Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, how many additional staff have been deployed to clear the administrative backlog in relation to the Civil Service Pension Scheme; when the full complement of additional staff will be in place; and when the backlog will be cleared.

The Cabinet Office awarded Capita the contract to administer the Civil Service Pension Scheme in November 2023 under the previous government. The current delays facing scheme members are entirely unacceptable, and this Government has taken firm action to resolve them through a clear recovery plan with strict delivery milestones. We have deployed additional resources to expedite priority cases, ensuring that serving and former staff receive the high standard of service they deserve. Regular progress updates remain available to members via the pension portal and Gov.uk.

Capita is under a firm mandate to restore full service delivery to standard contractual levels by the end of June 2026. We are actively exploring the use of all available commercial and contractual levers and continue to withhold milestone payments for missed transition deliverables. All options remain on the table if they fail to meet the June deadline.

A dedicated 140-person government surge team was deployed to clear the 15,000 inherited unread emails and stabilise operations. This support will remain in place until Cabinet Office are satisfied service levels have been restored, with an expectation of Capita picking up the cost (to be part of the post-recovery contractual settlement).

The Cabinet Office maintains a rigorous oversight of the Civil Service Pension Scheme and has addressed Capita’s data protection failure that occurred on 30 March 2026. This incident involved a session management and document generation failure on the member portal, which enabled 138 members to view the benefit statements of other individuals. Internal investigations established that this was a technical malfunction rather than a cyber-attack, following a specific technical deployment.

Following this discovery, the Cabinet Office notified the Information Commissioner’s Office and oversaw a full root cause analysis conducted by Capita. In addition to strengthening technical controls to prevent a recurrence, the Cabinet Office mandated that Capita provide formal accounts of the incident to the Public Accounts Committee and the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee. These measures ensure that the causes of the failure are fully understood and that Capita remains accountable for the security of member information.

Regular updates on the work to recover the service, continue to be posted on the Civil Service Pensions member portal and on Gov.Uk.