apologising for \u201cserious issues\u201d<\/a>\u00a0affecting scheme members. They also set out an action plan to tackle the crisis, which includes setting up a hardship fund, prioritisation of cases, and civil service surge support.<\/p>\nAppearing at the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee yesterday afternoon, Thomas-Symonds and Little were asked what had triggered the letter and for the next steps the Cabinet Office would be taking.<\/p>\n
Thomas-Symonds said: \u201cBefore I come to the details I should say openly at the outset that the service \u2013 or lack thereof \u2013 that is being provided to people who have worked many years and given their lives to public service is completely and utterly unacceptable.\u201d<\/p>\n
The minister said key issues have included newly-retired people not being able to access their pensions, delays to quotes, inaccurate quotes, and incomplete details when people login to the portal.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur priority now is dealing with this issue of the immediate hardship and problems that have been caused to people,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s why I\u2019ve signed off the hardship loans.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thomas-Symonds said Capita inherited \u201ca very significant backlog\u201d of around 86,000 cases from MyCSP on 1 December, when the administration of the scheme switched to the consultancy giant.<\/p>\n
But he added: \u201cI think Capita have subsequently said that they underestimated the complexity of the scheme, which may be one of the explanations as to why we find ourselves in the position that we do.\u201d<\/p>\n
The minister also noted that the Cabinet Office\u2019s \u201ccontractual rights are being reserved\u201d under both the current contract with Capita and the previous one under MyCSP, the suggestion\u00a0being that the department may seek penalty payments from both firms for contract failures.<\/p>\n
Thomas-Symonds said he is meeting Capita chief Adolfo Hernandez on Thursday to \u201conce again set out not only the unacceptable situation that people are facing that are seeking to use this scheme, but also what we will be doing and our expectation going forward\u201d.<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cOur priority now is dealing with this issue of the immediate hardship and problems that have been caused to people. That\u2019s why I\u2019ve signed off the hardship loans, and I think getting a grip of this is the priority now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Getting pensioners their first payment is \u2018priority number one\u2019<\/p>\n
Giving further details on the recovery plan, Little said that\u00a0\u201cthree sprints are being undertaken by our taskforce\u201d, with the first focused on making sure pensioners who have retired in recent months get their first pension payment.<\/p>\n
On average, around 3,000 civil servants retire each month, Little said.<\/p>\n
\u201cMany of those will not have received their first pension payment,\u201d she said. \u201cSo that is priority area number one. Also prioritising anyone who has had a recent bereavement, anyone who has retired on ill health. We will prioritise the most extreme and urgent cases as quickly as possible and we expect for those cases to be stabilised and dealt with by the end of February.\u201d<\/p>\n
Little said the government doesn\u2019t yet have a good estimate of how many people are in financial hardship, but it knows that around 8,500 members of the scheme \u201cwill have some sort of issue with their payment\u201d since 1 December.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t tell you today how many are suffering financial hardship, but given most people rely on a pension to be paid we can imagine it will be a significant number,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The hardship loan, which will be interest-free and issued by departments, is at a standard level of \u00a35,000, with exceptional access to up to \u00a310,000 for people who need more money,\u201d Little added.<\/p>\n
The Cabinet Office has budgeted for the maximum \u2013 if all 8,500 sought the hardship loan maximum of \u00a310,000, it would amount to \u00a385m.<\/p>\n
Asked about compensation, Little noted that there is an existing compensation scheme within the pension scheme contract for people \u201cwho suffer because they\u2019ve had to make decisions or had to access emergency funds that have high levels of interest rates\u201d.<\/p>\n
The second sprint will move onto the wider issues and the large number of outstanding queries. Little did not give a timeframe for this sprint.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe must get back to people so that they\u2019ve got the answers that they need to be able to undertake big life decisions,\u201d Little said. \u201cThese are often stressful and difficult choices that people are trying to make and they need the information from our pension scheme to be able to make those life choices.\u201d<\/p>\n
The third phase will focus on technical issues with the portal and website and run until the end of March, she said.<\/p>\n
On the portal, Little said there is information \u201cthat we need to make sure is connecting between the previous service and the one we\u2019ve got now\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ll also be looking at website functionality and the use of technology to make it easier for people to access their information,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
Little: \u2018No ill will\u2019 from Capita<\/p>\n
Little said the scheme had been \u201cin distress\u201d for years under MyCSP, with the Cabinet Office twice fining the firm over customer service failures. However, she said\u00a0\u201cit became very, very visible in the first week of January that there was a more significant set of issues to be dealt with\u201d as the number of complaints began to significantly increase.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is not a new issue,\u201d Little said. \u201cThe reason that I took the action to get in touch with all scheme members through any means possible today is because I sincerely believe that the scale and the level of hardship that people are enduring is just not good enough.\u201d<\/p>\n
Little said one of the \u201cbig challenges\u201d since the transfer has been the system for Capita to keep the Cabinet Office updated on progress, as the management information has to be manually produced by the administrator.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat inevitably has led to us having to reconcile information that we hold with Capita in order to get a grip on the situation,\u201d she said. \u201cSo the first thing that my teams have had to do is to understand exactly what the performance of Capita has been, because that information has been slower and harder to get a hold of than we would like.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asked by PACAC chair Simon Hoare if Capita had \u201cdeliberately\u201d provided this information slowly, Little said Capita has been \u201cabsolutely open to every single suggestion\u2026 from the start\u201d, providing regular updates on an almost daily basis.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd certainly before we transferred the contract, they were very open with myself and the minister for the Cabinet Office on the scale of the challenge,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd so I don\u2019t think there is\u00a0 any ill will on the part of Capita.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asked if there was a full worked-through transition plan when the Cabinet Office awarded the contract to Capita, Little said there had been but that the estimate of the work-in-progress backlog was \u201csignificantly lower\u201d at that time.<\/p>\n
Little also said she did not believe MyCSP had withheld information on the state of the backlog, which rose from 37,000 cases to 87,000 over the roughly six-month period from Capita winning the contract to the transition on 1 December.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs we got into the transition, and when you start these very large commercial handovers, it became clear that the backlog was closer to 87,000,\u201d Little said. \u201cSo at no point has this been about MyCSP withholding information. It\u2019s that the assumptions the new provider made proved to be untrue by the time they actually took over the service.\u201d<\/p>\n
Explaining why the backlog worsened over that period, Little added: \u201cSadly this is not unusual\u00a0where a service is handing over to another provider. You often find that staff leave and [MyCSP] found it very difficult to maintain service levels.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asked if Capita are now saying, “this is not what we signed up to?”, Little said: \u201cThey are saying to us \u201cit isn\u2019t what we signed up to, but we are going to do everything we can to get that backlog down and under control\u201d.<\/p>\n
Little added that the longstanding issues with the administration of the scheme under MyCSP was \u201cpart of our decision to transfer to a new provider, in the interests of seeking to improve customer service and better technology\u201d.<\/p>\n
She also noted that the market for pension schemes is \u201cfairly limited\u201d and \u201cthese are complex, very large schemes\u201d, with the Civil Service Pension Scheme \u201cone of the largest and most complex schemes that we have in the country\u201d.<\/p>\n
The perm sec also confirmed there would be a \u201cvery thorough\u201d lessons learned exercise, adding that she welcomes scrutiny from parliament on the transition. Little\u00a0will appear again before the committee on 10 February, and has agreed to give a further update to MPs at that session.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The service currently being provided to members of the Civil Service Pension Scheme is \u201cutterly unacceptable\u201d, Cabinet Office…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":399822,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[84,4176,4174,4175,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-399821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-personal-finance","tag-business","tag-finance","tag-personal-finance","tag-personalfinance","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399821\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/399822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}