The civil service’s biggest union is calling on its members to lobby their MP in a bid to get administration of the Civil Service Pension Scheme brought back “in house”.
PCS has launched an “e-action campaign” to support the drive, which allows members to contact their MP via an online form.
The union describes the scheme as “in crisis” and says the system is “failing the very people it was designed to support”, based on the findings of a recent National Audit Office report.
The Civil Service Pension Scheme has 1.7 million members. It is currently administered by MyCSP, which was spun out of the Cabinet Office in 2014. Under a new contract agreed in November 2023, outsourcer Capita is due to take over administration of the scheme from the start of December this year.
In June this year, the NAO flagged significant service issues related to MyCSP’s operation of the pension scheme. The following month, Cabinet Office perm sec Cat Little told MPs she believed Capita had likely “underestimated some of the complexity of the transition”, and that the technology had taken longer than expected to implement.
The Cabinet office is due to take a “go/no-go” decision on the switch of administration to Capita later this month – based on the firm’s readiness for a smooth transition from 1 December.
Little told members of the Public Accounts Committee that there would be a range of contingency options, with the “worst case scenario” being that the Civil Service Pension Scheme remained under MyCSP’s administration.
Last month, PCS called on the Cabinet Office to halt the outsourcing of the Civil Service Pension Scheme and use civil servants to administer it.
In a letter to Little, PCS general secretary Fran Heathcote said the union was firmly of the view that the very integrity of the administration of the CSPS is now at risk”.
She added: “Obviously, we recognise that given where we are, developing an in-house IT platform is not a practical option; but what very clearly is an option is to bring the current physical administration of the work in-house.
“Under these circumstances the scheme management regains direct control of the workforce administering the scheme; including the level of training and resource deployed in that administration – something that has clearly been consistently lacking, under the current contract.”
PCS’s latest campaign encourages members to make similar points to their MPs.
It is seeking "stronger" Cabinet Office oversight for the Civil Service Pension Scheme, a halt to the “privatisation of pension administration”, and a “clear plan” to complete pensions remediation work related to the McCloud judgment.
The judgment, which effectively declared 2015’s public-sector pension reforms illegal on the grounds of discrimination, has meant some Civil Service Pension Scheme members have the right to choose between two sets of pension entitlements for all or part of their service.
PCS is also calling for respect for union recognition during the Civil Service Pension Scheme’s transfer to Capita.
On Thursday last week, the Public Accounts Committee published a four-page update from Little on work to progress the transfer of Civil Service Pension Scheme administration to Capita. The document is dated 5 August.
It confirms that the go/no-go decision for Capita’s administration of the Civil Serice Pension Scheme to go live on 1 December will be taken by the end of this month.
Elsewhere, Little tells MPs that benchmarking and continuous improvement have been “embedded” in the contract with Capita.
The firm is required to develop an “annual continuous improvement plan” that focuses on the identification and implementation of technical and service improvements based on “introspective analysis” of its performance and technological advancements.
From December, Capita will also be required to produce an “annual benchmarking plan” to identify and implement targeted benchmarking activities against comparable services across the public and private sector.
The idea is for the plan to keep on top of best practice that could be applied to the Civil Service Pension Scheme administration.
The NAO’s June report said the Cabinet Office recognised that its contract with MyCSP lacked “sufficient commercial levers” and that the department had been unable to incentivise service improvements with the administrator.
MyCSP and Capita declined the opportunity to comment on PCS’s “e-action campaign”.