A UK government official has now admitted Capita did not hit the expected performance level after the Civil Service Pension Scheme web portal went live late in 2025.
Users hit a string of issues with unrecognised passwords and usernames. They got broken and circular links, too, while the site flashed dummy placeholder text.
All this followed the government handing Capita £239m (€276m) to build and run CSPS, one of the UK’s biggest pension schemes, covering about 1.5 million current and former civil servants.
Cabinet Office permanent secretary and civil service chief operating officer Catherine Little wrote: “Capita did not deliver the full levels of IT, automation, and portal functionality at go-live. This significantly impacted Capita’s ability to manage the volumes of work inherited and the new work delivered since go-live.”
Capita took over from MyCSP at the beginning of December under a 2023 contract that bundled a new tech platform and a membership portal.
Cabinet Office permanent secretary and civil service chief operating officer Catherine Little said ministers were told: “that there were shortcomings in the [Capita] IT solutions, but we were unable contractually to continue the service through MyCSP and the level of service from MyCSP was deteriorating.”
Industrial action at MyCSP piled on and inflated the backlog dumped on Capita at handover. Little wrote: “We implemented an exit plan, but the legacy contract with MyCSP provided limited commercial levers to manage performance during their final months.”
At a Public Accounts Committee hearing this week, chair Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown said Capita’s IT was not ready on 1 December, “or if they were, nowhere near tailored to reach the level of cases and complexity you got.”
Capita insists it agreed to a phased rollout of the portal tech, with the Cabinet Office signing off on split delivery rather than a single clean cut.
Capita Public Services managing director Chris Clements told the PAC that the plan was staged: “There are two releases of functionality, first in December and then at the end of March.”
“The combined releases are the full functionality that was promised as part of the procurement. The functionality we went live with on December 1 was all that was needed to administer a pension scheme. What happened then is we had some teething problems and some difficulties with scaling and with the technology and with the line availability; they were quickly rectified, and we worked through, but there are features that we are successfully going live with this weekend to provide all of the features in the original plan.”
Clements said the Track My Case feature and a live AI chat went live this week, after members were previously told to ring up for non-urgent queries until the bot arrived.
The BBC reported retired UK civil servants had their income slashed after payments failed to arrive. Capita told the broadcaster it was wrestling with a bigger backlog than agreed.
Capita expected about 37,300 cases to be transferred from MyCSP, but Little said Capita was instructed in July 2025 to prepare for volumes up to 100,000.
Capita Public Services CEO Richard Holroyd told the committee that the company had been warned about rising volumes but had little grip on case complexity or how long cases had been festering.
Meanwhile, Capita’s wider Whitehall soap opera keeps rolling, from a £370m (€428m) Department for Work and Pensions win to a £958m (€1.11bn) legal punch-up with Sopra Steria, with Microsoft Copilot dragged in as the latest magic wand.
