UK government admits Capita pension portal wasn't ready

A UK government official has admitted Capita did not reach the expected level of performance following the disastrous launch of the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) web portal late last year. The Register reported in December that users experienced a string issues with unrecognized passwords and usernames. They also endured broken and circular links while the website appeared unfinished and untested, with headers and other features displaying dummy text. This came after the government awarded Capita £239 million to build and run the CSPS, one of the UK's largest pension schemes, supporting around 1.5 million current and former civil servants. In a letter to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) this week, Catherine Little, civil service chief operating officer and Cabinet Office permanent secretary, 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 running the scheme from MyCSP at the beginning of December under a contract awarded in 2023 , which included a new technology platform and membership portal. In her letter, Little said the Cabinet Office had notified ministers "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 created further problems and increased the final backlog of cases handed over to Capita. "We implemented an exit plan but the legacy contract with MyCSP provided limited commercial levers to manage performance during their final months," she said. In a PAC hearing this week, chair Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown said Capita's IT systems were not up and running on December 1 "or if they were, nowhere near tailored to reach the level of cases and complexity you got." Capita said it had agreed a phased implementation of its portal technology. Chris Clements, managing director of Capita Public Services, told the PAC that, in conjunction with the Cabinet Office, it had agreed to split the functionality between December 1 and the end of March before go-live. Watchdog boss calls Capita's £370M DWP win 'extraordinary' amid pension portal dumpster fire Capita's £370M Whitehall outsourcing deal challenged as 'abnormally low' Sopra Steria sues UK government over £958M Capita outsourcing award Capita taps Microsoft Copilot to dig it out from UK pensions backlog "There are two releases of functionality, first in December and then at the end of March," he said. "The combined releases are the full functionality that was promised as part of the procurement. The functionality that we went live with on December 1 was everything 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." He said the Track My Case portal feature and a live AI chat both went live as planned this week. Earlier this year, Capita told pension scheme members not to contact the CSPS with non-urgent inquiries until the chatbot had gone live. Retired civil servants in the UK have had their income slashed after payments from the system failed to arrive, according to the BBC . Capita told the news outlet it was struggling with a bigger backlog of cases than had been agreed. Initially, Capita expected a transfer of around 37,300 cases from MyCSP. In her letter, Little said that Capita was specifically instructed in July 2025 to prepare for volumes of up to 100,000. Richard Holroyd, CEO, Capita Public Services, told the committee that although was warned about the increasing number of incoming cases, Capita had little understanding of the complexity of those cases or how long they had been outstanding, affecting its ability to clear the backlog. ®