Public Sector
Union demands government strips outsourcer of contract after delays, bereavement failures, and data breach
Capita’s annual general meeting next week is set to come with an unexpected item on the agenda: angry civil servants protesting over missing pensions, broken systems, and a data breach affecting pension scheme members.
Members of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union will gather outside Capita’s AGM at Sheldon Square, London, from 9:45am on May 18 to demand that the government strips the outsourcer of responsibility for administering civil service pensions after months of delays, botched portal launches, missing payments, bereavement failures, and a data breach that exposed members’ personal information.
PCS said Capita’s handling of the scheme has left “thousands of retired civil servants without their pensions,” while bereaved spouses face long waits for payments and future retirees are left worrying whether their income will materialize at all.
The protest is the latest twist in what has become one of Whitehall’s messiest outsourcing debacles. Capita took over administration of the Civil Service Pension Scheme in December under a £239 million contract covering around 1.5 million current and former civil servants – and things went sideways almost immediately.
Users of the new pension portal were quick to complain about login failures, broken links, and unfinished-looking pages after the launch. MPs later heard the system went live without full functionality in place and struggled to handle the volume and complexity of cases transferred from the previous administrator, MyCSP.
PCS said delays affected around 8,500 newly retired civil servants, while Capita said it inherited an 86,000-case backlog from MyCSP, many already overdue.
The problems did not stop at missing pensions. In April, Capita confirmed that a flaw in the system briefly exposed pension data for other members for about 35 minutes, affecting 138 people. The breach prompted scrutiny from the Information Commissioner’s Office and further fury from unions already accusing the company of turning the pension scheme into a slow-motion catastrophe.
PCS general secretary Fran Heathcote previously described the situation as a “fiasco” and argued each fresh failure strengthened the case for bringing critical public services back in-house rather than handing them to contractors.
Capita, meanwhile, continues to insist that inherited backlogs and unexpected case complexity contributed to the mess, while government officials acknowledged that performance fell well below expectations after go-live.
Capita refused to comment. ®
