NAO highlights service problems

Members will be aware that the CSPA has had concerns about MyCSP’s administration of the civil service pension scheme. The National Audit Office (NAO), the public sector watchdog, decided to investigate after a number of complaints.

CSPA General Secretary Sally Tsoukaris and myself as Pensions Manager, gave evidence to the NAO, which has now been referred to the Public Accounts Committee. Some readers will have participated in our online survey about MyCSP service, which has been submitted as further evidence to the parliamentary committee. All the different pension schemes (except Partnership) and all members retired, deferred (left the civil service, not yet drawing pension) and active (still working, building up pension) are administrated by MyCSP – that is a total of 1.7 million members.

MyCSP, part of the much bigger Equiniti group, fully took over from Capita in 2016, charging the civil service £238 million for administration since then. Some of you will remember there were concerns with Capita when it administered pensions previously. However, Capita has been re-appointed, with the expectation that new technology and communications will save £83 million over its contract, set
for five years.

The NAO report found several problems with MyCSP’s administration, all of which the CSPA and other stakeholders have been raising for some time. There have been 4,780 complaints in 2024/25. The key areas of concern have been contact centre call waiting times and delays in processing actions, mainly retirements.

The CSPA member survey found that, although some members had good experiences with the contact centre, many said the service was unacceptable. The Cabinet Office’s management of the scheme was criticised indirectly for not having built in significant financial penalties if MyCSP failed to meet requirements. This is something the Cabinet Office has told us will be different under the new contract with Capita.

MyCSP’s key performance indicators (KPIs) have been mostly met, but there is little transparency over these KPIs – as we have emphasised in our evidence. In future, the Cabinet Office will oversee the data directly and be able to run performance reports rather than have the administrators monitoring themselves.

Remedy implementation

Two of the biggest challenges to the scheme administration are implementing the ‘remedy’ programme and making the transition from MyCSP to Capita on 1 December. Implementing the age discrimination remedy across more than four million public service workers is a huge task. For the civil service, it has so far cost £31.7 million and taken up the time of 100 full-time equivalent staff.

It involves doing two retirement ‘quotes’, one with the service calculated under the legacy scheme for the remedy period, one for the same service in the Alpha scheme. These calculations are to be done for every new retiree who is eligible and for those who have retired since 2015.

There are delays affecting those who have already retired of up to two years. This work slows down everything, including contact centre staff answering queries and new retirement quotes being issued. In future, the improved communications and technology brought in by Capita should help to reduce the number of calls and cut call waiting times.

Transition to Capita

The CSPA has met some of the Capita team and receives updates on the progress of the transition from the Cabinet Office. Delivery of the service relies on digital technology. We have highlighted the need for choice about communications, so that people can still get paper copies of letters and statements if they prefer.

The NAO report flagged up that three key milestones in the move to switch to Capita have been missed, with payments having been withheld accordingly. In a meeting with the CSPA, the Cabinet Office said these issues had mainly been resolved, and it was confident that the December deadline was on track.

The Cabinet Office believes lessons have been learnt and that the administration process will be better under Capita. The CSPA is in regular contact about the transition and will continue to highlight our members’ concerns, whoever is running the pension scheme’s administration.