The UK authorities awarded Capita a £239 million contract to run the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) after assessing its previous performance, regardless of the rollout later leaving hundreds of retirees ready for funds, a senior civil servant has stated.
The tech companies biz handed the pre-selection stage for the ten-year contract. At the tender stage, Capita efficiently navigated a technical evaluation and a business analysis primarily based on worth and worth for cash performed by two impartial authorities groups, in keeping with a letter to Members of Parliament (MPs).
Catherine Little, Cabinet Office everlasting secretary and the chief working officer of the Civil Service, wrote to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee in response to a variety of excellent questions from a current session on the CSPS.
Capita took over the service for 1.5 million present and former public servants, however a glitchy portal launch after this, in December final yr, led to what the Commercial and Public Services union known as a “fiasco” that delayed funds to “8,500 newly retired civil servants.”
Capita stated it was managing a backlog of 86,000 circumstances inherited from the earlier supplier, MyCSP, a big proportion of which had been already overdue.
In her letter, Little stated the choice to outsource in 2021 adopted an “Outline Business Case” and a “Delivery Model Assessment,” which included a value, threat, and advantages evaluation of choices together with insourcing. “The assessment provided a data-driven indication that outsourcing provided the best opportunity to realize defined benefits with the least risk,” she stated.
The Cabinet Office then launched the competition to outsource the deal in February 2022.
According to Little, a sequence of detailed necessities had been set out that had been “a significant enhancement to the previous contract.”
The letter – printed this week however despatched on March 24 – stated bidders had been assessed on previous performance on the pre-selection stage, which Capita efficiently handed.
“At the tender stage, bids underwent a technical assessment and a commercial evaluation based on price and value for money conducted by two independent teams. Capita was the winning bidder in line with the evaluation methodology,” Little wrote.
Nonetheless, she acknowledged the service didn’t meet expectations, noting “unacceptable constituent experiences, specifically regarding bereavement call handling.”
She stated she had escalated one particular case with Capita as a matter of urgency, and the outsourcer was investigating “to ensure appropriate action is taken.”
“To bolster capacity, we are finalizing training to allow government surge staff to support this workstream later in March,” she instructed MPs. Initially, Capita anticipated a switch of round 37,300 circumstances from MyCSP. In her letter, Little stated that Capita was particularly instructed in July 2025 to arrange for volumes of as much as 100,000.
Richard Holroyd, CEO of Capita Public Services, told the Public Accounts Committee in March that though the corporate was warned in regards to the rising variety of incoming circumstances, it had little understanding of their complexity or how lengthy that they had been excellent, affecting its capacity to clear the backlog.
Little stated Capita’s performance knowledge throughout 16 of the federal government’s most essential contracts reveals that in Q2 of the latest monetary yr – July to September 2025 – 90 p.c of its KPI knowledge was rated “good” and 5 p.c was rated “inadequate.”
For the CSPS, Capita had offered insufficient administration data thus far, however primarily based on obtainable knowledge, the Cabinet Office maintains that Capita has failed the vast majority of its KPIs, Little stated. ®
