Latest news with #CivilService
Telegraph
4 hours ago
- Business
- Telegraph
Why ‘naive' Labour can't fix broken Britain
Heidi Alexander became the latest Transport Secretary to deliver unwanted news regarding HS2 last week, as she unveiled yet more delays to the crisis-hit high-speed rail project. She said it brought her no joy to tell households that not only will the scheme miss its target date of 2033, but it will also cost at least £37bn more than expected. In her words, the saga was an 'appalling mess' and a 'litany of failure'. Strikingly, her comments were almost identical to those made during a public inquiry into the Edinburgh Trams system in 2023, which was completed £400m over budget and five years late. To add insult to injury, producing this report cost the taxpayer £13m. Such damning examples of troubled infrastructure projects have given rise to a simple question in recent years: why is it so hard to get anything done in this country? Until recently, Sir Keir Starmer's diagnosis was simple: 'the party opposite'. But after nearly a year of governing with the biggest majority in 25 years, the Prime Minister, who insists he is a 'builder, not a blocker', has set his sights on a new enemy. 'When Labour came in, there was an expectation that relationships with the Civil Service would be put on to a much more stable, harmonious footing after what had been a decade of quite fractious relationships,' says Patrick Diamond, a public policy expert and former special adviser to Lord Mandelson. 'Suffice to say, it really has not worked out like that.' Like his predecessors, Sir Keir is waging war on Whitehall after concluding that Britain's state machinery is broken, even despite boasting more employees than ever before. He is hardly the first to say so. Michael Gove called it the 'blob'; Liz Truss described it as the 'deep state'; and Dominic Cummings said it was 'an idea for the history books'. Sir Keir issued his own critique in December when he said that too many civil servants were comfortable in 'the tepid bath of managed decline'. According to polling from YouGov earlier this year, 52pc of all MPs believe the Civil Service works badly, compared to 40pc who think it works well. 'There is a lot of frustration in Labour circles about the way the Civil Service works and the feeling that it's making it much harder for Labour to get things done,' says Diamond. '[People worry] this is going to undermine Labour's political position because in three or four years' time, it's going to be more difficult to turn around and say, 'We've changed the country in the way that we promised in our last manifesto.'' The Prime Minister's latest effort to solve this problem appears to borrow from the playbook of Boris Johnson's former adviser, Cummings, by bringing more radical thinkers into Whitehall. He has launched a new drive to attract 'elite' talent into government to help 'rewire the state', aiming to attract people who typically would not consider a role in the Civil Service. Concern over the performance of the central government is growing despite it employing a record 4m people. That includes 550,000 civil servants, the highest number since 2006. Chaos reigns across many of the state's most crucial functions, whether that be waiting too long to see a GP or spiralling hotel bills for asylum seekers. Productivity across the public sector is still 4.6pc lower than in 2019, while the health service is 10pc less efficient than before Covid. This means that the Government is pouring ever more money into the public sector without results. This is key because voters will simply lose faith in politics if no party can achieve real change in government, according to former head of the Civil Service, Simon Case. 'If we don't fix this, we'll just end up with politicians, but even more importantly, voters getting more and more frustrated that it doesn't matter who you vote for, nothing changes,' he says. 'That is a really big problem if people increasingly turn away from voting, engaging and caring about our democracy because they think it doesn't matter any more.' Yet Sir Keir faces a mammoth challenge to turn things around. Money is tight, discontent is rife and productivity growth is lacklustre. If he cannot find a way to overhaul Whitehall, his hopes of transforming the country will evaporate as quickly as his public approval ratings have already. The HS2 fiasco – which includes £100m spent on a bat tunnel – is just one of many examples of official failure. NHS gets a health check Experts believe Labour can make most headway with voters by making good on pledges to fix the NHS. 'Labour have made improving the NHS a central part of their pitch,' says Max Warner, from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. 'The key target for this Parliament is that 92pc of those waiting for pre-planned hospital care in England should be waiting less than 18 weeks.' To this end, Rachel Reeves recently unveiled plans to give the health service a yearly £29bn boost as part of her spending review. Still, it may not be enough. 'That 18-week target has not been met now in essentially a decade,' says Warner. 'It will be really challenging to hit it by the end of this Parliament. It's more likely than not that they're not going to.' Currently, the health service is on track for a lost decade of productivity despite employing a record number of people and receiving tens of billions of pounds more in funding. 'The Government has continued to set targets for NHS productivity, but even if they hit those, hospital productivity will have only really just returned to pre-pandemic levels by the end of the Parliament or by 2028-29,' he adds. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, has shown he is not afraid of big decisions like scrapping NHS England, allegedly after no one there could tell him or Sir Keir's key adviser, Morgan McSweeney, how much it would cost to slash waiting lists. However, Alex Thomas, at the Institute for Government, warns that unwinding such a vastly complex organisation could prove to be a distraction. 'I do think [scrapping NHS England] will take up quite a lot of time and capital,' he says. 'They need to be careful that the activity they're pursuing isn't going to distract from the core objectives.' In recognition of problems within the public sector, the Government has already vowed to overhaul the Civil Service so it can push through change faster. Pat McFadden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a Cabinet minister who has for most of his life worked in the public sector, wants to run the state more like a start-up. 'If we keep governing as usual, we are not going to achieve what we want to achieve,' he said after launching secondments for private sector tech workers in government. This has been followed by pledges of holding civil servants personally responsible for achieving savings in their departments and getting rid of underperformers. Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has also said he wants to see government spending monitored in real time on a digital dashboard, an idea first floated by Cummings. This formed part of the Vote Leave architect's plans to create a new unit at No10 that would track departments' underperformance and waste in real time. 'Nobody's in charge' But Labour ministers cannot blame Whitehall for everything, observers warn. Many believe that despite having years to lay the groundwork in opposition, the new administration was not ready to rule. 'For a whole set of reasons, it just wasn't as well prepared as it could have been for power,' says Diamond. 'They came in with not that many policy commitments. There's a feeling in quite a lot of Whitehall departments that they're dealing with ministers who still have a lot to do in working out what their policy approach should be.' Some of this is down to naivety, says a former top civil servant speaking on the condition of anonymity. 'On the political side, there's a lot of frustration,' the source said. 'They thought – in the way that quite often politicians on the Left think – that they turn up, and just by the virtue of being different people, they would somehow be able to make it better, which is kind of quite naive. They're discovering that actually governing is hard. People don't often appreciate that making change happen is boring and hard.' Ministers are frustrated with the Civil Service and how Whitehall operates, complaining of an aversion to risk-taking, slow processes and uninspiring advice. It begs the question whether the British state's problem is the people who lead it, those who execute their vision or the system itself. Case, who was the most senior civil servant from 2020 to 2024, believes it is the system itself that has become far too complex and slow. 'The way we have organised our state means that it is extremely difficult to alter the status quo,' he says. 'The thing that isn't fair is that people say this is all down to the Civil Service. The Civil Service is actually only one very small part of the machinery of the state. 'At the heart of this lies the problem of power in the UK being far more diffuse than it used to be. The problem with the diffusion is that it feels like so many bodies are now responsible. What it can feel like to prime ministers is almost everybody's in charge, so nobody's in charge.' Case is not alone in this assessment. It is an opinion shared by Diamond, who is now a public policy lecturer at Queen Mary University of London after working in Tony Blair's government earlier in his career. 'What people underappreciate is that there isn't this thing called government that is a single bureaucracy where everybody works together and is coordinated,' he says. 'Most of these public services are vastly complex sets of organisations, some of which are not directly linked to each other, not accountable to each other or not directly controlled by ministers. 'The idea that there is just this lever you can pull ... Those levers are actually very hard to find, and even when you pull them, it doesn't necessarily mean that something's going to happen.' This is a common criticism from those who have experienced the Civil Service from the inside. Layers and layers of bureaucracy have, over time, created a system where no single employee has much agency or responsibility. As a result, when you are in the belly of the beast, getting anything done is difficult. 'People commonly talk about the great problems we have with getting things built in this country, whether that's houses or infrastructure,' says Case. 'They start to list off all of the different bodies that are statutory consultees, who get a say over how you're building your road or how you're building a nuclear power station. 'Each one of these may have been a sensible decision, but the problem is nobody over the decades has stopped to think about the accumulation of each of these. It should not take 10 years to build a nuclear power station.' Bloated bureaucracy This view is echoed by another former, anonymous civil servant. 'A change of government doesn't change lots of the ways that our state is just totally bent out of shape, and lots of things don't work,' they said. 'You can't fix those things overnight. 'You've got far too many people. Big organisations with lots of bureaucrats are just a nightmare. It means every individual job is less interesting. You've got much less space to operate in, and many more people to have to check with about whether what you're doing is going to interfere with what they're doing. It just begets a kind of endless meetings culture.' The Civil Service has swelled by 134,000 staff from a low point of 416,000 in late 2016, meaning that the bulk of austerity headcount cuts have now been reversed. While some of this rise reflects that the UK needs more administrators post-Brexit, ministers are keen to stem the rise. The Government is poised to cull as many as 50,000 civil servant jobs in the coming years in a push to find savings. It comes after Covid created a politically contentious culture of working from home that has become hard to undo. Departments such as the Treasury still only have an office attendance of 63pc, the latest available figures for March show. Figures released by the Cabinet Office also showed long-term sickness among civil servants hit a post-Covid high in the year to March 2023, the latest data available. 'Not being in the office has made people feel a lot less part of a collective,' says the former civil servant. 'There's just a kind of passivity and a sense of helplessness on both sides. I don't think either the ministers or the civil servants in government feel very powerful.' There are also questions over Whitehall's ability to attract and retain the best talent. Despite fast-growing wages in recent years and gold-plated pensions, many jobs attract far worse pay than in the private sector. As a result, the Civil Service cannot expect the best candidates, insiders say. 'If you're really good, you will literally be able to double your salary by going and working in the private sector, doing what counts as pretty much the same job,' the former civil servant says. 'The Civil Service should be about half the size at least, and the people should be paid more. It doesn't make financial sense for a very clever person in their early 30s to choose to be a civil servant.' Pay will only become a more salient factor as the Government seeks to adopt artificial intelligence to make efficiencies, experts warn. Diamond is adamant that the Government must pay to hire the best, particularly as the likes of Meta offer £74m signing-on bonuses to poach leading AI researchers. 'The tension has always been the question of whether civil servants should be paid more than the Prime Minister,' says Diamond. 'If you think about trying to recruit people out of the technology sector who can do all sorts of AI processes the Government's going to need, the idea that it is unacceptable to pay them more than the Prime Minister is a bit naive given what it would take to attract such people. Thomas, at the Institute for Government, adds: 'There is legitimate concern about the extent of specialist skills in the Civil Service, the speed of staff churn and people moving around. There needs to be a really clear focus on skills and capability, and building that in order so that ministers can get things done.' Cutting the fat The Civil Service needs to be scaled back to improve performance, he believes. 'There should be more rounds of compulsory redundancy and compulsory exit in the Civil Service based on performance,' says Thomas. 'You talk to most civil servants, and they are frustrated with how performance isn't well managed. 'Some of these mutually agreed exits and cuts that are going to have to come following the spending review's reduction in administrative budgets are an opportunity for the Civil Service to get more match fit.' Like other experts, he believes the central Whitehall machinery, such as the Cabinet Office, needs to be overhauled. The Government is in the process of slimming it down, but Thomas says: 'There's definitely further to go to get a No 10 Cabinet Office machine that's really humming.' A quagmire of quangos, a big and unwieldy Civil Service and ministers still finding their feet give a flavour of Labour's teething issues. Even a tentative proposal to scrap the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and hand its responsibilities to bigger, better-resourced departments appears to have been judged too ambitious and quietly shelved. These challenges explain why Sir Keir, after less than a year in power, is voicing opinions similar to those of Cummings. 'It's not that the civil servants are anti-Labour or anti any other particular party. I think the challenge is that change is always more challenging,' says Clive Betts, the Labour MP for Sheffield South East. 'The other problem is, in this social media age... you go on your computer and immediately say, 'This needs to be done', and you assume that it can be done. I had emails within two weeks of the last election saying, 'Why haven't you done taxi licencing, why haven't you changed it?' 'We know what needs to be done. But the process of getting it changed, and the actual details of the change and how you write the new legislation will take some time. The public, I think, is less understanding of those challenges,' Betts says. With Britain facing an acute housing crisis, more than 6m people waiting for hospital treatment and Europe's highest industrial energy prices, there is much to do and little time. After only 11 months in charge, Labour is trailing Reform in the polls and Sir Keir's personal rating is in the doldrums. Mandelson's former adviser, Diamond, points out that Blair confessed to only finding his stride with the Whitehall machinery in his second term. Sir Keir may not have that luxury.
Irish Times
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Trinity calls pest control with lucrative new contract to tackle rats and other problems
Ireland's universities hope to benefit from the US crackdown on academic free expression . ACivil Service special-ops squad has been deployed to San Francisco to talk up our merits and colleges are already well aware of the value of American undergrads , who pay top non-EU fees. In advance of the hoped-for arrival of exiles, Ireland's oldest university, Trinity College Dublin , is cleaning up its act. This week it issued a €1 million tender for pest control. The job encompasses both the city-centre campus and the college's many satellite sites, including buildings at St James's Hospital and, intimidatingly for any ratter, the boat club at Islandbridge. About 68 per cent of the buildings on campus are more than 100 years old, and being a university brings unique challenges for pest control. The challenges range from bed bugs to carpet moths and something called 'booklice', termite-like little creatures that may menace the more than six million printed volumes in the various libraries and repositories. The lucky bidder will inherit more than 200 existing rodent monitoring points, which they will be expected to upgrade, along with baiting and carcass collection duties. The standard rotation is eight visits a year, though certain sites – including cafes, the nursing school and the science building – will get 12. Still, can't be worse than Manhattan. READ MORE The Monk on stage Rex Ryan as Gerry Hutch in The Monk, at the Glass Mask on Dawson Street The reviews are in for The Monk, the cafe-theatrical one-man show about Gerry Hutch written, directed and performed by Rex Ryan , son of another Gerry. Critical consensus is mixed for the play at the Glass Mask on Dawson Street in Dublin, with praise for the 'superb' performance and staging (Daily Mail), the 'fascinating portrait' of its subject (Sunday Independent) and the 'not boring' experience in general (Sunday World) – something far from guaranteed in a theatre that has introduced audiences to a string of challenging European expressionist pieces in recent months. But there are moral and other quandaries raised by the semi-fictionalised multimedia extravaganza. The 'mishmash of fact and fiction' is 'sometimes an uncomfortable watch for the wrong reasons', says the Mail. It's like 'A Christmas Carol, with added misery, and without the redeemable protagonist,' says The Irish Independent. The Sunday World muses that 'there may be' objections to the 'somewhat glamorising' portrayal of the gangland figure. The Monk is a man you might not want to annoy by, for example, staging an entire play where you dress up as him and re-enact important moments of his life in a fashion that recalls a more miserable Christmas Carol. But Ryan says Hutch doesn't seem to mind. 'I don't give a bo***x, Rex,' was the exact verdict from Hutch himself, Ryan told the Sunday Independent's Barry Egan. Shamrock shake-up Síofra the Shamrock is back on the shelves. Photograph: Brown Thomas Welcome back Síofra the Shamrock, the limited edition plush toy that returned to sale this week after what can only be described as a period of enforced scarcity in the wake of her St Patrick's Day launch. Síofra is 'a charming, cuddly celebration of Irishness', which is to say a stuffed shamrock with a smiling face. She's no regular teddy, however: she's a Jellycat, part of a range of virally collectable baby toys focused, perplexingly, on desirable bourgeois lifestyle foods. On the shelves of Arnotts in Dublin currently are the likes of a cinnamon roll, a bowl of oats and a wedge of Brie – all in teddy form. Those with suitcases full of Beanie Babies in the attic might be feeling once bitten twice shy, but people go wild for Jellycats in a very similar fashion. Some buy them for babies, sure, but plenty of adults feel compelled to complete the collection, and harbour daydreams about the future cash value of their stash. There were queues up Grafton Street outside Brown Thomas – and a larger-than-life Síofra to pose with – which produced plenty of content for the video-sharing platform TikTok last time for influencers. It brought plenty of hype for the British brand's own account, which is followed by 1.8 million people. Desirable items are readily resold online. There was a Síofra from the first batch available on Adverts online sales platform this week for €90, while Marcus Mussel was going for more than €250 on online second-hand clothes shop, Vinted. This can make them a target for shoplifters. Legit fans who make it to Brown Thomas or Arnotts, where the shops issue new 'drops' each day for a limited period, can expect to pay €30 for their 12cm of Irish charm. [ Killiney WhatsApp chats ablaze again with a new debate about goats Opens in new window ] The green, green grass of home Mow row: 'All hell broke loose' over a Castleisland patch of grass. Photograph: Alamy/PA No awards for Castleisland , Co Kerry, in the 32-county Best Kept Towns competition won by Naas in Co Kildare this week. And no wonder, given the level of political turmoil over keeping a patch of grass cut. 'All hell broke loose,' The Kerryman reports, at a Kerry County Council meeting over a letter sent by Sinn Féin offering to deploy members to mow the grass on an estate if the council would not do it. Jackie Healy-Rae jnr, of the Kerry political dynasty, insisted a €900 lawnmower had already been purchased for the residents and Independent councillor Charlie Farrelly demanded an apology from the Sinn Féin members over the letter, 'sarcastically implying' that the 'Army Council' had sent it. This went down roughly how something like this would go down in the Dáil: ructions, rancour, appeals to the chair, calls to withdraw. Farrelly said he would withdraw the Army Council remark, which was intended 'in jest', but he still wasn't happy about the letter. Sinn Féin councillor Robert Brosnan decried the 'dirty digs' and ultimately he and his party colleagues stormed out. There is no update on the status of the grass. Fine, okay People celebrate Bloomsday on Dublin's North Great George's Street. Photograph: Dan Dennison Christmas comes earlier every year and Bloomsday is lasting longer. But six weeks on from this column's first reference of the year, this is the last, I promise. Our sympathies with the Joyceans of China, where the Irish consulate spent the past week in the cities of Shanghai, Nanjing and Suzhou bringing the complicated novel to new audiences. One cultural issue: there's no word 'Yes' in Mandarin. In the last chapter of Ulysses, the only one in Molly Bloom's voice, the word 'Yes' features more than 80 times. The last part of the last line, as erudite Irish Times readers no doubt already know, goes like this: 'And his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.' The American writer and translator Brendan O'Kane notes that one translation into Chinese, by Jin Di, opts for 'really', giving: 'and his heart was going like mad and really I said I will Really'. But our favourite is Xiao Qian and Wen Jieruo's version – 'by far the most widely read', says O'Kane. This goes with '好吧' – 'okay, fine.' This gives us the climactic line: 'Okay I said okay fine OKAY.' Which is also Overheard's position on cutting down on the Joyce references.
The Sun
4 days ago
- Business
- The Sun
Bungling civil servants face major probe over HS2 fiasco – as project delayed yet again and costs spiral out of control
BUNGLING civil servants could face a major investigation over the HS2 fiasco - as the project is delayed yet again and costs spiral out of control. Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander today confirmed there is 'no route' to hitting the 2033 target for trains to run between London and Birmingham. 2 2 And she revealed the Prime Minister has asked the Cabinet Secretary to consider whether mandarins and public bodies should face a formal probe for their role in the chaos. A source close to Ms Alexander told The Sun: 'We will make sure this mess can never happen again. 'That's why the Prime Minister has asked the Cabinet Secretary to immediately look at the role of the Civil Service and the wider public sector in HS2 – including whether an investigation is needed.' The high-speed line was originally due to open in 2026 and stretch to Manchester and Leeds - but only the London to Birmingham leg remains, and even that now faces delays of two years or more. Ms Alexander did not confirm a new completion date or cost, which some suggest could exceed £100billion - far above the official £57billion estimate at 2019 prices. She said she was 'drawing a line in the sand' after what she called a 'litany of failure' spanning 15 years, with billions wasted on ineffective contracts, repeated changes, and scrapped designs - including £250million blown on two rejected station plans for Euston. Two reviews published yesterday laid bare the scale of the failure: one by new HS2 boss Mark Wild warned the current scope, schedule and budget were 'unsustainable', while another by infrastructure adviser James Stewart blasted weak oversight and inconsistent ministerial involvement. Ms Alexander said the previous government had pressed ahead with construction contracts despite a 2020 review warning against it, and that a Sunak-era ministerial taskforce for Euston 'never even met.' She promised a reset, with a new 10-Year Infrastructure Strategy, fresh governance boards, and the appointment of former TfL boss Mike Brown - who helped deliver Crossrail - as HS2 Ltd's new chair. She told MPs it would take 'a number of months' to confirm a final schedule and budget. But Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said the whole scheme should be scrapped, blasting: 'Let's scrap HS2, let's use the tens of billions of pounds we can save in the next decade to upgrade railway lines across the entirety of the United Kingdom to the benefit of many millions, and spend the rest on other national priorities.' Ms Alexander hit back: 'We are not going to be a country that spends over £30 billion on rail infrastructure but then never sees a train running on it... "
Daily Mail
4 days ago
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Ex-Cabinet Secretary Simon Case is handed peerage despite grovelling apology for Covid WhatsApps branding officials 'feral' and 'pygmies'
A former head of the Civil Service has been handed a peerage despite controversy over his time at the heart of government. Simon Case, who stood down as Cabinet secretary last year after four years, will become a crossbencher former national security adviser Tim Barrow, it has been announced. Lord Case, a former aide to the Prince of Wales, served under four prime ministers between 202 and 2024, leading the Civil Service during the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the funeral of Elizabeth II. But his tenure was not without controversy. He was forced to recuse himself from leading an investigation into the ' Partygate ' scandal following allegations his own office had held a Christmas event during lockdown - though he was not one of those fined over the scandal. In 2023, evidence presented to the UK Covid-19 Inquiry revealed he was often exasperated by the Johnson administration. Messages revealed he found Mr Johnson's style of working 'very frustrating' and described his day-to-day administration as 'dysfunctional'. In July 2020, before he became Cabinet Secretary, he told a friend: 'I've never seen a bunch of people less well-equipped to run a country.' He also described Mr Johnson and his inner circle as 'basically feral'. Others to be given peerages include Olympic gold medalist Katherine Grainger and former John Lewis chairwoman Sharon White. Baroness Grainger, now chairwoman of the British Olympic Association (BOA), is Britain's most decorated female rower. In addition to winning gold at the 2012 London Olympics, she won four silver medals – in 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2016 – and six world championship titles. Baroness Grainger then spent eight years as chairwoman of UK Sport before leaving the post this year and taking up the leadership of the BOA. Lord Barrow played a key role in Brexit negotiations as the UK's representative to the EU between 2017 and 2021, before becoming national security adviser under Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. He had been lined up by Mr Sunak to take over as ambassador to the US, but the change of government last year led to Sir Keir Starmer appointing Lord Peter Mandelson instead. Baroness White was the first black person and second woman to become a permanent secretary at the Treasury, before serving as CEO of Ofcom between 2015 and 2019. She then chaired John Lewis between 2020 and 2024.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Civil Service blows £239m of taxpayers' cash on ‘failed' pension administrator
Taxpayers will foot a £239m bill for a new civil servants' pension scheme administrator despite the company's 'failing' track record, its critics have said. Outsourcing giant Capita will run the Civil Service Pension Scheme from December, which involves handling £7bn in pension contributions and making payments of almost £8bn a year to retirees. However, the Cabinet Office has already withheld almost £10m in contractual payments after the company missed vital deadlines while taking over from the scheme's current administrators, a National Audit Office (NAO) report said. Capita previously administered the Teachers' Pension Scheme for 27 years, but Government officials opted to switch to a new provider in 2023 amid a string of delays. Earlier this year it emerged teachers had been left waiting months for pension payouts, while some were unable to file for divorce due to administrative failures. Capita said at the time that it was experiencing delays in calculating cash equivalent transfer values, which provide a cash value for the pension someone has built up and are often requested by people transferring it elsewhere or getting divorced. The provider is now facing legal action over the backlog. There are 1.7 million members of the Civil Service Pension Scheme, which has almost £189bn in pension liabilities. The seven-year contract was awarded in November 2023 and Capita will take over running the scheme from December. The terms include a two-year transition from the current administrator MyCSP. However, MPs said Capita had already missed three of its six milestones during the transition period, and the Cabinet Office subsequently withheld £9.6m in payments. In its role, Capita will be required to maintain members' records, calculate and pay pensions, manage contributions and deal with queries from members and employers. The outsourcing giant will now operate a simplified IT solution to avoid further delays, reducing the service offered to both scheme members and employers until at least March 2026, the NAO said. Capita previously spent 27 years running the Teachers' Pension Scheme, beginning in 1996. It received multiple renewals that cost taxpayers more than £170m, but the Department for Education handed the new 10-year £223m contract to Indian IT company Tata in June 2023. Last year Capita also lost its £107m contract for managing SATs tests. Shimeon Lee, of the TaxPayers' Alliance said: 'It's hard to believe that such a massive pension scheme has been handed to a company with a track record of losing contracts. 'While Civil Service pensions do desperately need reform, it's vital that the system itself is robust and efficient. The Cabinet Office must get tougher on poor performance and handing taxpayers' cash to failing contractors who can't deliver.' A Capita spokesperson said: 'Capita is proud to be working in partnership with the Cabinet Office to modernise the administration of the Civil Service Pension Scheme from December 2025. 'While the NAO report reflects the status of our transition to scheme administrator in May, we have since met the referenced milestones and are on track to deliver enhanced, innovative services for members for when the contract commences. 'We remain committed to offering seamless, tailored experiences to all Civil Service Pension Scheme members.' The Cabinet Office was contacted for comment. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
