Capita has offered to pay for the continued work of surge staff brought in to tackle the Civil Service Pension Scheme crisis.
Since February, HMRC has deployed more than a hundred staff from its Surge and Rapid Response Team to help Capita get to grips with backlogs and missed payments.
In a letter to the Public Accounts Committee, sent on Monday and published on Wednesday, Capita Public Services chief exec Richard Holroyd said he “recognises that the Cabinet Office has funded the HMRC surge staff as set out by the Heads of Terms in December 2025” and is “incredibly grateful for their professionalism during their tenure with Capita”.
“As the surge staff has continued beyond April, when we moved past the work to index the inherited 15,000 emails and the initial spike in activity due to inherited backlogs, and will continue for some time ahead, Capita recognises that there should be a limit to the cost to the taxpayer,” he added.
Holroyd said that in light of this, Capita wrote to the Cabinet Office on 10 April “to offer to cover costs until those surge colleagues can return to civil service duties”.
At the PACAC session on 3 March, Little said: "My expectation is that the taxpayer should not have to suffer or pay for what we have had to do to get the service level of this contract back to where it needs to be. That will have to be subject to the usual commercial arrangements in place."
CSW understands that commercial discussions between the Cabinet Office and Capita are ongoing over responsibility for the costs of the surge staff.
Initially, a team of around 150 staff came in to support the recovery work, while around 140 SRRT staff are still in place, according to a letter sent by Little to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee on 24 March but only published this week.
In the letter, Little also explained that these staff had been “moved from other deployments, starting with low‑priority work and progressing up the prioritisation scale”, having been asked at a PACAC session on 3 March for detail on where they had come in from.
‘Deeply disappointed’
In a separate letter, from Little to PAC, sent on Tuesday this week and published a day later, Little gave an update on the data breach at the end of March which saw 138 members of the scheme either receive personal Annual Benefit Statements (ABS) data belonging to other members and/or have their personal data seen by other members.
“I am deeply disappointed by the unacceptable data breach involving the Civil Service Pension Scheme,” Little said.
She said the Cabinet Office has formally notified the Information Commissioner’s Office of this breach and asked Capita’s chief exec to provide “absolute assurance of the steps taken to ensure this never happens again”.
“We take this matter extremely seriously and are expecting a comprehensive technical account from Capita regarding the root cause of the incident on 30 March,” she said.
In a letter from Capita on the breach, sent on 8 April, Holroyd said the breach happened during a 35-minute period on 30 March. He said all affected members were contacted individually by 9am on 3 April via the secure portal to outline the issue.
The ABS request functionality on the portal remains offline while Capita works to resolve the underlying issue. Holroyd said Capita will notify the Cabinet Office and PAC once it is restored.
“We sincerely apologise for this issue, and any concerns members may have,” he added. “Capita takes the protection of personal data extremely seriously, and we are taking all necessary steps to ensure this does not recur.”