Capita set to miss legal deadline on 93,000 civil servants' pension fixes, claims union

PCS says outsourcer still stuck in design phase while retirees wait for McCloud corrections

Capita is set to leave 93,000 pension cases waiting for legally required corrections after its disastrous takeover of the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS), according to the UK’s largest civil service union.

The outsourcing biz took over the scheme in December 2025, offering its 1.7 million members a glitchy online portal and a service that has buckled under demand. Thousands have since had trouble receiving payments and or getting their details updated.

In a statement, the PCS union - which has around 170,000 members - said the Cabinet Office had confirmed it would miss the March 2027 deadline for cases arising from the McCloud judgment, which found that changes to public service pension schemes unlawfully discriminated against younger members. The ruling required the government to review and, where necessary, correct pension benefits for the affected period.

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Around 73,000 retired or deceased members and 20,000 deferred members are still waiting, the union said.

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The deadline to complete these changes was set for March 2025, but in January this year, the government said it would extend the deadline to March 31, 2027.

Capita was due to start the work when it took over the CSPS, but PCS claimed the outsourcer was stuck in the design stage it started in July.

PCS general secretary Fran Heathcote said:

“These people are waiting for legally required corrections to their pensions, yet Capita has still not begun processing the outstanding cases. We cannot even give members reliable information about when their pensions will be corrected. Capita’s mess continues to pile up at the expense of members. I don’t know what more the Government needs to see before it finally says enough is enough.”

The Register has asked Capita and the Cabinet Office to comment.

Capita won the seven-year, £239 million contract to oversee the CSPS in November 2023, taking over from MyCSP, which ran the scheme on behalf of the Cabinet Office under a £238 million contract that was first agreed in 2012.

The Register revealed its troubled launch in December last year. Since then, it has hit the lives of civil servants waiting for their pensions, some of whom have been “left struggling to make ends meet at a pivotable point in their life, causing them significant distress and anxiety,” Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, chair of a parliamentary spending watchdog, said in July.

Capita’s original contract award for CSPS details “provision of options and benefits calculations resulting from McCloud judgment”.

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However, in a written statement to Parliament in March this year, Satvir Kaur, then Parliamentary Secretary for the Cabinet Office, said the £239 million contract with Capita covers the day-to-day management of the Civil Service Pension Scheme, but does not include the specific cost of resolving the remaining McCloud remedy cases.

The government is paying for that work through a separate, dedicated Capita-run project, Remedy Project 7, at an additional cost of £45 million, said Kaur.®