| Crapita: copyright Private Eye 15:56 - Jan 29 with 757 views | DJR |
My wife is due to receive her deferred Civil Service pension in March. She received a letter in October asking if she wanted a retirement pack and she duly requested one online as she wants to draw her pension immediately. She followed this up with a phone call and was told she should receive the pack by 12 January.
It didn't arrive, so she has spent hours on the phone recently trying to get through to find out where it is but without success.
She discovered today that Capita had taken over the running of the scheme on 1 December but the position seems much more chaotic that it was because at least before then she was able to get through to someone.
Anyway digging about I've discovered this is a widespread issue and it has got a lot of coverage. Here's an article that has just appeared on the Guardian websie.
https://www.theguardian.com/mo
"My kids buy me food’: civil service pensioners offered emergency loans as nearly 90,000 face delays
Government to lend up to £10,000 to worst-affected new retirees as minister admits there is ‘unacceptable’ backlog"
Newly retired civil servants say they are struggling to pay bills and buy food because delays at their pension scheme have left them without an income for months.
Pensioners have reported being forced to borrow money from family to pay for food and heating, with some saying they feared losing their homes because they could not afford their rent or mortgage.
The apparent crisis at the Civil Service Pension Scheme has now been acknowledged by the government, which revealed that interest-free “hardship loans” of up to £10,000 will be offered to thousands of the worst-affected people. Some are also likely to be able to access compensation.
The pension scheme has admitted to a backlog of nearly 90,000 cases – comprising claims, valuations and other requests – that it warned could take months to resolve. Some members have been waiting since January 2025 for their pension claim to be processed.
About 3,000 civil servants retire every month, and the government has accepted that many of those who have retired since 1 December last year will not have received their first pension payment.
One former civil servant, who did not want to be named, said she was forced to apply for universal credit because she had been left without income since retiring from the Department for Work and Pensions in August.
“I used up all my savings over the first four months and have no family to help me,” she said. “The stress has forced me to take antidepressants.”
Another submitted a claim for her pension in January 2025 before retiring three months later. “I’ve yet to receive a penny,” she said. “I can’t afford to put my heating on. It breaks my heart having to ask my kids to buy me food.”
The Civil Service Pension Scheme is overseen by the Cabinet Office, which outsourced the administration to MyCSP, part of Equiniti, more than a decade ago. However, last month the £239m contract passed to Capita after a two-year transition period.
A report by parliament’s public accounts committee last October questioned whether Capita was ready to take over the scheme –which has 1.7 million members – and suggested the government explore bringing the administration in-house.
Many scheme members said they had been unable to log in to their accounts since Capita took over in December, and reported unanswered emails and long waits on phone lines.
Some reported that Capita, which was criticised for its administration of Teachers’ Pensions, had told them not to get in touch while the backlog was addressed.
One 69-year-old retiree said he feared his home would be repossessed unless his pension lump sum was paid before his mortgage term ends in April. His pension entitlement was due to start last October, and his mortgage lender will not extend his term because of his age.
He said on one occasion he had been in a queue on the phone to MyCSP for five hours without getting through. “I spent a further two hours starting at position 26, then being cut off when I reached the top of the queue,” he said.
Catherine Little, the chief operating officer for the civil service, told MPs there was no firm figure for how many scheme members were experiencing financial hardship, but that about 8,500 people had had some sort of issue with their pension payments since 1 December. She said the standard level for the loans would be £5,000, with up to £10,000 for exceptional cases.
The campaign group Civil Service Pensioners’ Alliance (CSPA) said it had been “deluged” with complaints from people facing hardship since Capita took over the administration in December.
Some scheme members had been hit with shock tax bills after Capita recorded incorrect tax codes, it said.
Capita said it was aware of problems with tax codes affecting a limited number of members and was working with HMRC to resolve them.
It blamed MyCSP for the delays experienced by claimants and said it had increased staffing levels.
“At the time of contract signature [in 2023], the volume of work-in-progress items left by the previous provider was agreed to be 37,000,” a spokesperson said. “Once we took over the scheme in December, however, we discovered that the backlog we were inheriting was in fact 86,000. As a result we have experienced several times the normal volume of member queries since launch.”
A spokesperson for MyCSP said: “All outstanding work items were fully disclosed and agreed with Cabinet Office senior management prior to commencement of the handover process. Over the course of its tenure administering the scheme, MyCSP consistently met the service levels set by the Cabinet Office.”
The Cabinet Office said it was aware of the problems faced by members and their impact.
“We have strong contractual levers in place to ensure Capita delivers, alongside strengthened controls over the scheme, to ensure a more reliable and efficient service for both members and taxpayers,” a spokesperson said."
The whole situation is a disgrace and demonstrates to me how awful the contracting out of public services is. Fortunately our finances are good enough to cope with any delay but clearly many people's aren't.
[Post edited 29 Jan 16:06]
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| Crapita: copyright Private Eye on 17:03 - Jan 29 with 545 views | Steve_M |
There seems to be no punishment for failure for the likes of Capita, Sodexo or the big accountancy and consulting firms.
There's also this which is related:
https://bearoneill.com/2026/01
Hopefully your wife, and those others affected, get this sorted out. |  |
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| Crapita: copyright Private Eye on 17:12 - Jan 29 with 521 views | DJR |
| Crapita: copyright Private Eye on 17:03 - Jan 29 by Steve_M |
There seems to be no punishment for failure for the likes of Capita, Sodexo or the big accountancy and consulting firms.
There's also this which is related:
https://bearoneill.com/2026/01
Hopefully your wife, and those others affected, get this sorted out. |
Thanks for the link. My wife has managed to sign up to the new website and leaving aside the technical limitations, it is hopeless with no details of her pension on it apart from her death benefit nomination.
She has been able to use it to send a message, but press reports suggest it will be a very long time before she gets any response, assuming she gets one at all.
But the following from the article is further proof of Capita's incompetence.
"How have we allowed something so bad to be inflicted on people, many of whom are definitely not tech experts?
This site would never have passed a GDS Service Standard assessment. So why was it allowed to go live?"
But then again, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. [Post edited 29 Jan 17:24]
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| Crapita: copyright Private Eye on 17:26 - Jan 29 with 475 views | soupytwist |
This has also happened a lot with the teachers pension scheme run by Capita, who in 2023 lost the contract to Tata Consultancy Services.
I don't think that the situation has improved much. |  | | |
| Crapita: copyright Private Eye on 18:12 - Jan 29 with 376 views | Father_Jack |
I left the civil service last October after 45 years of selflessly running the country. Not a bean received since.
At least this is now emerging as the national.scandal it is, but I would make the point that the scheme was hopelessly managed before Capita took over. It's clearly underresourced regardless of who is managing it.
If and when Crapita get their act together I trust we will all be handsomely and deservedly compensated. |  |
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| Crapita: copyright Private Eye on 18:20 - Jan 29 with 355 views | stuyarmouthblue |
I know a little about this. It's one of those situations where the Tories created a mess but then Labour didn't exactly help. I recommend your wife writes to your MP about it. Sometimes this helps. |  | | |
| Crapita: copyright Private Eye on 18:27 - Jan 29 with 335 views | bluester |
| Crapita: copyright Private Eye on 17:03 - Jan 29 by Steve_M |
There seems to be no punishment for failure for the likes of Capita, Sodexo or the big accountancy and consulting firms.
There's also this which is related:
https://bearoneill.com/2026/01
Hopefully your wife, and those others affected, get this sorted out. |
I have quite a few friends in the CS who were horrified to see Capita were taking over. I’ve worked with them on and number of occasions and they were woeful every time. Didn’t they come close to going under in the late 2010s? | | | |
| Crapita: copyright Private Eye on 18:41 - Jan 29 with 309 views | DJR |
| Crapita: copyright Private Eye on 18:12 - Jan 29 by Father_Jack |
I left the civil service last October after 45 years of selflessly running the country. Not a bean received since.
At least this is now emerging as the national.scandal it is, but I would make the point that the scheme was hopelessly managed before Capita took over. It's clearly underresourced regardless of who is managing it.
If and when Crapita get their act together I trust we will all be handsomely and deservedly compensated. |
Very sorry to hear that.
There was a time when Hogg Robinson, the travel agent, administered Civil Service pensions. They were a disaster (as I can vouch for) and thing dramatically improved when it was taken in-house. But clearly it's been out-sourced since. And the lesson that should have been learned is that out-sourcing means doing things on the cheap, | | | |
| Crapita: copyright Private Eye on 18:56 - Jan 29 with 259 views | Father_Jack |
| Crapita: copyright Private Eye on 18:41 - Jan 29 by DJR |
Very sorry to hear that.
There was a time when Hogg Robinson, the travel agent, administered Civil Service pensions. They were a disaster (as I can vouch for) and thing dramatically improved when it was taken in-house. But clearly it's been out-sourced since. And the lesson that should have been learned is that out-sourcing means doing things on the cheap, |
Yes indeed.
I hope your wife's problems are solved soon. I get the occasional "update" from my parent department. Latest which came today says that they and Cabinet Office are continuing to apply pressure and that a Deputy CE in HMRC is now on the case (yawn).
I've been told to expect something mid Feb but am not holding my breath. | |
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| Crapita: copyright Private Eye on 19:23 - Jan 29 with 191 views | DJR |
| Crapita: copyright Private Eye on 18:20 - Jan 29 by stuyarmouthblue |
I know a little about this. It's one of those situations where the Tories created a mess but then Labour didn't exactly help. I recommend your wife writes to your MP about it. Sometimes this helps. |
Sadly, when it comes to outsourcing in the Civil Service, Labour under Blair, Brown and now Starmer are as keen as the Tories | | | |
| Crapita: copyright Private Eye on 19:35 - Jan 29 with 145 views | stuyarmouthblue |
| Crapita: copyright Private Eye on 19:23 - Jan 29 by DJR |
Sadly, when it comes to outsourcing in the Civil Service, Labour under Blair, Brown and now Starmer are as keen as the Tories |
There's more to it than that., not that I disagree.. Anyhow, I hope it's soon resolved | | | |
| Crapita: copyright Private Eye on 19:37 - Jan 29 with 130 views | DJR |
| Crapita: copyright Private Eye on 19:35 - Jan 29 by stuyarmouthblue |
There's more to it than that., not that I disagree.. Anyhow, I hope it's soon resolved |
Thanks. And my wife had mentioned earlier today she might write to her MP, so I'll will make sure she does given your prompting. [Post edited 29 Jan 19:38]
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| Crapita: copyright Private Eye on 19:41 - Jan 29 with 119 views | DJR |
I am a retired member of the FDA and this is from an email I have just received from them.
"Members may have seen the joint statement from Chief Operating Officer for the Civil Service and Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary Cat Little and Capita CEO Adolfo Hernandez. We are pleased the Cabinet Office and Capita have publicly acknowledged the severity of the issues and have apologised for the distress these failures have caused to members’ personal finances through late payments and to personal lives due to delays dealing with bereavements, settling divorces, and assessing applications for voluntary departures.
We note Paymaster General and Minister for the Cabinet Office Nick Thomas-Symonds acknowledged that service levels have been “utterly unacceptable” in front of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee yesterday.
The FDA are also broadly encouraged by the work undertaken by the Cabinet Office’s taskforce, led by HMRC’s Angela MacDonald, working directly with Capita on an urgent recovery plan for the scheme, whose immediate actions include:
Prioritising death-in-service cases, ill-health retirements and hardship cases.
Help and support, including interim support and loans measures for people who have left, or are due to leave, and are experiencing financial hardship due to delayed pension payments.
150 additional staff have been deployed to Capita to clear correspondence backlogs and speed up case processing.
The FDA is now pressing the Cabinet Office and government departments to ensure that the burden of evidence is not unnecessarily high to access support and all of those in need of hardship loans are able to access them. Though hardship applications will be administered by departments, we believe there should be a centrally agreed process and short set of assessment criteria to ensure consistency of outcomes. The FDA will be supporting members with securing these bridging payments.
We are also repeating our call for the Cabinet Office to proactively open a compensation scheme covering the distress and inconvenience caused, interest on late payments, and invite members to provide evidence of increased associated costs incurred.
Capita and the Cabinet Office must also ensure the extra resources deployed mean the backlog is cleared swiftly so that the scheme offers a consistent, accurate, and timely service to our members.
In an all-staff email, Little also acknowledged the impact these issues are having on staff seeking VES quotations for colleagues planning or considering voluntary exit. Although she states these cases will be prioritised, we believe the easiest way to reduce members’ distress is to remove the self-imposed deadline for exits of 31 March. This will allow time for accurate quotations, and time for members to consider them." | | | |
| Crapita: copyright Private Eye on 21:19 - Jan 29 with 31 views | TractorWood |
£239m contract. Sheesh.
'Leveraging AI for hyper scale'. Absolute charlatans.
Hope you get sorted. |  |
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