Civil Service Pensions

Alison Bennett Excerpts

Monday 26th October 2026 Commons Chamber

[Sally Jameson]

I am absolutely disgusted to hear about the experience of my hon. Friend’s constituents with the Capita hotline and will be taking that up with Capita myself. It is totally unacceptable. No one in Capita right now should have the time to laugh, frankly; they should be spending every waking minute working to resolve their failures and the crisis that our retired civil servants are facing.

[Alison Bennett (Mid Sussex) (LD)]

I have many constituents who are caught up in this hell—this limbo. Some of them have been waiting for more than a year. However, I also have teachers writing to me concerned about the transfer of the teachers’ pension scheme from Capita to Tata that is now under way. Thinking about lessons learned, what advice would the Minister offer to her counterpart in the Department for Education?

[Sally Jameson]

I will be discussing with the Department for Education the lessons that we have learned from this transfer. Capita has shown publicly how terribly it has been—you do not have to look far to find a constituent who has been affected by this. We absolutely must improve these services going forward, which is why we are exploring in-house models. We want to have a big wave of insourcing, because we can no longer be totally reliant on these companies that let us down time and again.