Nick Thomas-Symonds MP: speeches

Speeches

• 6 Jul 2026 · Civil Service Pensions · Hansard source

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  To take the hon. Lady’s final point first, yes, bereavement cases are being prioritised. Capita’s current working assumption is that the remaining backlog of over 6,700 quotations for past retirement dates and the 4,100 actionable bereavement cases will be systemically cleared through the rest of July and August, and I hope this House will hold it to that timetable. More broadly, the hon. Lady is absolutely right about learning the lessons from this situation and robustly holding Capita to account. That is why, as the House will be aware, I took the decision to end, for example, its contract for the Royal Mail pension scheme. The House can be assured that I will not hesitate to take robust action. On the hon. Lady’s other point, which I think is a central one, I am always very conscious—contrary to what the shadow Minister says—of the operational position week to week in order to ensure that I am still driving the improvement of this pension scheme to the level it should be at.

• 6 Jul 2026 · Civil Service Pensions · Hansard source

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  I am quite astonished by the shadow Minister’s contribution. The House should be in no doubt that the previous Government signed a 10-year contract in November 2023. That is the situation we were left with, and I have been grappling with it throughout my time in office. The idea that I have put ideology above operational urgency is utter and total nonsense. I have intervened strongly at every single opportunity, and I have held Capita to account on its milestones time and again, to the tune of £9.9 million, in a way that the previous Government never did. I have a lot more sympathy with the shadow Minister on his point about compensation. We have introduced a process to pay interest in respect of pensions paid by Capita from 1 December 2025, whereby full benefits are paid more than one month after retirement. The interest rate applied will be based on the Bank of England base rate plus 1% for the period of the delay between retirement and payment. That information has formally been published on a civil service pension website, and members will have the opportunity to ask for other losses to be covered as part of the complaints process. As for the rest of the shadow Minister’s comments, I think he will struggle to find anyone who has been as robust as I have been in holding Capita to account.

• 6 Jul 2026 · Civil Service Pensions · Hansard source

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  To my right hon. Friend’s first point: yes, of course, the stakeholder group includes PCS. His question on Capita being awarded the contract in the first place is a valid one. It is fair to say that the previous pension provider was certainly not providing a sufficient level of performance, but, as he will have heard in my answer to the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Kingswinford and South Staffordshire (Mike Wood), the contract was signed in November 2023; we inherited a long-term contract and I have been trying to deal with the issue since.

• 6 Jul 2026 · Civil Service Pensions · Hansard source

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  I want to provide the House with an important update on the administration of the civil service pension scheme. Capita was awarded this contract in November 2023. It had two years of transition to prepare, and its senior leadership gave me explicit personal assurances ahead of the handover that they were fully capable of managing the workload and that they were ready for a successful transition. Indeed, the chief executive promised that technological improvements would create a flagship use case for the largest AI-enabled pension scheme in the country. It is clear that non-delivery of technology has been a fundamental part of Capita’s inability to deliver. The reality is that it was completely unprepared and its system was overwhelmed, which resulted in a backlog that skyrocketed to a staggering 120,000 unresolved cases. In response, I intervened immediately and established the Cabinet Office pensions recovery taskforce. Capita committed to two critical recovery targets: an end of April milestone to clear the inherited arrears, and an end of June milestone by which point it promised a complete return to standard contractually required levels. Capita missed its own April milestone. The end of June deadline has arrived, and I regret to inform the House that Capita has failed to meet that milestone, too. Seven months on from taking over operations, too many pension scheme members still face unacceptable delays after years of dedicated public service. Since my last statement on this matter, thousands of quotations have been issued and pensions put into payment. Capita had committed to clearing the quotes backlog by today, but I am afraid that the reality remains very different. As of the end of June, there are still more than 6,700 quotations outstanding for past retirement dates, and more than 4,100 bereavement cases on which Capita could take action. These are the most harrowing stories, affecting devastated scheme members and grieving families. My officials have forcefully escalated those systemic back-office failures directly to Capita’s senior leadership, demanding an immediate investigation and resolution. I have to be frank with the House: what progress has been achieved is due to the significant additional capability provided by the Cabinet Office pensions recovery taskforce, and a team of more than 140 officials whom I have “surged” into the process. Let me also say that public money will not fund Capita’s failings. We will recover every single penny of these surge costs directly from Capita, and I will not remove a single member of the team until the service is permanently fixed and fully restored. Across core areas of pension payments, quotations and complaints, the operational reality remains deeply concerning, and although the speed of quote issuance has accelerated over the past month, it still leaves more than 6,700 outstanding quotes to be processed, as of the end of June, for past retirement dates. Let me turn to the subject of parliamentary correspondence. The volume of MP complaints remains too high—there are more than 1,900 outstanding constituent cases. I understand that Capita resolved nearly 700 last week, but another 500 or so complaints were raised, so this remains all too current an issue. When I last reported to the House, the figure stood at 1,500. The growth of the backlog is completely unacceptable. Capita has clearly failed to manage the correspondence effectively, to the extent that I have had to ask the pensions recovery taskforce to step in. Indeed, the situation has been so faltering that the Parliamentary Secretary at the Cabinet Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton Test (Satvir Kaur), has written to Mr Speaker about it. Because of Capita’s persistent failures, alongside a wider, completely unacceptable failure in its overall MP engagement, demonstrated—as was reported to me by Members from across the House—by a poorly co-ordinated MP drop-in session at the end of May, I had to intervene again. I ordered the pensions recovery taskforce to take direct operational control and establish virtual surgeries for MPs and caseworkers running every weekday. I hope that has provided at least a direct route for parliamentary offices to try to secure updates. Since I launched that initiative in May, we have delivered more than 250 virtual surgeries, supporting more than 150 Members from across the House. Let me now turn to the steps that I am taking to protect scheme members. I have no doubt that all Members will agree with me that the service that Capita has provided has been dreadful. We need to take further robust measures. First, I will continue to apply the most stringent commercial levers. We are executing robust, continuous action with immediate financial consequences. We have already hit Capita’s bottom line by withholding £9.9 million in payments, because the Government will only ever pay for what is successfully delivered. I find this failure remarkable in the light of the personal assurances given to me by the chief executive ahead of the transfer. Those assurances have not been met. Core outputs are deficient, and Capita is failing even to make basic functionality work. I know that many Members are calling for the immediate termination of the contract and the insourcing of the service, but if I were to terminate the contract straightaway, that would clearly cause severe disruption to the payroll. I have to manage this so that the payroll is operated effectively; what I cannot do is create an immediate, catastrophic operational vacuum. I cannot replace a complex pension operation overnight. However, I have instructed my officials to bring together a broad range of stakeholders and experts to consider, in line with the Government’s strategy, how scheme members can best be served by a long-term, durable delivery of the scheme. Let no one think that I or the Government are accepting the status quo. This episode highlights the severe limitations of outsourcing the civil service pension scheme. I say openly to the House that if I could insource this operation today, I would do so. None the less, it is Government policy to insource, in line with our manifesto commitment to deliver “the biggest wave of insourcing of public services in a generation”, and this pension scheme could be a prime candidate for insourcing in the future. That future is being actively shaped by the Government’s announcement on 17 June of a new public interest test that will end outsourcing by default. From April 2027, all contracts over £1 million in value must be assessed for in-house viability before renewal, and Departments exceeding £100 million in annual spend must develop five-year insourcing strategies. This framework builds the exact long-term capability that we need, shifting our focus from short-term pricing to service quality and operational resilience. To ensure full accountability, we are executing our contractual right to deploy independent auditors immediately to conduct a technical review of systems, data integrity and compliance with statutory duties. We are also beginning the process to appoint a remedial adviser, at Capita’s expense, to force rectification directly on the ground. I am not ruling out further interventions, but we need to build the unvarnished evidence base that will serve as a strict prerequisite for further formal escalation, including potential litigation or step-in remedies, should performance fail to improve. In October, the House will receive a further update on the findings of the independent audit, the performance of the remedial adviser and the longer-term structural options being considered, including meeting our manifesto commitment by bringing the scheme in-house. Let me finish by saying this. Public servants who dedicated their working lives to this country deserve absolute financial security and unwavering dignity in retirement, not corporate failure, empty promises and severe administrative failure. I hope the House will see the uncompromising line in the sand that I am drawing today. I will continue to apply commercial pressure and ensure full accountability, and we will find a way forward that delivers for the people who deliver for this country. I commend this statement to the House.