The boss of National Savings & Investments, forced out of his job amid a £476 million savings scandal, will depart with a pension worth at least £1.5 million, the bank’s accounts suggest.
Dax Harkins, who has run the Treasury-owned bank since March 2026, stepped down from the role on Thursday after it emerged millions of pounds had not been paid to 37,500 bereaved families over the course of 17 years. As these families wait to find out how they will be repaid, Harkins will leave with a generous civil service pension worth between £65,000 and £70,000 a year, a figure that will rise in line with the Consumer Prices Index.
The civil service scheme is a defined benefit scheme, which means he will receive a guaranteed income for every year of his retirement.
As of March last year, the latest set of NS&I accounts available show Harkins had a pension with a cash equivalent transfer value (CETV) of £1.346 million. A CETV is an estimate from the pension provider and outlines the value of what it thinks the pension is worth over the course of Harkins’s retirement.
Harkins had been at NS&I since 2003
John Ralfe, a pensions consultant, said the £1.35 million was likely to be an underestimate, because of the yearly inflationary rises applied to civil service pensions. He added: “If you said £1.5 million, you would still be understating it.”
Assuming Harkins is paid £65,000 a year, over the course of a 25-year retirement, taxpayers would have spent £1.63 million paying out his pension.
The annual report, published last July, stated that Harkins received an annual salary of £185,000 to £190,000 during his time as chief executive, plus pension benefits worth £110,000 and additional benefits in kind. It meant his total remuneration was worth between £320,000 and £325,000.
He has been at NS&I since November 2003, which he joined after a short career in the private sector, and his pension will have accrued over his entire 22-year tenure. He will be replaced by Sir Jim Harra, the former boss of HM Revenue & Customs.
NS&I is a branch of the Treasury which holds £240 billion in deposits and runs the monthly Premium Bonds prize lottery.
In December, the firm informed the Treasury that £476 million had not been paid to bereaved families after the deaths of customers between 2008 and 2025.
On Thursday Torsten Bell, the pensions minister, announced the departure of Harkins in the House of Commons.
Full details of the “operational failure” remain scant. But experts suspect the age of NS&I — which dates back to 1861 — may be responsible. Customers in the 1950s and 1960s may have originally bought Premium Bonds and other accounts in their local Post Office and had paper-based accounts. These may then not have been found when the bank searched its systems after someone died and their family tried to claim the money.
NS&I has been in the middle of a cost-cutting and modernisation programme, called Project Rainbow, since 2020. However, it has already run £1.3 billion over budget and is still not due to be completed until March 2028. A damning public affairs committee (PAC) report published in February, blamed management for instilling a “good news culture”, which discouraged staff from admitting failure and made disagreements hard to resolve. The report suggested this culture came from the top management team, including Harkins.
The Treasury, NS&I and Dax Harkins have been contacted for comment.