Capita and the civil service pension

[Czerwonitz]

Aibu to think this is a conscious decision to encourage civil servants to turn to hard drinking and cigarettes as a retirement plan?

The system and customer service are so so so so so bad. I have no idea if my pension still exists at the moment. Retired friends are not receiving any money (the solution is for their old departments to give them a loan repayable within THIRTY DAYS of the first drawdown of their pension if capita ever finds it).

Unbearable, awful, embarrassing.

We need a
I work for Capita AMA

Many people don't take a lump sum, as has been explained. It's not clear whether people will be receiving their missing payments (in which case repaying in 30 days should be ok, although could be tricky from a tax pov) or simply being treated as having deferred the start (not ok). Never mind the huge stress that has been caused for retirees and the bereaved and the massive waste of public money.

No we do not. They would be breaching the terms of the contract doing something as daft as that. I'd certainly report them, that's outrageous. Talk about making a bad situation even worse.

The contract they're already totally in breach of?

You don't need to 'understand' because you can just listen to the people who have got real life problems due to the financial difficulty caused by this mess.

It is a national disgrace. People have worked their whole careers for the CS and are treated appallingly at retirement. Capita should be nowhere near government contracts ever.

Which the loan will help with in the short term. And when they've got what they're owed from their pension, they pay back. Still not seeing the issue with that part of the solution.

And obviously that doesn't mean that the whole rest of the mess, stress, upset etc etc isn't totally awful, far from it.

Wouldn't anyone who'd had to take a loan get a set amount of back pay which would pay off the loan? If you were due a monthly pension of £500 and received the same amount via a loan over 6 months you'd receive the equivalent from your pension wouldn't you? Better to pay that back as soon as you receive it than have to worry it must come out of the £500 you have to live on every month.

My company was bought by Capita. It was an absolute shit show and I couldn’t get out of there quickly enough.

No excuse, two wrongs don't make a right.

in fact I think this thread is totally inappropriate. There is already an escalation path for CS pension members to use, what's the point of stirring things up further.

I didn't bday it did. Do you have a point?

I live in dread that civil service jobs will be outsourced before the end of my career. Without fail it's a miserable disaster.

I was approved for a voluntary early exit on Thursday with a potential last day of Service on 29th September!
We will see….

Do you work for Capita?:) of course it's appropriate to raise it.

How ridiculous, to suggest posters go through the appropriate process. The one that doesnt work?

Wouldn't that be great, if you could get online, actually speak to someone who can help and get your money.

Disclaimer- I do not work for Capita and will (hopefully!) be drawing pensions this year from schemes they are administering but I do know someone who works for them. I sent them a link to this thread and asked if they knew any more about what was going on.

Their take was that they were told that the backlog they would be inheriting from the previous administrators was x thousand, and had lined up additional staffing to clear it as a priority.
When the switch happened they were blindsided by the volume of people who had been told that the previous lot couldn't sort anything and that they should call Capita after the handover date.
The backlog is perhaps 3 times larger than Capita was told, They don't know whose fault it is that it was hidden, but I'm told it's frustrating for Capita staff who are being publicly blamed. They are trying their hardest to sort it out from a position they could not have anticipated.

This is nonsense. The civil service system worked well. The civil service system understood that blocking someone from their account for months was completely unacceptable.

I frequently have 10,000 new emails in my inbox on a Monday and they are all in action by Friday.

They've put totally untrained, unskilled people into a skills requiring job.

I love how the private sector outsourcers just lie and lie and lie and people eat it up.

Don’t shoot the messenger! A quick google search shows that the scheme has been outsourced since 2013. Equiniti were the handover party I think.

I frequently have 10,000 new emails in my inbox on a Monday and they are all in action by Friday

You read & action 2000 emails a day?! What about other work?

There have been a few different issues with Capita. I can absolutely believe that there was a bigger backlog than they initially knew and am sure that there is fault with the previous provider. I am at a loss on the following though-

• website not working (and I don't mean just being down because of traffic- basic functionality was not in place and is still not for some features)
• how they were able to take over without the appropriate knowledge of the backlog- it's absolutely normal to have an information gathering period before a contract like this moves across. Seems like a failure (possibly on all sides)
• Once they realised the extent of the backlog and that they would not be ready, someone should have raised the alarm and if necessary postponed the switchover (which could have been done with agreement of all parties)

Seems like a perfect storm of failure on all sides, including the Cabinet Office for lack of oversight.

They told me they don't even have a contact email address

Mine works fine, but perhaps I am just lucky.

You are and I'd double check your info

None of them can require any actual work to reply. Must mostly be yes/no or generic replies.

Incorrect. All need to be assessed and assigned or dealt with directly. It's funny how the private sector thinks it's so great and then falls over at basic stuff.