On 1 December, the administration of the Civil Service Pension Scheme transferred from MyCSP to Capita. In the following days and weeks, members began to report issues including difficulty logging into the portal, incomplete pension details, long waits on customer service calls, and delays to pension quotes and payments. It was also revealed that the inherited backlog, initially expected to be 37,000 cases, had in fact grown to 86,000 by the time of the transition.
Amid growing pressure to address the crisis, the government launched a taskforce to get to grips with the issues, and Capita and the Cabinet Office announced an action plan on 28 January which included prioritising urgent cases, bringing in a surge civil service team and providing a hardship fund for those waiting to be paid.
CSW's Tevye Markson spoke to Chris Clements, managing director of Capita Pension Solutions, to find out why the transition went so wrong and to get an update on the plan to tackle the crisis and deliver a good service.
Can you describe the moment when you realised the scale of the challenge you were facing with the backlog?
Rather than a single moment, the scale of the challenge became clear through a series of revelations in the first days and weeks following Capita taking over the contract on 1 December. These contracts are inherently complex, and limited access to information during the handover made it difficult to fully grasp the situation prior to handover.
Shortly after taking over, social media posts surfaced from members who had been owed money for months (some for years), and as we opened phone lines and the portal, the seriousness of the issues became apparent. Based on the information provided, we expected 7,000 calls a week (around 1,400 a day) and were staffed to support that. On the first full day of service, we received over 5,900 calls. There was frustration for years of poor service, and many thought it would be fixed as soon as Capita took on the contract. The daily and weekly call volumes remained exponentially high throughout December and into January due to the huge volume of pent-up demand.
We were only able to see the full scope of the challenge when the contract officially transitioned, with a backlog of 86,000 cases, 15,000 unread emails, and over 20 million data errors. It’s important to remember that this is a very complex scheme. There are 1.7 million members. There are over 186 potential processes, which all have variants depending on the individual’s circumstance which means there are approximately 70 million ways to retire in the civil service. It is not possible to address everything at once. We had to prioritise.
Compounding these issues, many MyCSP staff had participated in industrial action from July up to the weekend before transition over MyCSP/Equiniti's refusal to allow PCS to represent employees ahead of their planned TUPE transfer to us in December. At the end of November, we signed a voluntary recognition agreement with PCS, effective from 1 December 2025, providing PCS members with a formal voice in workplace matters and reinforcing our commitment to positive industrial relations. Whilst we welcomed this important agreement, the months of strike action delayed the return and pre-training of some staff until after 1 December.
Although we inherited this situation, it is now ours to fix, and we are committed to doing so.
The recovery plan is being delivered in partnership with government. Can you give us a picture of how that is working in practice – do you have joint teams? What's the governance to ensure both sides are working together well?
The recovery plan is being run through a formal, joint governance structure with the Cabinet Office and HMRC. We are in daily contact with the Cabinet Office to oversee delivery and ensure issues are escalated immediately. Together we direct the surge teams, and they work in lockstep with Capita’s frontline staff.
The recovery plan is overseen by a dedicated cross‑government taskforce, led by Angela MacDonald, deputy chief executive of HMRC, to drive the programme forward – this is beginning to deliver results for members.
On 12 February you told MPs that your only regret was that the surge team and taskforce contingencies should have been brought in sooner. When were those contingency measures triggered?
My sincere regret is that the Civil Service Pension Scheme members did not receive the service they deserve from day one. They have had to put up with long waits on the phone, delays in getting their information and delays to payments and lump sums. For that, I reiterate my apology. The position we inherited, coupled with service levels provided in the period leading up to transition, did not help matters.
Although we had more than 500 colleagues working on the contract from day one – around 50% more than the previous provider – and even delivered a payroll run before the official ‘go live’ date as a rescue measure, we were still hampered by the volume of unread emails, along with the age and complexity of the backlog before transition. Once we fully understood the scale of the challenge, we worked with the Cabinet Office and HMRC to deploy surge teams as quickly as possible.
"Truthfully, this was a situation that we would have never imagined and have never experienced in over 50 years of delivering complex pensions schemes"
How long did it take for those measures to come in?
As soon as we began working through the inherited data, it became clear that the true volume, age and complexity of cases were far greater than indicated. That combination of unexpectedly high case numbers, incomplete or poor-quality data, and the urgency of many individual situations meant we needed to scale up further, quickly.
Within weeks we added an additional 100 staff. In early February, HMRC provided a team of 150 surge staff. Despite the surge team having the security clearances required, we had to train them on the technology and processes, which we did as quickly as possible. The mobilisation of all groups was rapid, with teams deployed in phases over several weeks to ensure staff could be trained, onboarded and allocated to the highest priority case types, and we are hugely appreciative of the support and partnership from the Cabinet Office and HMRC throughout.
Why hadn’t it happened sooner?
Even when we received the case load and we were able to access the data in that first week of December, the age and the complexity of the cases wasn’t immediately clear. When we saw our phone lines getting swamped, MPs' offices ringing with desperate constituents and people chasing money from early 2025, we reacted.
It took a few weeks to surge the Cabinet Office and Capita teams as we had to get them trained and security cleared.
The Cabinet Office has said Capita underestimated the complexity of the scheme. What did Capita underestimate and why?
We run over 400 pension schemes across the UK, paying more than £20bn to members every year; we are experts in understanding and administering large, complex defined benefits schemes. And whilst we understood the complexity of the scheme and anticipated some backlog, we had no visibility of the true scale, age and complexity hidden within it. Truthfully, this was a situation that we would have never imagined and have never experienced in over 50 years of delivering complex pensions schemes. While we knew data errors existed, we had no sense of their true magnitude. Only once we began the work did we discover more than 20 million data errors, many of which directly undermined our ability to automate processes.
We were also taken aback to find that around 12,000 civil servants had been retired without any payment arrangements in place. Alongside this were thousands of historic cases – some untouched for years – many of them highly complex and requiring detailed, manual resolution.
It was only after consolidating all case data into our system that the full extent of the challenge became visible. At that point, it became clear that resolving the backlog would take far longer, and require far more intensive intervention, than anyone had initially understood.
What could have prevented this?
We inherited a poor service that was deteriorating quickly. This wasn’t just transforming the contract; it was first about resolving a poor service that had been in distress for many years. If we had more transparency before we took over the contract, we could have planned for this better.
You’ve mentioned that you run hundreds of pension schemes in the UK across the private and public sector. How common is it to not get a full picture of the scale of backlog during a transition?
Capita has been doing this for over 50 years, and we’re recognised as award-winning experts in the field. After transition it is not unusual to find issues that we were not fully made aware of. But these were uniquely unfortunate circumstances. The distressed condition of the previous service, the complexity and age of the backlog which was not clear until go-live, along with the industrial action, all made for a perfect storm.
You told the Public Accounts Committee that the service transition had followed the usual process, yet clearly it ended up with significant problems at the point of handover. What could have been done differently in the transition process to avoid that?
Transparency. Clarity about how many cases were causing great hardship and the age of these cases (some were years old). There were far too many open cases that involved people who were terminally ill, in great hardship or had other issues of enormous sensitivity. We had no warning of the length of time members had been waiting for progress on their cases.
What lessons have you as an organisation learnt from the transition and the first few weeks after taking on the contract?
Many lessons have been learned. Having the support and partnership of the Cabinet Office has been invaluable. Communicating with members and being straight about the problems was vital. The importance of sound data quality is critical. It was right that we faced tough questioning from MPs. We’ve also learned that our brilliant colleagues can and will step up to achieve what once seemed almost insurmountable within the delivery timeframe we asked for.
Have all the 15,000 inherited unread emails now been reviewed?
Thanks to the diligence and professionalism of the teams, we read and triaged all 15,000 of them by the end of February as we committed to at the PAC in February.
Where are you at with tackling priority cases: death in service, ill-health retirements and hardship situations?
All the priority cases which we knew about on 12 February when [Capita Public Services chief exec] Richard Holroyd and I appeared before the PAC, and which have no dependencies on third parties, have now been processed. These priority cases are now being managed in line with the service members should expect.
We should have normal service levels on all cases by the end of June.
And what about voluntary exits?
We’re on track to process voluntary exits priority schemes (as defined by the Cabinet Office) by the end of March.
"Capita is committed to providing normal service by the end of June, when members will experience a smoother, more intuitive service"
Can you give an update on efforts to improve the service on the portal, website and phones?
First, the phones are up to normal service levels already; over the last two weeks, over 70% of calls are being answered within 30 seconds. On the portal, to date, we’ve had over 250,000 registrations. The secure member portal gives access to payslips and P60s and allows members to do simple tasks such as change of address and nomination of beneficiaries.
A new tool called Track My Case has been tested and has been gradually going live since 18 March. This will give members clearer visibility of the status of their case and help reduce enquiries into the contact centre. We have also just launched our first member chatbot, which will automate several processes including registration help, password reset help, and username reminder.
We are now rolling out the ‘multi-stint’ functionality which will, for the first time, enable members who have multiple periods of service in the civil service to register for the member portal and access all information about their pension digitally. This should be fully rolled out by late March.
What will the service look like at the end of March?
We always agreed with the Cabinet Office to roll the service out in two phases: December for go-live and end of March with a range of enhancements on the portal. By the end of March, new functions will be running on the portal and service levels will be progressing quickly back towards normal, as we move towards the end of June deadline.
And at the end of June?
Capita is committed to providing normal service by the end of June, when members will experience a smoother, more intuitive service through the portal and a new mobile app, making it easier to access their pension information. This will help members to better plan and manage their retirement.
When should members expect to experience a good level of service and what will that look like? What are the metrics for success?
We have a saying in Capita: the sound of perfect service is silence. If you look across government, we’re delivering consistently and reliably with 90% of our KPIs green. CSPS will run smoothly as with our other services and, in the end, better than it ever did before. The detailed metrics for success are part of the contract with the Cabinet Office, but the most important metric is that scheme members are happy with the service they receive.
How are you monitoring progress towards that?
We have daily dashboards that track progress across all our metrics, and we hear from members every day. It’s not perfect yet, but we are committed and confident we will get there.
At a recent PACAC session, the chair, Simon Hoare, shared the experience of a constituent whose husband had died of cancer. When the constituent called the ‘death in service’ branch, she was asked by a customer service agent said: "Are you sure? You don’t sound old enough to be a widow." What are you doing to ensure those dealing with members over the phone have the right training and understanding of sensitivities?
That was a very difficult anecdote to hear, and we are terribly sorry that this individual was treated in this way. We’ve tracked down the member. I can’t say too much that might breach any confidentiality, but the member had contact with MyCSP in November 2025 and with Capita in December 2025. We believe that the call raised at PACAC took place before 1 December when we took over. Regardless, it is unacceptable and we are deeply sorry that the member had that experience. Ongoing training on communication and dealing with vulnerable members is critical, and we run this across all our contracts – we are committed to ensuring we can deliver the very best service to our members.
What are the plans for the workforce size once contract service levels are reached – and when will the surge team depart?
The surge team are still working alongside us to tackle the backlog, but we expect them to gradually begin to reduce in number from the end of April.
What is your vision for the scheme in the coming years once service levels return to normal?
As service levels return to normal, our vision is to give members a smoother, more intuitive experience through the portal and a new mobile app, making it easier to access their pension information. This will help members to better plan and manage their retirement, similar to how they can manage finances with their bank or any other financial services provider.
Technology and AI will be a core part of this vision, enabling our team to anticipate and address member needs swiftly and accurately. This approach will free up staff to focus on meaningful interactions, further strengthening the service we deliver.
Our vision is clear: to build a scheme that not only meets today’s expectations but also inspires confidence for the long term.