Capita won disastrous UK pensions gig after acing performance checks
- Reference: 1776414613
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2026/04/17/capita_csps/
- Source link:
Capita wins four out of five stars for 'good', 'inexpensive' service [1]FROM THE ARCHIVES
The tech services biz passed the pre-selection stage for the [2]ten-year contract . At the tender stage, Capita successfully navigated a technical assessment and a commercial evaluation based on price and value for money conducted by two independent government teams, according to [3]a letter to Members of Parliament (MPs).
Catherine Little, Cabinet Office permanent secretary and the chief operating officer of the Civil Service, wrote to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee in response to a number of outstanding questions from a recent session on the CSPS.
Capita took over the service for 1.5 million current and former public servants, but a glitchy portal launch after this, in December last year, led to what the Commercial and Public Services union called a "fiasco" that delayed payments to "8,500 newly retired civil servants."
Capita said it was managing a backlog of 86,000 cases inherited from the previous provider, MyCSP, a significant proportion of which were already overdue.
[4]
In her letter, Little said the decision to outsource in 2021 followed an "Outline Business Case" and a "Delivery Model Assessment," which included a cost, risk, and benefits analysis of options including insourcing. "The assessment provided a data-driven indication that outsourcing provided the best opportunity to realize defined benefits with the least risk," she said.
[5]
[6]
The Cabinet Office [7]then launched the competition to outsource the deal in February 2022.
According to Little, a series of detailed requirements were set out that were "a significant enhancement to the previous contract."
[8]
The letter – published this week but sent on March 24 – said bidders were assessed on past performance at the pre-selection stage, which Capita successfully passed.
"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.
[9]Capita's pension portal exposes civil servants' private data
[10]UK government admits Capita pension portal was crapita at launch
[11]Capita pension portal 'fiasco' forces Cabinet Office into damage control
[12]Newly launched civil service pension portal from Capita is crapita, users report
Nonetheless, she acknowledged the service did not meet expectations, noting "unacceptable constituent experiences, specifically regarding bereavement call handling."
She said she had escalated one specific 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 told MPs. 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.
[13]
Richard Holroyd, CEO of Capita Public Services, [14]told the Public Accounts Committee in March that although the company was warned about the increasing number of incoming cases, it had little understanding of their complexity or how long they had been outstanding, affecting its ability to clear the backlog.
Little said Capita's performance data across 16 of the government's most important contracts shows that in Q2 of the most recent financial year – July to September 2025 – 90 percent of its KPI data was rated "good" and 5 percent was rated "inadequate."
For the CSPS, Capita had provided inadequate management information to date, but based on available data, the Cabinet Office maintains that Capita has failed the majority of its KPIs, Little said. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2015/06/10/excellent_mixed_grill_service/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/21/capita_wins_239m_contract_to/
[3] https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/52508/documents/292309/default/
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/publicsector&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aeIEyLmKMrJHrpqrHvLusQAAAgA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/publicsector&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aeIEyLmKMrJHrpqrHvLusQAAAgA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/publicsector&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aeIEyLmKMrJHrpqrHvLusQAAAgA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/003500-2022
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/publicsector&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aeIEyLmKMrJHrpqrHvLusQAAAgA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/09/capita_breach/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/27/capita_pension_portal_pac/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/29/capita_pension_portal_update/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/03/capita_civil_service_pension_portal/
[13] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/publicsector&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aeIEyLmKMrJHrpqrHvLusQAAAgA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/27/capita_pension_portal_pac
[15] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
From the letter linked in TFA: "Capita was the winning bidder in line with the evaluation methodology."
Perhaps the evaluation methodology needs to be evaluated.
It's almost like the people awarding the tender are willfully ignoring all the other disastrous Capita contracts...
after assessing its past performance
LOL, good one.
Brown Envelopes
Does the Civil Service & Cabinet Office not see that it's things like THIS that make Joe Public genuinely believe the whole thing is about corruption and crony capitalism?!
How the hell is outsourcing cheaper than having your own people do the job? How is going through tenders every few years and getting staff that are more and more demotivated with each tUPE cheaper? How is it cheaper and better to offshore it?
How can an entire Government procurement service not have heard CRAPITA?!
There is literally ZERO requirements for these firms to improve or even provide the basic amount of service because the civil service seems to be full of careerist idiots who don't care how many jobs are offshored, as long as it isn't theirs & how much tax payers money is thrown down the pan to the incompetent likes of Crapita, Infoshite, accenshite, krappyMG etc because again, it isn't their money and their after directorships?
Re: Brown Envelopes
How is it cheaper and better to offshore it?
Those questions never get asked. We're trapped in the neoliberal bollocks since the 1980's: public sector bad, private sector good. A whole generation has been brainwashed into believing that cult. So it pervades local and central government, the NHS, education, supposedly public services, etc. An added problem is the people and institutional memory to run stuff in house have long gone => outsourcing is the only game in town.
Re: Brown Envelopes
There's a fair few reasons this happens, as I'm sure you are aware:
There's not that many companies out there large enough to take on contracts of this scale. Those companies also promise those wonderful Rainbow Farting Unicorns (and then deliver a donkey with a cone taped to the head and ribbons tied to the tail. One with flatulence, obviously) to make their offerings look so wonderful. Their ploy is to get something in that technically does the job, then milk the support side for as much as they can get.
Compounding this is the need for that company to be vetted and approved: Larger companies can afford this easily, while the mid-sized can't. Smaller can as they can specialize in this kind of contract, but they can't handle the scale of project so that puts them out of the running.
In house? Don't have the size of in house teams to handle larger projects hence it getting outsourced. Ideally support should be moved in house, but the big corpo's want the support contract to milk it for everything they can get. SLA's are horrible at that point (yes, looking at Crapita specifically, but Fujitsu isn't that much better) but they're sold on the promise of it being cheaper and better than in house support. Yes, I do have first hand experience of this - thanks to Crapita, who were told, specifically and explicitly NOT to review the IT department when doing a review of processes to offer recommendations for improvement: They then ignored that entirely and did review IT and then tried to present their recommendations to the board of INCREASING the IT budget in order to outsource IT to another branch of Crapita for an inferior SLA contract. Seriously: They'd charge per callout if it wasn't what they considered 'critical', and that list was miniscule compared to what IT covered out of hours, with a faster response time than Crapita was offering! Yet other hospitals bought into Craptia's promise of those mythical Unicorns only to find costs skyrocket, to then try and hire back their IT staff they'd laid off in order to get Craptia in... and yes, the whole process was a nightmare and exceedingly expensive.
I know, rambling and ranting, but considering the cost of a biro to the NHS was five times the cost of the same biro from the same supplier to a private company?
Well, the truth is most companies would love to get a government contract, simply so they could milk it for all it's worth, and the government keeps believing the bullshit they're fed that outsourcing is cheaper without reading the fine print.
Favourite tennis shot
What's your favourite tennis shot? Obviously, the volley would up there, or perhaps the deep-court lob, but I've always loved a nice backhander.
Nothing to do with this topic of course - just a random musing. Who else likes a nice backhander? Anyone?