UK government admits Capita pension portal was crapita at launch

Summary

A UK government official has admitted Capita did not reach the expected level of performance following the disastrous launch of the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) web portal late last year. The Register reported in December that users experienced a string issues with unrecognized passwords and usernames. They also endured broken and circular links while the website appeared unfinished and untested, with headers and other features displaying dummy text. This came after the government awarded Capita £239 million to build and run the CSPS, one of the UK's largest pension schemes, supporting around 1.5 million current and former civil servants. In a letter to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) this week, Catherine Little, civil service chief operating officer and Cabinet Office permanent secretary, wrote: "Capita did not deliver the full levels of IT, automation, and portal functionality at go-live. This significantly impacted Capita's ability to manage the volumes of work inherited and the new work delivered since go-live." Capita took over running the scheme from MyCSP at the beginning of December under a contract awarded in 2023, which included a new technology platform and membership portal. In her letter, Little said the Cabinet Office had notified ministers "that there were shortcomings in the [Capita] IT solutions but we were unable contractually to continue the service through MyCSP and the level of service from MyCSP was deteriorating." Industrial action at MyCSP created further problems and increased the final backlog of cases handed over to Capita. "We implemented an exit plan but the legacy contract with MyCSP provided limited commercial levers to manage performance during their final months," she said. In a PAC hearing this week, chair Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown said Capita's IT systems were not up and running on December 1 "or if they were, nowhere near tailored to reach the level of cases and complexity you got." Capita said it had agreed a phased i...