Capita has offered to pay for the continued work of surge staff brought in to tackle the Civil Service Pension Scheme crisis.<\/p>\n
Since February, HMRC has deployed more than a hundred staff from its Surge and Rapid Response Team to help Capita get to grips with backlogs and missed payments.<\/p>\n
In a letter to the Public Accounts Committee, sent on Monday and published on Wednesday, Capita Public Services chief exec Richard Holroyd said he \u201crecognises that the Cabinet Office has funded the HMRC surge staff as set out by the Heads of Terms in December 2025\u201d and is \u201cincredibly grateful for their professionalism during their tenure with Capita\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs the surge staff has continued beyond April, when we moved past the work to index the inherited 15,000 emails and the initial spike in activity due to inherited backlogs, and will continue for some time ahead, Capita recognises that there should be a limit to the cost to the taxpayer,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Holroyd said that in light of this, Capita wrote to the Cabinet Office on 10 April \u201cto offer to cover costs until those surge colleagues can return to civil service duties\u201d.<\/p>\n
At the PACAC session on 3 March, Little said: “My expectation is that the taxpayer should not have to suffer or pay for what we have had to do to get the service level of this contract back to where it needs to be. That will have to be subject to the usual commercial arrangements in place.”<\/p>\n
CSW understands that commercial discussions between the Cabinet Office and Capita are ongoing over responsibility for the costs of the surge staff.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Initially, a team of around 150 staff came in to support the recovery work, while around 140 SRRT staff are still in place, according to a letter sent by Little to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee on 24 March but only published this week.<\/p>\n
In the letter, Little also explained that these staff had been \u201cmoved from other deployments, starting with low\u2011priority work and progressing up the prioritisation scale\u201d, having been asked at a PACAC session on 3 March for detail on where they had come in from.<\/p>\n
\u2018Deeply disappointed\u2019<\/p>\n