New Capita-run Civil Service Pension Scheme - problems (what a surprise!)

Universidad

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82057951#Comment_82057951

I can't imagine they will prioritise the 2026 ABS process given how deep in the toilet they are with everything else. There may be a statutory deadline, but we have seen various public sector pensions ignore this for literally years at a time, with barely a mote of coverage.

Watching_The_Wheels

Must be time to phone Capita again for the umpteenth time to chase my missing WPS refund.

Well at least they found my missing month of pension down the back of a Capita sofa and paid it in short order.

NewtsInThePond

Email notice received this morning in my works inbox from Cat Little, so I am sharing the main points for those who may be interested:

Yesterday’s parliamentary announcement marks a significant commercial escalation, the introduction of an independent assessment of Capita, and a stepping up of our permanent leadership and operational capability in the Cabinet Office.

 Commercial and Contractual Enforcement

 The minister announced robust measures to enforce delivery standards and hold the scheme administrator, Capita, contractually and financially to account:

• Withholding Payments: The government is taking robust action to ensure Capita faces the immediate financial consequences of its delivery failures, having already withheld £9.9 million in payments. The government will only pay for services successfully delivered.
• Surge Cost Recovery: Public money will not fund Capita’s failings. We will recover every single penny of our 140-strong operational surge support team's costs directly from Capita, and the team will remain on the ground until the service is permanently fixed.
• Direct Remedial Intervention: We are beginning the process to appoint an independent Remedial Adviser, at Capita's expense, to force service rectification directly on the ground.
• Independent Technical Audits: The government is executing its contractual right to deploy independent auditors immediately to conduct a technical review of systems, data integrity, and compliance with statutory duties.

 To consider the long-term delivery of the scheme, the minister has instructed officials to bring together a broad range of stakeholders and experts to consider, in line with the government's strategy, how scheme members can best be served in the long term, in the delivery of these vital schemes, including the option to insource.

hugheskevi

The full Parliamentary statement and debate is at this link.

Trying to piece together the material from Angela MacDonald's updates, Richard Vianello's update, the Public Accounts Committee, and the Parliamentary statement, I think the position is now something like the table below, noting however that there are probably about 20,000 other cases that are likely overdue, so the figures need to be considered only in terms of broad magnitudes rather than as a comprehensive and complete set of data.

Caseload backlog, July 2026 (estimated)

	Total	In progress	Awaiting 3rd party input
Death-in-service	600	200	400
Divorce (existing cases)	1,400	800	600
Ill health retirements	429	360	69
Bereavement	4,750	1,651	3,099
		1,461 are over 4 months old
Arrears and pension into payment*	4,900	3,100	1,800
Parliamentary raised cases	1,900	Managed by daily virtual surgeries. Many MPs reporting these surgeries are ineffective.
2015 Remedy	400	Due by end June - have implemented at least 400 of the Immediate Choice elections received but not yet implemented from the statements sent out between January and March 2025 (commitment made by Capita at 26th March Public Accounts Committee hearing [see Q233]
Retirement quotes	9,463	7,194 are for members who requested a quote prior to 5 June and have a past retirement date of 30 June 2026 (or before). 2,269 were received after 5 June. 1,379 are complex.
		6,500	2936 with employers
Total	23,842

• some members report that although arrears have been paid, 2026 Pension Increase has not been included, so a further arrears payment will be due. It is unclear whether these members are included in the figures in this row

Other deliverables

Reduce telephone answering time	9 minutes across all cases, longer for non-priority calls (Cabinet Office said 3-4 minutes, Capita say 8m 47s)
Portal updates	Angela MacDonald confirmed on 8th July that a further update is due. Capita previously said that only 1% of members don't have access, but many were still reporting lost access (username or password suddenly unrecognised and can't be reset). Live Chat only seemed to deal with portal access issues, with other queries having to go through the portal. Many report no answer to queries submitted through portal. Track My Case is extremely basic and only shows whether a case is open or closed. Uploading of documents seems problematic too (only one at a time, or limited size of document, or unable to upload anything at all).
Pre 2025 Annual Benefit Statements	Were due to be put in the member portal, overdue, no recent updates
Retirement modeller	Overdue and no timescale available
Transfers	Non-club transfers in suspended. Delays in other types of transfer quote due to backlog.
Pension divorce sharing	Suspended due to revised SCAPE discount rate calculations being underway
Recovery of interest free loans	Mostly Departmental led

Forthcoming previously stated or statutory deadlines

14th July	Capita supplying a detailed recovery plan to Cabinet Office
16th July	Capita to meet Cabinet Office to discuss recovery plan
31st August	Capita revised deadline to produce quotes for past retirements and bereavement cases (straightforward cases)
31st August	Statutory deadline for combined ABS/RSS annual statements to active members
1st September	All pensions relating to the quotes issued by end June put into payment and arrears paid where member responded promptly
Early September	All bereavement cases to be cleared
September	Update due about 2015 Remedy / McCloud
30th September	More complicated cases back to service delivery agreement levels, aside from about 600 of the most complicated cases
6th October	Statutory deadline for Pension Saving Statements to be issued
31st October	Deadline for Pension Dashboard connection
Unspecified	Implement new actuarial factors based on new SCAPE discount rate of CPI+2% (not all factors produced by the Govt Actuary's Dept yet so no timeline). This will enable all transfers and divorce processing to resume.
Unspecified	Interest payments made for late payments
Unspecified	Individual claims for loss to be set up at a later date
6th April 2027	Implement Inheritance Tax changes
Mid 2027	Complete delivery of McCloud / 2015 Remedy - Immediate Choice Remedy Saving Statements all issued (and presumably remaining deferred members RSS), as well as things like Contingent Decisions, EPA compensation, etc

drummersdale

Thanks @hugheskevi - so basically the whole thing is a car crash - and given the Government has (sort of) indicated it would be ripe for insourcing the likelihood is that Capita will see very little in it for them other than simply dolng the bare minimum to try and limit any penalties. There is very little incentive for them to do anything else it would seem.

daisy_1571

I've heard of yet another ex colleague who finally got her quote paperwork this week and its wrong.

Was this a deliberate ploy in the 'get as many out by end June' target ie management-sanctioned instruction no checking or giving calcs even a cursory glance just get them out. Or just an understandable symptom of over worked staff being given impossible targets for how many they personally must do therefore either gone number blind or in a panic to get as many out as they can ? Or a symptom of the computer systems ie things might look correct to the staff member calculating but then it goes wrong in the internal manipulation between them clicking go and the paperwork coming out the other end?

Mainly though I wonder if the figures given to government will simply show quotes out. And nothing about errors. Or the returned quotes requiring corrections will go down as 'queries' or as 'capita awaiting' information from the prospective pensioner?

Dxx

NewtsInThePond

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82061060#Comment_82061060

Brilliant, clear and very understandable update as usual @hugheskevi! The time you take to prep information to share with us all is fantastic! Thank you.🤩

Gosh though, most disappointing and very depressing read for me in that Parliamentary statement comes pretty much at the beginning. That Capita was actually awarded the contract in November 2023 and so have had TWO years to prepare before the reigns were handed over from MyCPS…holy moly…what on earth has that organisation being doing during this time?!?!?!😕

Lifematters

So the transfer requests have been suspended.

I had transfer quote and completed all relevant paperwork for transfer from CSP to LGPS late August 2025.

Transfer still not gone through and I’m now leaving my post in a months time.

What happens to transfer in this situation? Will LGPS accept it (when eventually comes through) after I’ve left? Or will it be cancelled?

MouldyOldDough

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82059176#Comment_82059176

I tried 'enquiries@civilservicepensionscheme.org.uk' first - that did not receive anything - no bounce, no response.

'mycsp.sar@cabinetoffice.gov.uk' and 'enquiries@capita-pension.co.uk' both failed - both previously worked - I may have to try my MP…..

hugheskevi

The Public Accounts Committee and the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee hearing is at this link.

The 30th June deadline was comprehensively missed, and has been replaced by an end of September deadline (although in places it is referred to as end of August, it depends on exactly what is included in terms of delivery), although many MPs appear to have little confidence in achieving that new deadline given the past trail of missed deadlines.

At the Public Accounts Committee hearing on 8th July it was confirmed that there are 111,700 items of work in progress at the moment, compared to a normal position of 55,000. Capita is currently failing 16 of 21 Key Performance Indicators. The key performance indicators being met mostly involve regular pensioner payments, which isn't very surprising given that making ongoing pension payments is the highest priority of a pension scheme.

Cat Little confirmed that "When we tendered for this contract, there were only 2 suppliers left when the contract was awarded in 2023."Andrew Forzani said only MyCSP and Capita submitted credible bids.

There was much discussion of the statutory deadline of March 2027 to complete 2015 Remedy. This was rather odd, as no such statutory deadline exists. The statutory requirement was to complete the Remedy by March 2025, but schemes could extend that deadline for more complex cases. Cabinet Office chose to extend that deadline by 2 years to March 2027, but it can (and almost certainly will) choose to extend it further. Granted, it has the backing of statute in being able to extend the deadline, but I would argue it is misleading to assert March 2027 is a statutory deadline, certainly without any further clarification. Capita confirmed that as at 8th July 2026 no contract for the delivery of 2015 Remedy work has been signed with the Cabinet Office, so it is wishful thinking to believe it will all be delivered by March 2027.

This Employer Pension Notice states "we’re working to implement a long-term solution to restore the loading and processing of monthly interfaces. In the meantime, we still need member earnings data so we can complete CARE year-end processing and produce accurate statements." This is very concerning, as the basis of good data management is a monthly interface and diligent resolution of all errors and warnings produced by automated checks on the data upload from the employer. Clearly this has not been happening at all.

I have updated all the tables in my post above with all new data, times, etc. Note there is widespread concern about the accuracy of quotes and the robustness of the quality assurance process being applied to their production. If many of the recently issued quotes are incorrect, then the number of effectively outstanding quotes may be much higher.

Meanwhile, the employer contribution rate will fall from 28.97% to 22.32% from next year. That has no impact on members, although as many believe the employer contribution rate is the value of their pension, and it is included prominently on payslips and job adverts, some might think their remuneration has been reduced. Some may give a wry smile to the news that the administration levy is falling from 0.27% of salary to 0.22% - presumably some efficiencies have been identified there!