Civil Service Pension Scheme administration problems

Last updated: 22/06/2026

This page is regularly updated with the latest information and guidance.

Many members have urgent queries about the current unacceptable performance of the civil service pension scheme administrators.

This is a fast-moving issue, with significant developments occurring regularly. This page will be updated with the latest position and key information for members.

Hopefully, most of the answers that members need will be available here. But please contact your local representative or full-time officer if you need further assistance.

If you do not know who your local representative or full-time officer is, then contact Prospect’s helpdesk by telephone or email.

What is the background to the problems with the Civil Service Pension Scheme

What has gone wrong with the administration of the Civil Service Pension Scheme?

What is the scale of these problems?

What scrutiny has this issue received in the media and in Parliament?

What has been the response?

What progress has been made by the recovery team?

Progress on processing payments to the backlog of cases of retired members

Progress on issuing retirement quotes to those considering retirement

What are my options if my retirement quote and / or pension payment are late?

What if the information in my retirement quote is wrong?

Can my case be escalated?

I am not retiring imminently, but I am affected by scheme administration problems, when will these be fixed?

Should there be compensation for the detriment caused by these problems?

How do the transition loans work for those waiting for delayed pension payments?

What has been going wrong with Civil Service Pension Scheme administration?

What is the background to the problems with the Civil Service Pension Scheme

The Cabinet Office manages the Civil Service Pension Scheme. It has outsourced the administration of the scheme. The contract was previously held by MyCSP, but transferred to Capita on 1 December 2025.

The service that scheme members receive has been poor for some time. These poor standards prompted a National Audit Office investigation and an inquiry by the Public Accounts Committee last year, even before Capita took over the contract.

The National Audit Office report noted problems, such as poor response times to members’ calls and emails, under MyCSP.

The NAO also highlighted issues with the Cabinet Office’s management of the contract to administer the scheme.

They also reported that Capita had missed three key transition milestones as they prepared to take on the contract to administer the scheme.

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) stated, in its report on the issue, that: “There is a clear risk that Capita will not be ready to take over administration of the Scheme as planned on 1 December 2025.”

This was consistent with concerns that Prospect and the other main civil service trade unions were raising during regular meetings with the Cabinet Office in the run-up to the transfer.

The PAC requested that the Cabinet Office keep it updated on the progress of the transition plans.

It was only on 11 November, with less than a month to go, that the Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary wrote to the PAC to confirm that operational services would transfer to Capita on 1 December 2025.

The extremely late go / no go decision was indicative of serious doubts about Capita’s ability to run this pension scheme. In fact, some of the key deliverables under the contract had to be put back to allow them to focus on the main priorities.

 The Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary gave some insight into the thinking to go ahead with the transfer to Capita in oral evidence to the PAC on 3 March 2026:

“I do not in any way like giving that sort of advice to a Minister, because in those sorts of situations I am basically saying, “Do you want to continue with a poor service [MyCSP] that looks like it is going to get worse with no commercial protection, or do you want to move to a new service [Capita] that is highly risky and complicated, and has some different challenges?”

The position was, basically, that moving to Capita might be bad, but staying with MyCSP would likely be even worse.

This was an appalling situation for the manager of a major public service pension scheme to have gotten itself into.     

The service that members receive has not been good for some time. A recent National Audit Office report noted particular problems with response times to members’ calls and emails last year.

Things got noticeably worse from 1 December 2025 when the administration contract transferred to Capita (from MyCSP).

From that point, there were many complaints from members who could not access Capita’s online pension portal, or whose data was missing or incorrect.

These issues obviously caused great inconvenience and sometimes affected members’ ability to make important decisions, including about full and partial retirement.

From the beginning of this year, we started to become aware of significant numbers of newly retired scheme members not receiving any pension payments, sometimes for several months.

This obviously caused the members concerned great distress, and many experienced significant financial hardship.

We supported members who were:

But all other members of the scheme are also affected by issues caused by these problems to a degree.

It is much harder for scheme members to get accurate and timely information from the scheme that they need to plan their future.

Those most affected include members aiming to retire over the next few months. Many have no certainty about the pension they would get, or if it would be paid on time.

What has gone wrong with the administration of the Civil Service Pension Scheme?

The transfer from MyCSP to Capita on 1 December 2025 went extremely badly from the very start.

There were thousands of complaints from members who could not access Capita’s new online pension portal, or whose data was missing or incorrect.

An article published in The Register just two days later gave an overview of the situation.

In a letter to the PAC dated 24 March 2026, the Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary confirmed the nature and extent of these problems:

“Capita did not deliver the full levels of IT, automation, and portal functionality at go-live. This significantly impacted Capita’s ability to manage the volumes of work inherited and the new work delivered since go-live.”

These problems caused knock-on difficulties elsewhere. For example, the average call answering time for members ringing Capita remained well over 1 hour throughout the first two months of the contract. In turn, this led to tens of thousands of abandoned calls. It became almost impossible for members who needed to speak to someone at Capita to get through.

These issues obviously caused serious inconvenience to significant numbers of members and often affected their ability to make important decisions, including about full and partial retirement.

But soon more serious categories of complaints began to emerge in rapidly growing numbers.

From the beginning of 2026, we started to become aware of significant numbers of newly retired scheme members not receiving any pension payments, sometimes for many months.

These delays obviously caused the members concerned great distress, and many experienced significant financial hardship.

Prospect has supported members who were:

The nature and scale of the serious problems affecting scheme members have only grown since the start of the year.

Many members considering retirement are waiting for a quote to help them make their decision. Some have retired with no idea of the precise amount they are entitled to.

Other members, knowing there are huge backlogs for retirement quotes and even pension payments, have reacted by putting off their plans to partially or fully retire.

But members who are further away from retirement have also been impacted in a variety of ways: from difficulties with planning for their retirement due to the unavailability of information or tools, to being unable to more on with their lives because their divorce cannot be finalised due to problems producing pension valuations.

What is the scale of these problems?

When planning for taking on this contract, Capita assumed they would inherit about 37,000 cases from MyCSP.

In the joint apology from the Cabinet Office and Capita on 28 January it was noted that the actual backlog of cases was 86,000.

On 2 February the Public Accounts Committee published a letter from the Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary that stated the backlog had increased to 120,000 cases.

The backlog included a wide range of cases (including duplicates), from relatively trivial, to extremely difficult cases involving financial hardship and even bereavement.

The most serious cases involved members whose pensions were delayed by many months.

One group of members affected were those who retired while MyCSP was still administering the scheme but had not received their pension by 1 December 2025 when Capita took over.

In evidence to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee the Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary said this happened to about 8,500 members.

There were also about 7,000 surviving dependents (eg widows and widowers) of former scheme members waiting for their dependents pension when Capita took over administration of the scheme.

Clearly there were extremely serious problems building up under MyCSP even before the transfer to Capita (though in a letter to the PAC on 2 April 2026, MyCSP claimed they met all of their key service levels in the 6 months leading up to the transfer to Capita).

These problems only grew in the aftermath of Capita taking on the contract. Capita were unable to process retirement quotes at the pace required, so the number of retired members waiting for payment grew. 

In a statement to the House of Commons on 22 April, the Minister for the Cabinet Office stated that the backlog of outstanding quotes requested by members considering retirement had increased to 24,000.

Thousands of those members have since retired without receiving a quote or any payment. Thousands more will likely have put off their retirement for many months due to a lack of information or a fear of not having any income for an extended period.

Very few active members of the scheme will have been totally unaffected by the wide range of administrative problems described above.   

The extent and nature of these problems are unprecedented in Prospect’s experience. It is one of the worst pension administration disasters in living memory.

The numbers affected are huge, but each of the tens of thousands of cases represents an unacceptable amount of distress for the member concerned (or their bereaved dependent).

This article in Civil Service World, marking six months since Capita took over, captures both the impact at an individual level and the scale of the overall problems.

What scrutiny has this issue received in the media and in Parliament?

A scandal of this scale inevitably attracts attention, and there has been a lot of media coverage of it, particularly about the impact on individual members.

Because this is a public scheme whose managers are accountable to Parliament, there has also been a high level of scrutiny there too.

Initially, Prospect devoted resources to raising the profile of the problems that members were experiencing. It has now received the attention it needs at the highest levels.

The experience of one young terminally ill member of the scheme was raised at PMQs on 21 January (BBC Northern Ireland covered that case).

MPs also debated the schemes’ problems in Westminster Hall on 4 February. This report conveys the outrage that MPs expressed about the human impact of the situation.

Prospect wrote to all MPs with a briefing about the situation ahead of the debate in Westminster Hall (you can download that here).

The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee (PACAC) has oversight of the Cabinet Office (the managers of the pension scheme).

PACAC questioned Ministers and senior civil servants about the situation on 4 February. This committee held a follow-up session with senior officials on 3 March.

Both the National Audit Office (NAO) and the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) have scrutinised scheme administration in general and the transfer to Capita in particular.

The Public Accounts Committee inquiry into the Civil Service Pension Scheme contains a lot of information about the background to this problem (and the latest government responses).

This committee held an oral evidence session with senior Capita executives on 12 February and another on 26 March.

On 28 April, PACAC and PAC wrote to the Minister to ask that he (and his senior officials) appear before a joint session of the committees on 7 July (later rescheduled to 8 July).  

What has been the response?

There should be no doubt that the very highest levels of government have grasped the seriousness of the situation and responded appropriately.

HMRC’s second permanent secretary, Angela MacDonald, was asked to lead a specialist team to help with the casework backlogs.

She and her team worked with Capita to develop a recovery plan to return the service to an acceptable standard.

The recovery plan includes the prioritisation of processing payments to the most urgent cases, but it also aims to return to the contractual levels of service by the end of June.

There is also a surge team of over 150 civil servants deployed to work on reducing the backlog. This is on top of additional resourcing from Capita.

A crucial element of the plan is providing interim financial support for members while they wait for their pensions to be paid (see below).

These loans are meant to protect members against the risk of serious financial distress due to delayed payment.

What progress has been made by the recovery team?

The recovery team has committed to providing regular feedback to members on the progress they are making. Latest updates are available here.

The first update on 12 February reassured members that their data had transferred successfully to Capita.

The second update on 27 February outlined progress on: call waiting times, the backlog of cases, unread emails transferred by MyCSP, retirement quotes and the pension modeller.

The third update on 12 March provided more information on progress on answering calls but particularly focussed on the position of members who had not received pension quotes yet.

The fourth update on 26 March stated that Capita was focussing on issuing retirement quotes they inherited from MyCSP (ie that had been requested before 1 December 2025). It stated that only limited work had been done on quotes requested since then and that many members would have to wait until the end of June. It acknowledged that this left members in a difficult position of having to choose between delaying their retirement and potentially having no income for an extended period.

The fifth update on 7 April told members about an issue that had affected the publication of 2024/25 Annual Benefit Statements (ABSs) on the online portal. For a small time after they were uploaded, a small number of ABSs were visible to members they did not belong to. Consequently, the ABS interface was taken offline.

The sixth update on 23 April stated that all cases of retired members waiting for payment of pension that had been inherited from MyCSP (where Capita had the necessary information and a lump sum was due) had received a lump sum. Regular pensions were due to be paid by the end of May. It also stated that there were 23,000 outstanding retirement quotes that needed to be processed by the end of June.

The seventh update on 13 May stated that 1,500 pensions had been put into payment in the previous two weeks and that Capita was still committed to putting outstanding pensions inherited from MyCSP by the end of May. It also stated that over 2,500 retirement quotes had been issued to members in the previous week.

The eight update on 28 May contained several important updates:

The nineth update on 12 June stated that 4,000 retirement quotes had been issued since the previous update. It also asked members not to call the contact centre with non-urgent queries. It highlighted the 10MB file size limit when returning quotes and recommended uploading documents in PDF or JPEG format.   

Separate recovery plans are also available from here.

Progress on processing payments to the backlog of cases of retired members

The initial priority for the recovery team was to deal with the financial hardship of retired members who were waiting for their pension to be paid.

The transitional loan scheme (see below) was able to address the immediate needs of members in this position and allowed the recovery team to focus on making payments.

The recovery team established a priority order for dealing with the backlog, death-in-service, bereavement and ill-health retirement cases were treated as the most urgent.

Capita has settled all death in service and ill-heath cases it is aware of or has done everything it’s possible to do whilst waiting for members to respond.

Capita also committed to making sure that all members who have submitted their forms and have received their pension quote, received their lump sum, and in some instances 70% of their arrears, by the end of February.

All outstanding payments to this group of members were expected to be made within a further eight weeks (ie by the end of April), but some are still outstanding.

Progress on payment of dependents’ pensions is less transparent. Anecdotally, more of these seem to be outstanding. The commitment is to have cleared this backlog by the end of June.

There seem to be some cases of retired members and dependents who have not received a lump sum yet. This is possibly due to Capita not having any information about these cases. Members in this position should complete and return the following form: Civil Service Pension Scheme – Outstanding Lump Sum Payment form

The Cabinet Office has accepted that interest must be paid on delayed pension payments. Further information about this is available from the website.

Progress on issuing retirement quotes to those considering retirement

While the most urgent cases that the recovery team had to deal with were those who had already retired but not received any pension, those planning to retire are also significantly impacted by the unacceptable standards of pension scheme administration.

Unfortunately, members considering whether to partially or fully retire have been impacted since 1 December 2025 and will continue to be impacted by these problems for some time.

The recovery team is aiming to restore normal service by the end of June 2026. But, given that it can take up to 4 months from requesting a retirement quote to processing a payment in normal circumstances, even achieving this aim would mean that it will not be until November that members will be retiring under normal conditions.

In a letter to the PAC on 5 June, Capita suggested that only retirement quotes with “clean data” would be issued in the normal timescales from the beginning of July.

In the meantime, all that we are practically able to do is to give members a realistic idea of what they can expect and a clear explanation of their options.

Pension quotations are being prioritised on the basis of the desired retirement date and not the submission date.

If you requested a retirement quote before 1 December, and you confirmed that your plans are unchanged, you should have received a quote by now.

If you submitted a retirement quote after 1 December, the target is to issue it by the end of June.

From the regular updates issued by the Cabinet Office it is clear that Capita is struggling to meet the end of June deadline to issue outstanding retirement quotes (generally those that were submitted by the end of April),

If the end of June target is met, it will likely be very back ended (a disproportionate number of quotes will have been issued at the end of June).

There is obviously a possibility that the target will slip by a number of weeks, or even months.

Even if the end of June target is broadly met, it is likely that members with more complicated circumstances may be subject to longer delays.

What are my options if my retirement quote and / or pension payment are late?

Urgent cases, such as death-in-service and ill-health will continue to be prioritised. However, anyone else who wants to partially or fully retire and asks for a quote before the end of June, and potentially for some time afterwards, can expect delays.

This is obviously completely unsatisfactory, but it is also the reality that members must deal with, and it is important that they have information about their options.

The example given in the Cabinet Office update of 12 March is of a member who gave notice to retire in March only receiving their quote in May. On normal timescales (though they might act more quickly in practice) their pension will be paid in August.

That member can potentially delay their retirement to later in the year when the service is expected to return to normal. But there are several implications of this decision:

If the member either does not want to, or is not allowed to, postpone their retirement, they face up to 4 months or even longer waiting for their pension (potentially without any income).

Though, as Capita has been ramping up the issuance of retirement quotes, the likely average waiting time will hopefully come down and eventually be eliminated once the service is fully recovered.

In these situations, members will be eligible for a transitional loan (see below).

A first transitional loan of £5,000 should be payable without any conditions. Up to £20,000 can be paid where in exceptional cases.

What if the information in my retirement quote is wrong?

If there is a mistake in your retirement quote, get in touch with Capita immediately (the ‘contact us’ facility on the pension portal is the best option for this).

Members can put a pension into payment while still challenging the basis of the calculation by the scheme administrator.

In these cases, it is important not to spend any money that may be reclaimed later or to assume that any discrepancy will be resolved in your favour.

Further information about dealing with retirement quotes is available from the Quotes Hub.

Can my case be escalated?

It is important to remember that nearly all members are currently affected by these issues, many very seriously.

There is some prioritisation in respect of death-in-service and ill-health cases, otherwise quotes are being prioritised in order of date of retirement.

With many thousands of members waiting, for example, for outstanding retirement quotes, it is impossible to escalate everyone in this situation.

Anyone who has been waiting for payment since before 1 December 2025 and has not received a lump sum or other payment should contact Prospect.

Those waiting for a retirement quote since 1 December 2025 are still not beyond the target date for issuing these so cannot be escalated yet.

Members who have retired but not received any payment should consider applying for a transitional loan.

I am not retiring imminently, but I am affected by scheme administration problems, when will these be fixed?

While those waiting for delayed pension payments or retirement quotes are impacted the most, all scheme members have been affected by administration problems.

Thousands of scheme members are still unable to register for the membership portal. This is particularly affecting those with multiple periods of service.

Capita are trying to resolve these problems and are communicating with impacted members by ‘phone or post.

Should there be compensation for the detriment caused by these problems?

Yes, thousands of members have suffered detriment due to the unacceptable service from scheme administrators, and they are entitled to compensation as a result.

These losses will be financial (e.g. interest payments owed on the sources of credit members relied on while waiting for their pension to be paid) and non-financial (e.g. the distress caused by the delays).

Each case will be different, but it is not difficult to imagine circumstances where members who suffered the most from serious delays in payment could be owed substantial compensation.

Many tens of thousands more members will have suffered less serious detriment, but still potentially be owed compensation for the significant inconvenience these problems will have caused.

The usual route for making complaints about maladministration is through the pension scheme’s internal dispute resolution procedure.

Should I make a complaint?

All relevant stakeholders are very aware that the level of service for scheme members is completely unacceptable.

A complaint about delays that you are currently experiencing is unlikely to produce any positive results.

Eventually, members’ pensions will be paid, and the full scale of their losses (financial and non-financial) can be evaluated.

At that point a complaint about maladministration through the scheme’s internal dispute resolution procedure can be initiated.

Members are entitled to start this process whenever they want, but the Cabinet Office has made it clear that its priority is returning the service to acceptable standards.

The Cabinet Office does not currently have the resources to process the number of complaints that are expected through its internal dispute resolution procedure.

For this reason, we believe it would be better for members to wait until later in the year to submit complaints (though it is up to members when they want to complain).

When the Cabinet Office is resourced to deal with complaints, Prospect will provide detailed guidance to members on how to engage this process.

How do the transition loans work for those waiting for delayed pension payments?

The Cabinet Office and employers moved at great speed to set up a scheme to offer support to people in financial distress due to delays in receiving their pension.

The proposal is for a scheme of personal loans to provide transitional help to individuals experiencing financial hardship due to delays to their pension payments.

The loan is to provide funds to bridge the gap until the pension is paid. It is not a form of compensation for the detriment suffered.

The loan is interest free and a single payment of £5,000. A further loan, of up to £20,000 in total, will be provided if more financial support is required for exceptional reasons.

Those who have fully retired (ie left active service) since 1 January 2025, and those who are partially retired, should apply to their former / current employer.

All other members of the Civil Service Pensions Scheme should mention their hardship to Capita so their case can be prioritsed.

Any member who has not received their pension payment on time will have suffered a detriment and will be entitled to a payment under this scheme (subject to basic ID / fraud prevention checks).

Entitlement to a further payment, beyond the basic £5,000, will be based on evidence of additional financial need.

The most serious cases will urgently need funds to deal with the financial hardship they have suffered. This scheme provides the fastest potential access to financial help.

Members should be directed to the scheme run by their (former) employer. Accessing funds through this scheme should also trigger escalation of the case with Capita.

The expectation is that all employers will offer this scheme to affected (former) employees. Please get in touch if there is any difficulty with your employer participating in this.