Civil service pensions

Status / emerging findings

• MyCSP customer service collapsed: only 8% of calls answered within 30 seconds by January 2025 (target 80%), average wait 24 minutes, and 24% call abandonment rate. Staff fell 11% despite claims of 'highest staffing levels'.
• Capita's December 2025 takeover proved chaotic: inherited 86,000–89,000 backlog cases (16,000 unread emails, 20 million corrupted data lines), but backlog grew to 140,000 within weeks. Capita planned for 'normal' workload of 15–20-day-old cases; actual cases included 13,000 over a year old.
• Dying pensioners and bereaved spouses left without payments: widows' pensions and bereavement cases unresolved 5+ months post-handover despite being classified 'priority'. Some terminal-illness cases unable to access recurring pension payments.
• Cabinet Office failed oversight: did not disclose true backlog complexity before Capita go-live; Capita only discovered reality on 10 December and notified Cabinet Office of the mismatch.
• McCloud remedy programme still incomplete: ~416,000 affected members given remedies costing £31.7 million, but Capita found ~400 remedy cases in the backlog unresolved.

Why it matters

1.7 million current and former civil servants depend on this scheme; service collapse has left dying pensioners, bereaved families, and remedy claimants without payments for months, while the Cabinet Office and contractor appear to have mismanaged a £239 million contract transition.

Tone arc

Opened procedural (July 2025, questioning service decline under MyCSP), shifted sharply adversarial from December 2025 onwards as Capita's failures mounted post-handover. By February–March 2026, Committee adopted confrontational stance focusing on negligence, with detailed scrutiny of what Capita and Cabinet Office knew before go-live.

Key witnesses

Cat Little CB (Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary), Duncan Watson (MyCSP CEO), Richard Holroyd (Capita Public Services), Chris Clements (Capita Public Services), Fiona Ryland (Cabinet Office), Muna Rowe (Cabinet Office/MyCSP), Prospect Deputy General Secretary (union representation)