MPs lambast Capita bosses over civil service pensions chaos: Enormous case

Capita bosses got a pasting from MPs today over a civil service pensions scandal which has led to ‘heartbreaking’ cases of hardship.

Two senior executives, Richard Holroyd and Chris Clements of Capita Public Services, apologised for the customer service meltdown, which has seen some pensioners left without an income for months, and they promised to fix it.

But during their appearance at the public accounts committee at Westminster, the pair blamed previous administrator MyCSP for the huge backlog of cases they inherited – including more than 15,000 unread emails.

The Daily Mail and This is Money revealed this week that the case backlog has swelled to 120,000, forcing the Government to issue emergency loans to former staff, since Capita took over at the start of December.

We have since received another influx of messages from distressed employees, some desperate for payments and lump sums to pay essential bills, who have waited hours on the phone to get through to Capita.

The civil service scheme is one of Britain’s most generous, because members receive final salary or career average salary-linked pensions which are guaranteed until they die.

Capita boss Richard Holroyd said receiving so many unread emails in a handover was ‘unheard of’, and the firm had also discovered corrupted data and a cache of 12,000 ‘voluntary exit’ cases which had not been loaded onto the system.

He nevertheless told the hearing: ‘My apologies to all members of the scheme. We own this problem and we will fix it.’

Mr Holroyd confirmed Capita might be subject to financial penalties but said it was focusing on addressing the current issues before discussing that with the Cabinet Office, which oversees the civil service pension contract.

He also held out the hope of compensation for people caught up in the chaos in cases where Capita was found to be at fault, though it would be a matter for the Cabinet Office where problems were down to MyCSP.

Cases where Capita might pay compensation could ‘potentially’ include Jason Gould, a retired prison officer who has been waiting for his lump sum and pension since December, Mr Holroyd told the Daily Mail when we pressed him about this case outside the committee room.

Chair Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown said his committee had warned in November there was a ‘clear risk’ that Capita would not be ready to take over administration of civil service pensions, and ‘our predictions have sadly have become a reality’.

‘Over the past few months we’ve heard heartbreaking stories of the hardship suffered by the current and former civil servants since Capita’s takeover of the scheme,’ he told the hearing.

‘Many of these people have been left without any income and the departments are scrambling to organise hardship loans to help those affected.

‘Reaching retirement is a significant milestone in anyone’s life but instead this time has become marred by stress and anxiety to many current and former civil servants who have dedicated their careers to public service across this country.’

Sir Geoffrey pressed Mr Holroyd on what Capita knew about the huge case backlog in advance of taking over from MyCSP, and what it should have known and what it did about it.

‘You were surprised, I get that. But why were you surprised? Were you lied to about the information that you’d been given or did you not ask the right questions?’ he asked.

Mr Holroyd replied: ‘We asked and were making clear that we were concerned about the level of the backlog because we could tell that it may not be as we were anticipating.’

He declined to comment on the ‘veracity’ of the answers Capita received, but added: ‘What’s apparent to us and became apparent to us at “go live” [the start of the contract on 1 December] was that the information we were given was not the whole picture.’

Sir Geoffrey said the ‘proof of the pudding’ would be in the written correspondence that Capita was going to have to produce to the Cabinet Office.

Anna Dixon, Labour MP for Shipley, said: ‘Many of us as MPs were very well aware even before the transition of the problems that people who have worked their lives in public service were finding with MyCSP.

‘And obviously there was this promise that things would get better, yet for many of them things have got a lot worse.’

She went on: ‘I took part in a Westminster Hall debate with many other fellow members and it was really heartbreaking hearing the litany of individual cases that all of us were handling.

‘For example, a constituent of mine made a claim back in May, [and] was having these difficulties with MyCSP, long waits on the phone, unanswered emails, documents…