Civil service chiefs have said they will talk to Capita about inappropriate language on the Civil Service Pension Scheme phone lines.
At a Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee session yesterday, chair Simon Hoare told the senior officials that a constituent whose husband died of cancer in November had come to see him recently after being told by the person on the death in service branch of the pension scheme phone line: "Are you sure? You don’t sound old enough to be a widow."
Hoare said another woman contacted him on Monday to say that, despite having been assured on three occasions on the phone that all the documentation needed to facilitate a lump sum payment was "to hand", she was then told, “I’m frightfully sorry – we haven’t got all the information we require. It is going to be delayed by another three to four months.”
Hoare said: "It seems to me that one can have many people answering the telephones, looking at the portal and engaging with whatever, but the level of care and attention that they are providing could at best, or charitably, be described as patchy, and certainly, in the case of “You don’t sound old enough to be a widow”, as entirely unacceptable.
"There was talk of an HMRC surge coming in. What is the appetite among those people who were supposed to be addressing the backlog for addressing this? Are they alert to the enormous levels of distress and worry that they are causing to lots of people who have worked jolly hard on behalf of the state?"
Responding, Little said: "Can I first of all reiterate what you have said? That sort of conversation is utterly unacceptable. It is not appropriate. Obviously both the level of resources and the quality of resources really matter here. I will take that up directly with Capita as an example of the sort of thing that our hard-working former civil servants and families are having to deal with. It is not good enough."
On the surge resources, HMRC second permanent secretary Angela MacDonald, who is leading the recovery taskforce to get the pension scheme back to expected service levels, said the 142 staff deployed from HMRC "are all well experienced in being landed into all sorts of circumstances, picking up new training and then providing support".
She said those colleagues "are doing a variety of tasks – only tasks they can be trained to do; obviously, pensions are very complicated, and there are definitely pieces for which this is not suitable, but they are on the call lines at the moment, helping people, for instance, to unblock their access to the portal".
Coming back to this point later in the session, Hoare asked the senior officials to "make sure that, whether it is the HMRC surge people or Capita employees directly, they understand the enormous distress that people go through when having to reiterate time and time again the circumstances of the death of their loved one".
"It only really needs to be done once. I appreciate that when one is dealing with large numbers and many, many cases, people become just a statistic, but there is a huge difference when somebody has died in service and their surviving relative is trying to sort out the pension having to regurgitate the circumstances of the death and provide this, that and the other in order to prove what it is that they are saying," Hoare added.
MacDonald said she has raised this with colleagues working on the front line of the scheme and said her experience was that there are "a whole load of very junior colleagues trying incredibly hard to do the best possible job that they can" and they are "often on the end of some very distressed and frustrated people, and our job is to make sure that they get the support that they need".
She added: "I cannot say that there is not the odd individual case – you brought one up – where there is inappropriate language."
MacDonald confirmed that there is a specialist team that deals with bereavement.
Hoare then said: "So surely to heaven there must be somebody in HR who can work out the sensitivity that the issue of death involves. And you do not put on the end of the telephone an enthusiastic but young and inexperienced person who does not get all the nuance and sensitivity of that issue."
MacDonald responded: "I absolutely agree with you, and once again, I will go back and have that conversation with Capita."
MyCSP 'should have gone back and asked'
At the session, in which the senior officials explained the decision to go ahead with the transition of the scheme's administration from MyCSP to Capita, they also set out why some of the 8,153 scheme members who received quotes before the transfer and are awaiting pension payments are now being asked for more information.
MacDonald said those 8,153 cases were not reviewed by MyCSP before being handed over to Capita and so, "in some instances, we are having to go back and ask the questions that MyCSP should have gone back and asked", such as: “You haven’t made the selection,” or “It’s not clear. You haven’t signed this form.”
"When you get to finalisation, there are always those kinds of pieces to be done," MacDonald said. "That is frustrating for some of the members who have been sat waiting because they should have had those questions asked of them many months ago. As we clear through the backlog – and we have paid out lump sums to 5,854 of those people already – and go through the finish, we will ask any final questions."
Insourcing will be given 'serious thought'
The senior officials were also asked if the Cabinet Office will "give serious thought" to running pension schemes itself in the future, and if would "start to plan it now for the future".
Little said: “I think this is an important question related to the state of the market and our experience. This contract is now contracted for seven years, but I think it’s important that we as the civil service set out all of the options strategically for managing not just civil service-related schemes, but public sector pension schemes in the round, of which there are a very large number – we've got teachers, the Royal Mail the Armed Forces.
"I think the McCloud remedy and some of the big policy changes that we’re now dealing with just show how very complicated and high scale and high stakes these pension arrangements are. That’s a very long way of saying yes.”
Little noted that insourcing "is always considered whenever you are looking at these big service contracts" and is "the starting point" of the process. She also said she would get back to the committee on the precise details of the consideration the Cabinet Office gave to insourcing in 2023, when Capita won the contract.