UK spending watchdog opens investigation into Capita's pension fiasco The UK's public spending watchdog is investigating the troubled transfer of the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) to Capita. In a notice, the National Audit Office (NAO) said problems had persisted since the outsourcer took over administration in December 2025. The Cabinet Office awarded Capita the seven-year £239 million …
At an invitation-only behind-closed-doors meeting recently the Crapita CEO said sorry sotto voce to Government officials, then they all had a good laugh about it, signed contracts for the next few upcoming jobs and went out to lunch at a really nice restaurant where they have an open tab on expenses.
Yes, and Thank You, Minister
/farce.
"That's the usual feeling from members of the public when they try to have any dealings with the civil service."
This isn't the civil service doing this. It's an outsourced provider. Civil service pension administration was first outsourced in 2012, it's been going downhill ever since.
Ah, I see. Not quite sure what the link was but if you were implying that the civil service is getting a taste of its own medicine, then I see.
Plenty of public services over the years have been ground down to almost non existence, either deliberately or through neglect: NHS dentistry, HMRC, Justice system, child mental health services. But they are all examples of successive salami slicing by multiple government of various colours and I wouldn't blame the civil service necessarily. Capita inherited a system that wasn't working great, and somehow made it a lot worse almost immediately.
Which just goes to show its not the people on the ground floor at crapita that are crap but its the people at the top
Who all went to the right college at Oxford, and cant possibly be anything other that super gentlemen who are top men in the field
And besides , I've been promised a non exec directorship at £150k a year at crapita when I'm fired from government
A joke... or is it ?
the civil service can genuinely just fuck off! My ONE PERSON consultancy could do this - all these firms do is tuoe across the existing staff & ship a load out to india.
I could literally go to a bank, get some cash to buy insurance, tupe the entire team across & that's it.
literally as long as I put in a slightly lower bid. even better if I register my consultancy in india or the us rather than using my uk firm
"My ONE PERSON consultancy could do this"
Unlikely I suspect. Crapita did take on a service that was already terrible. MyCSP looked like they had run their service provision into the ground with strikes and declared service levels of 2 weeks just to acknowledge an email.
Somehow though, Capita exceeded expectations and made it even worse.
Companies like these don't have _experience_, their workers have. The only reason these companies still exist is IR35, because they are exempt from it. This has prevented emergence of competitors.
IR35 is designed in such a way that a whole delivery team cannot leave such company, incorporate and deliver contract to public sector without large margin and overheads.
Then ideally, such "temporary" projects that take decades should really be done in house by government run company.
Rather than fix the problem they will spend more money on this, which will tell us what we already know, and demand a small fine that will be added to Crapita's next contract fee.
The veterans' pension clawbacks also warrant an examination. They are damaging lives but it isn't getting much coverage.
"One woman had been waiting six months for her widow's pension after her husband died in March."
It's worse when you realise that death in service cases are the highest priority for Capita sort out and it still took (at least) 6 months in this woman's case.
And as for "all but the most complex cases would return to normal service by September": it is now October and a former colleague of mine who retired 7 months previous still has no pension because their retirement date is wrong in the system.
it is now October and a former colleague of mine who retired 7 months previous still has no pension because their retirement date is wrong in the system
I was made redundant (while a member of the Civil Service scheme) in February and chose to put everything over £30k of my redundancy into my pension.
Capita still have be recorded as an active member of that orgs pension scheme. And (speaking the the HR bod at Ork[-1], they haven't even asked for the cash to be added to me pension pot).
A complete and utter waste of time and money. I'm fortunate that I'm several years away from retirement otherwise I'd be getting *really* worried now.
Crapita had two years to do due diligence taking over the scheme.
So whose fault is it that Crapita vastly underestimated the number of cases?
Whose fault is it that they didn't recruit or train enough people?
Actually I feel that both the Civil Service and Crapita are at fault.
I've had 20+ years of experience dealing with various government contracts and amongst the things I have learned is that (all the departments I have dealt with) have sod all idea of writing a decent contract.
I will leave it to others to make aspersions as to favouritism or below the desk dealings, and whether it's conspiracy or cock-up.
I make only one comment in that one of my best friends has been trying to get a pension value out of Crapita for almost 9 months and still waiting. He is retiring next March but isn't classified as high priority.
Crapita, MyCSP & the Government are responsible: Crapita through a lack of due diligence, staff resourcing & robust software. MyCSP because they hid the actual numbers of cases in the backlog. The Government because BOTH contractors have now cocked-up the Civil Service pension & should have never been allowed to bid for anything!
It seems to me that every time someone takes one of these accounting & payment systems (Armed Forces Payrolls, Income Tax processing, Pensions etc) that is creaking along just fine using Cobol, envelopes and stamps and replaces it with a server farm running <insert flavor of the month> on the promise of "faster & cheaper plus WEB PORTALS!!!" what happens is a system that was working for mumble decades suddenly costs orders of magnitude more to run and the promised extra features (which is why we're turning off the Cobol innit?) never materialize, or do so in a manner that makes the whole wretched business unworkable.
And of course, in the meantime the payments are not getting made.
Perhaps the drive to AI and the resultant skyrocketing price of modernization will promote more of a IIWLITFA* attitude for a bit so my Giro** will arrive on time.
* If It's Working Leave It The Fsck Alone
** Do they still have these? I've been away for a bit.
Great that NAO is looking into it.
Probably same way it is looking as pigeon looks at piece of cardboard falling off someone's takeaway.
Likely outcome will be more contracts at higher margins and Chancellor of the day moaning that we don't pay enough taxes.
Shameless civil servants are only interested in their golden penshions (the irony).
We, the great unwashed who work for Crapita, squirm in collective embarrassment at this, latest fandango. Our contract had staff seconded to help-out, as have others, plus the Civil Servants parachuted-in - it all has a negative effect on other work.
But, that is NOTHING compared to the poor people waiting for urgent payments, especially if they've just lost loved-ones & have nothing else.
Crapita & the previous contractor MyCSP, have messed this up between them. Ironically, MyCSP faced an AO investigation in 2016, having taken over the Civil Service pension scheme in 2014, which was partly run by - Crapita!
Data migration: Delays in loading and correctly mapping data transferred from MyCSP to Capita.
Member records: People with multiple periods of Civil Service employment ("multi-stint" members) were initially unable to register on the new system.
System interfaces: Technical problems occurred in setting up and receiving data through interfaces between employers/departments and Capita.
Member portal: Members reported problems with registration, logging in, performance/speed, searching and incomplete pension information.
Limited functionality at go-live: The Member Hub went live on 1 December 2025 with limited functionality. During a surge of around 60,000 access requests, a technical fault resulted in 138 members being able to see other members' Annual Benefit Statements.
Inherited workload: Capita inherited approximately 86,000 work-in-progress cases and more than 15,000 unread emails.
Overall: The problems therefore appear to span data migration, system integration, member-facing software, workflow/case management and operational capacity, rather than being simply a problem of slow customer service.
