Capita missed its deadline: what happens now to Civil Service pensions

Update, 3 November 2026: the complex-case letters now have their own section in the article. What Taskforce update #19 says about complex cases (no action needed, a letter, a dedicated specialist contact line, and an update at least every four weeks) was first reported in the 31 October entry below. It now also sits in the body, under “If your case is one of the complex ones”, so it is easier to find. Nothing in it has changed.

Update, 31 October 2026: the scheme has published its full backlog, about 150,000 cases, and the McCloud remedy will miss its March 2027 date. Sally Jameson, Parliamentary Secretary at the Cabinet Office, made an oral statement to Parliament on Monday 26 October, and Taskforce update #19, dated 28 October, followed it. Richard Vianello, Director of Civil Service Pensions, writes that Capita’s July rectification plan “was not going to be sufficient to bring performance back in line with contractual expectations”. Cabinet Office officials have since been embedded with Capita’s IT and data teams to build a revised recovery plan in five workstreams: complex cases, routine payments and quotes, other queries and complaints, projects such as McCloud, and technology.

The new figures count everything. Against a baseline of 5 October, about 150,000 cases were outstanding: 30,500 complex payment-related cases, 13,000 straightforward payments and quotes, and 107,000 other queries and complaints. These are cases rather than members, since one member can have a quote, a complaint and an MP’s enquiry open at once. Capita receives about 20,000 new cases a week, so the total is roughly seven and a half weeks’ intake. The update says the numbers are “not comparable” with those in previous updates, which counted only cases more than 100 days old, as do the entries below. In the three weeks after 5 October, complex cases more than three months old fell by 1,200 to 20,600, and straightforward payments and quotes were cleared faster than they arrived. Figures will now be published every fortnight, and the next update is due on Thursday 12 November.

If your case is one of the complex ones, you do not need to do anything. Capita began writing to those members in the week of 26 October. The letter confirms that the case is in the complex group, gives a dedicated specialist phone line, and promises an update at least every four weeks until it is resolved.

McCloud: the March 2027 date will not be met. About 98,000 members, 78,000 of whom have already retired, are due an immediate choice under the 2015 remedy. The update says that “work has been delayed and the expected completion date of end March 2027 will not be met”. There is no new date yet. Affected members “will receive interest on any arrears due”, and the minister has committed to updating Parliament once a timetable is agreed.

Interest, compensation and Capita’s targets. In a written answer on 28 October the Cabinet Office said: “The scheme will automatically pay interest on delayed benefits to protect members from financial loss.” Claims for distress and inconvenience are assessed case by case through the complaints process. A second answer, on 30 October, declined to say how many cases met Capita’s contractual targets, which it called “commercially confidential”, and said priority is going to bereavement, death in service and ill health retirement cases. Separately, the Budget on 28 October removed the two-year rule that could make a late lump sum death benefit taxable, for payments made from that date once the Finance Bill passes. Our Budget guide explains the change.

Update, 3 October 2026: old payments and bereavement cases fell, and the National Audit Office has opened an audit. Taskforce update #18, dated 1 October, counts cases more than 100 days old using figures Capita supplied as at 30 September. Bereavement cases fell by 112 to 1,311, payments cases fell by 6 to 277 and ill health retirement cases fell by 5 to 8. Death in service cases rose by 9 to 332. Within the bereavement total, 262 cases are ready to be paid within 15 days, down 122, and 1,049 are waiting on further information, up 10.

What the update says about 30 September. In July, Capita told MPs it would restore services to standard contractual levels by 30 September. The update does not say whether it did. It says: “Evidence of Capita’s performance against that 30 September deadline will be viewed alongside the rectification plan by the end of October.” The Cabinet Office’s next commercial steps will be decided after the remedial adviser and the technical audit report this month, and the next taskforce update will follow a statement by ministers to Parliament later in October. Mr Vianello adds that “the service will not be considered as restored while it continues to rely on surge personnel or temporary administrative easements to maintain daily operations”.

The National Audit Office has opened an audit. The NAO, the public spending watchdog, has listed Transfer of the Civil Service Pension Scheme to Capita as work in progress, due in winter 2026/27. It “will examine how the Cabinet Office has managed the transition of administrator for the Civil Service Pension Scheme and how the service has been administered by Capita since December 2025”. The NAO puts the contract at £239 million over seven years and says £22.1 million in transitional support loans had been paid to more than 3,900 members by August 2026. It will not look at individual pension calculations; members with questions about their own pension are told to contact the administrator. In a statement on 2 October, Capita said it “accepts that performance remains below the standards that scheme members and the Government rightly expect”.

Three dates in the update. About 10,000 Pension Saving Statements will be posted, second class, around 6 October. A new pension modeller is promised for around mid-October. And Capita has committed to producing roughly 53,000 outstanding 2025/26 annual benefit statements by the end of October.

Correction, 2 October 2026: old payments cases fell, they did not rise. The 19 September entry below says old cases rose in every category and that payments rose by 223 to 511. On 21 September the scheme amended the Payments row of taskforce update #17 with corrected figures from Capita. Payments cases more than 100 days old were 283, down 5, so old cases rose in three of the four categories and not in all four. The update also shows bereavement up by 354, where we said 353. The cases Capita says it can pay within 15 days were 505 across the four categories, not 687. That is still up from 374 in the 7 September figures. The entry below is left as it was published.

Update, 19 September 2026: old cases rose in every category in the fortnight before Capita’s 30 September target. Taskforce update #17, issued on 17 September by pensions director Richard Vianello, counts cases more than 100 days old using figures Capita supplied as at 15 September. Bereavement cases rose by 353 to 1,423, payments by 223 to 511, death in service by 15 to 323, and ill health retirement by 1 to 13. The part that reverses the 9 September entry below is the cases Capita says it can pay within 15 days. Across the same four categories they fell to 374 in the 7 September figures, and they are now back up to 687. Vianello’s own verdict: “The increase in old cases is a clear indicator of continued poor performance across these priority categories.”

Three other things in the update. Of the roughly 900 retirement quotes that should have gone out by the end of June, 240 are still outstanding. Around 53,000 annual benefit statements are still to be issued, with a deadline of the end of October. And Capita will build a calculator for the interest owed to members whose payments were late, to sit alongside the existing guidance on delayed retirement and death benefit payments. The Cabinet Office also says it has enlarged its own team, “including bringing in additional capacity to scrutinise Capita’s data”. The next test is still 30 September, and the fuller update to Parliament is due in October.

Update, 18 September 2026: the minister says hitting the 1 September target is not recovery. In a written statement to Parliament on 9 September, Cabinet Office minister Sally Jameson set out the two targets Capita gave itself after missing its end of June commitment: clearing stock cases by 1 September 2026, and processing cases within Key Performance Indicators from 30 September 2026. Capita reported meeting the first across bereavement, death in service, ill health retirement, retirement payments and retirement quotes, but only “for cases it categorises as workable stock”. Her verdict: “meeting a milestone on workable stock alone is not sufficient progress and does not constitute full service recovery”, and “Overall performance remains unacceptable”. Workable stock is Capita’s own category, and the 7 September figures in the update below show why the qualifier matters: cases waiting on a third party went from 1,300 to 1,303. A fuller update to Parliament is promised in October, after the technical audit and the Remedial Adviser’s report, alongside work on “a long-term strategy to bring this pension scheme back in-house”.

The government is also setting up its own check on Capita’s figures. Computer Weekly reported on 11 September that the scheme director, Richard Vianello, told a member by email that the Cabinet Office is “sifting applications for a new Quality Assurance function”, and that “this team will have direct access to Capita systems”. It is still being recruited. For members, the next date is 30 September, the first test of whether cases are processed within the agreed standards rather than only cleared. Source: Computer Weekly, 11 September 2026.

Update, 9 September 2026: the payable backlog has been paid down, and the blocked one has not moved at all. The Cabinet Office update of 7 September repeats the over 100 days split that August introduced, so for the first time the two months can be compared directly. Cases Capita has everything it needs to pay fell from 1,201 to 374 across all four categories. Cases waiting on a third party went from 1,300 to 1,303, a movement of three. On quotes, Capita had about 4,000 outstanding at the end of June, issued 3,087 by the end of August and has about 900 left, so the six week clearance commitment it gave at the end of June was missed; from July it has committed to issuing new quotes within six weeks of receipt. The August totals are ours, added from the two components published that month.

Work is now being moved off Capita rather than only audited on it. The update records that Capita “has shared 50 of the oldest bereavement cases (over 150 days old) for the DWP surge team to investigate”, handing them back to Capita only so it can make the payments. That is a change of direction as well as a step up: on 24 August the 150 day escalation covered ill health retirement and death in service cases, and a DWP team is named here for the first time where August had the Government Actuary’s Department deploying colleagues. Families in that tranche may be asked to resupply information they have already sent, and the scheme has apologised for that in advance; what it means for a bereaved family is covered in Civil Service pension death benefits. Source: Civil Service Pension Recovery Plan Update, 7 September 2026.

Update, 24 August 2026: the taskforce has changed what it publishes, and the new figure is the one that answers the question members actually ask. Taskforce update #15, issued on 20 August by pensions director Richard Vianello, drops the “total work on hand” headline that #13 and #14 carried, and his reason for dropping it is the criticism this article has made throughout: those totals mix new cases with overdue ones, so, in his words, “the data does not clearly set out how old cases are, and how long it will take to get those members or their families the money that is owed”. The published figure is now cases over 100 days old, split by whether Capita can actually pay them.

On the new basis, the split is stark. Of the cases more than 100 days old, Capita has everything it needs to pay 1,082 bereavement cases, 45 death in service cases, 6 ill-health retirement cases and 68 retirement payments. A further 779, 242, 12 and 267 respectively are waiting on a third party. So on bereavement, the largest category, more than half of the oldest cases are sitting with a company that says it could pay them today. Vianello has committed to publishing expected payment dates for that group in the next update.

Three operational changes came with it. The Government Actuary’s Department is putting staff onto the oldest and most complex cases, some of which predate the MyCSP handover described below. Capita has been cleared to verify identity through credit referencing agencies rather than by hand. And a bulk processing tool put around 4,800 cases through in a single week. Separately, 2026 Annual Benefit Statements start loading to the member portal from the week of 25 August. Source: Civil Service Pensions Taskforce update #15, 20 August 2026.

Update, 8 August 2026: the taskforce has published its first real breakdown of the backlog, and the basis of the figures has changed. Taskforce update #14, issued on 6 August by pensions director Richard Vianello, gives the position as “17,014 members are waiting for a retirement quote, including those for future dates” and “There are 13,047 bereavement cases for Capita to resolve”. It also reports that 203 death in service cases are more than four months old, 175 of them with a spouse, civil partner or family waiting for a payment. Read those against the earlier numbers with care, because they do not count the same thing. The 9,463 quotes reported on 20 July counted requests already in the queue; the new figure deliberately includes members whose retirement date has not yet arrived. The 4,750 bereavement cases reported at that date, and the 3,099 waiting on returned paperwork in the 27 July recovery plan, are both narrower than “cases for Capita to resolve”. So the larger numbers are not a measure of how much worse the position has become. What they do show is that the scheme is now counting more of the problem, including work that has not fallen due yet, which is the first time it has published on that basis.

The oversight arrangements are clearer than they were, and one detail deserves stating plainly. Grant Thornton, described further down this page as an independent remediation advisor, is described by the scheme itself as “a consultancy firm acting as an independent third party, paid for and appointed by Capita, but with our agreement and working under our direction”. Both halves of that sentence matter. The supplier is paying for and appointed the firm now assessing whether its own recovery plan is realistic, and the Cabinet Office directs that work. A second and entirely separate appointment has since been made. The scheme says “We’ve now appointed an Auditor and are finalising terms”, and that the audit “will focus on Capita’s ‘rear view activity’”, meaning whether the right processes have been followed to the right standard on quotes, bereavements and pension payments since the contract began.

On McCloud, the honest answer is that the work has not started. The update asks members not to ring the contact centre about the 2015 Remedy “as Capita have yet to work through the recalculations”, and says a plan and timescales have been requested but not yet supplied. For Civil Service members that means there is still no published date by which remedy recalculations will be done. One date has firmed up: the retirement modeller, promised for months without one, is now expected “around mid-October”, with a progress report due in September. The taskforce update is published on the scheme member portal as taskforce update #14.

Update, 5 August 2026: Capita’s own results put a figure on what this contract is costing it. On 4 August the company published its half year results for 2026. Adjusted revenue rose 1.6 percent to 906.4 million pounds, but adjusted operating profit “declined 31.6% mainly due to additional costs incurred on the Civil Service Pension Scheme contract, as previously announced”. On the results call, management put numbers on the contract itself: it generated about 15 million pounds of revenue in the half and caused about 14 million pounds of remediation costs, with a further 3 million pounds knocked off consulting revenue. The company also now expects to deliver positive free cash flow, excluding business exits, in 2027.

The sharper figure sits one level down, in the division that actually holds the contract. Capita’s Pension Solutions division grew adjusted revenue by 24.7 percent to 107.4 million pounds and still recorded an adjusted operating loss of 3.6 million pounds, which the company puts down to “additional costs incurred on the Civil Service Pension Scheme contract as operational issues are resolved, and lower consulting volumes due to redeployment of resources to the Civil Service Pension Scheme contract”. The division’s own service measures point the same way. Average KPI performance for the half was “94%, excluding the Civil Service Pension Scheme contract, similar to the 95% performance in the same period in 2025”. Read those two together and the picture is a division performing much as it did a year earlier on everything except this contract, and losing money because of it.

What that does and does not tell you. It does not change the pension you have earned, and it does not change the recovery timetable set out below. What it does show is that fixing this has become expensive enough to move Capita’s group results rather than being absorbed quietly, which is the clearest measure so far of the scale of the work. On the contract, the company said: “While the operational challenges on the Civil Service Pension Scheme remain our immediate priority, we are confident that we have the right processes, technology and leadership in place to achieve service levels and deliver for members.” One point of care for anyone following the numbers: the full-year guidance of a 25 to 40 million pound hit to adjusted operating profit and a 35 to 50 million pound hit to free cash flow was repeated here, not revised. Those ranges were already announced in July. The half-year outturn above is the new part.

Update, 28 July 2026: the government has now published the recovery figures itself, and they show where the delay actually sits. These numbers first appeared in the scheme’s member portal on 23 July. The Cabinet Office has since published them on GOV.UK, in its recovery plan update of 27 July 2026, with a breakdown that had not been given before. As at 20 July there were 9,463 retirement quotes still waiting to be issued. Of those, 7,194 are for members who asked for a quote before 5 June and whose retirement date was 30 June 2026 or earlier, so the oldest cases are the bulk of the problem rather than a tail of it. A further 2,269 requests have come in since 5 June.

The split that matters is the new part. Of those 9,463 cases, 6,500 are within Capita’s control to deliver and 2,936 are with employers waiting for data to be clarified. That is close to a third of the queue sitting outside the administrator altogether, which is why chasing Capita alone was never going to clear it. The same pattern shows up on bereavement: Capita has 4,750 cases to process, of which 1,461 are more than four months old, and it is waiting on 3,099 of them for paperwork to be returned. If you are dealing with one of these cases and have been sent forms, they are the thing holding that file. The Cabinet Office has also agreed the appointment of Grant Thornton as independent remediation advisor, which is assessing whether the assumptions behind Capita’s recovery proposals will deliver as expected, and is creating a quality assurance function inside the department to run a forensic review of a small sample of cases each month. The update sets out no target date for clearing the backlog. The next taskforce update is due on 6 August 2026. The member-portal version of these figures is at Civil Service Pensions Taskforce update #13.

The audit has been escalated, and the ministerial brief has changed hands. The government’s recovery plan update of 13 July 2026 went further than the technical audit described below, saying it was “executing our contractual right to deploy independent auditors immediately to conduct a review of systems, IT infrastructure, data integrity, and statutory compliance”. Responsibility for the scheme still sits with the Cabinet Office, but the minister has changed since the 8 July hearing described below: the Cabinet Office now lists Louise Haigh as First Secretary of State, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office, in place of Nick Thomas-Symonds, who answered for the scheme at that hearing. The regular updates to members continue to come from the taskforce, under its pensions director Richard Vianello.

Update, 17 July 2026: why insourcing is a 2027 question, not a quick fix. Ministers keep calling the Civil Service scheme a strong candidate to be brought back in house, and there is now a formal route for it, though a medium-term one. Under new procurement rules that take effect in April 2027, every central government contract worth more than 1 million pounds has to be tested for whether it could be run in house before it is renewed, and departments that spend more than 100 million pounds a year must publish five-year insourcing plans. That is the machinery behind the insourcing talk, and also why nothing changes for members overnight.

Officials have been frank about the practical limit. The Civil Service chief operating officer, Cat Little, told MPs: “We are a very large customer for complex schemes in a market that has a very small number of suppliers.” When the work was last tendered, the field came down from six bidders to two. Rebuilding that capability inside government, or moving roughly 1.7 million members to a different provider, takes time to do safely, so the immediate job stays the same: getting Capita’s service back to standard. None of this changes the pension you have earned.

Update, 10 July 2026: from deadline to sanction, and the 8 July hearing. Since this article was published, the government has stepped up its response to the missed 30 June deadline. It has withheld 9.9 million pounds from Capita for missing contractual deadlines, ordered an independent technical audit of Capita’s systems and data, and appointed a remedial adviser, at Capita’s own expense, to drive corrections on the ground; it also intends to recover the cost of the roughly 140-person government team drafted in to help. Capita’s share price fell by around 15 percent on 7 July after the government’s position became public. The Cabinet Office minister, Nick Thomas-Symonds, described the contract as a prime candidate to be brought back in house and said the government would aim to do that by October if the evidence supports it, while cautioning that ending the contract overnight would risk leaving members without a working service.

On 8 July, the two committees of MPs questioned the minister and senior officials, and then Capita’s group chief executive and senior leaders, at their joint session. Capita’s group chief executive apologised repeatedly for a service the company accepted had not been good enough, and Capita said it expects to clear the bulk of retirement cases by 1 September and to return to normal contractual service by 30 September, with a small number of complex cases taking longer. Officials confirmed that Capita had been placed in contractual default and was expected to miss 16 of its 21 performance targets, and said the government would recover from Capita the full cost, put at 12.5 million pounds, of the officials drafted in to help. On the contract itself, ministers said every option remained open, including bringing the work back in house, called it a strong candidate for that, and stressed that no final decision had been taken.

If a delay has left you in financial hardship, the scheme is offering interest-free hardship loans, of up to 5,000 pounds, and up to 10,000 pounds in exceptional circumstances, while your case is put right. None of this changes your pension itself. Your Civil Service pension is set by the scheme rules and paid from government funds, so a struggling administrator can delay a quote or a payment but cannot reduce what you have earned.