assuming such can be found), and

2. Nuke Capita from orbit, pour l’encourager les autres.