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Capita lacked ‘detail and thoroughness’ in planning botched Civil Service Pension Scheme takeover

CEO of former civil service pension administrator claims Capita’s pre-takeover processes were inadequate

Karl Flinders
By
Published: 17 Apr 2026 10:28

Capita did not take advantage of MyCSP’s 12 years’ experience administering the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) during its takeover, according to the boss of outgoing firm.

In a letter to MPs, Duncan Watson, CEO at MyCSP – which was set up as a private and government joint venture in 2012 – also said Capita’s preparations for the contract switch, such as dress rehearsals, were inadequate.

MPs on the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) are attempting to get to the bottom of the problems which have seen thousands of civil servants face financial hardship because of severe delays in receiving their pensions.

During recent PAC hearings investigating problems with the CSPS administration, Capita bosses told MPs that many of the issues were caused by the backlog of work left to it by MyCSP.

In 2023, the Cabinet Office awarded Capita a seven-year contract worth £239m for the administration of the CSPS, which has 1.7 million members. The takeover from the previous administrator, MyCSP, took place on 1 December 2025. In the following month, amid delays and problems, an HMRC troubleshooter was brought in to lead an “urgent recovery plan”.

In a February PAC meeting, Capita told MPs it was left with 16,000 unread emails and 20 million database errors.

Facing MPs then, Chris Clements, managing director of Capita Public Services, was asked if the business process outsourcing company had been lied to about the backlog. He said: “We were surprised by the nature of the backlog on going live.”

In a later PAC hearing featuring Capita executives, committee chair Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP pointed some blame towards MyCSP and its government partner, the Cabinet Office: “We must remember that the Cabinet Office and MyCSP, respectively, are also responsible for the scheme and the state that it is currently in.”

One former civil servant affected by the long delays echoed this view, adding: “Capita’s line on the mess left by MyCSP has been the same since this first kicked off, and they may well have a point. But if so, then MyCSP have to be held accountable for handing over a shitshow, and the Cabinet Office needs to explain why the risk was not adequately considered or mitigated in their due diligence process.”

MyCSP hits back

But in a letter to Clifton-Brown, following revelations from Capita, the MyCSP CEO threw doubt on Capita’s claims. He said the company has no record of the database errors that Capta mentioned in a PAC hearing, adding that the 16,000 unread emails highlighted by Capita were the result of a “blackout” period when MyCSP could log them but not act on them.

He wrote: “Throughout the transition period, the MyCSP team worked collaboratively and openly with both Capita and Cabinet Office. In doing so, my team met the deliverables and activities agreed with Cabinet Office to support the transition as set out in the ‘exit plan’ and ‘handover plan’, which documents MyCSP’s obligations to support the transition of the scheme to Capita.”

In his letter, Watson criticised Capita’s activities when preparing for the takeover. “The MyCSP transition team felt that Capita’s discovery activities did not fully leverage the almost 12 years of experience MyCSP had of running the scheme,” he wrote. “MyCSP articulated concerns about this via several key risks reported to and discussed with Cabinet Office as part of the formal transition governance.

“The second key lesson is the critical importance of detailed and robust planning of the period leading up to and including ‘cutover’ to the new administrator. We do not believe that these activities were carried out to the level of detail and thoroughness required for such a major transition. As a result, the risks associated with not having a robust transition/cutover process in place were not fully understood or mitigated prior to transition.”

He told the PAC that the MyCSP team were invited to participate in a dress rehearsal of the data migration element but “were not included in any subsequent dress rehearsal activities or any parallel running of operations”.

“In our experience, this is not considered normal practice for a transition of this scale,” said Watson. “In MyCSP’s view, a more extensive programme of dress rehearsals and parallel running involving both parties may have helped to further mitigate transition risk.”

Watson reiterated that MyCSP initially raised concerns with Cabinet Office about Capita’s readiness to take on the scheme in July 2025.

It was October last year when a PAC report said there was a “real risk” that Capita would not be ready to take on the administration of the CSPS on time, but the outsourcer hit back claiming it was “not reflective of the current state of the transition” and inaccurate.

Computer Weekly contacted Capita for comment, but it had not responded by the time this article was published.

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