Capita has brought in Microsoft to help stabilise the new Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) member portal after its initial launch saw multiple login failures, broken links, and incomplete pages, leaving members unable to access or update key information.

The outsourcing firm switched on the portal on 1 December as part of its £239m, seven-year contract to provide administration services for the 1.7 million-member scheme.

But users quickly reported widespread problems, including unrecognised usernames and passwords, circular navigation paths and pages displaying placeholder copy.

Some were also unable to input essential details such as beneficiary information.

Public sector union PCS said it had been “urgently” raising complaints about the scheme after receiving a high volume of concerns from members.

In a statement to Pensions Age, the union said: “PCS officials have urgently taken the issue up with Civil Service Pension Scheme, who have advised us that Capita Pensions are taking remedial action through seeking support from Microsoft and deploying additional staff resources.”

Capita confirmed that there were early issues but said it had moved quickly with its technology partners to fix them.

“The new service went live on 1 December as part of the largest-ever on-time transition of a public sector pension scheme in the UK,” it said.

"There were teething problems with the website early last week, but we worked quickly with our partners to fix the issues.

"We are happy to confirm that, to date, 47,000 members have succeeded in registering on the site,” it told Pensions Age.

The firm stressed that Microsoft is one of several technology partners on the contract and that it had inherited a service “in need of transformation and modernisation”.

In a letter to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), Capita outlined three areas in which members had experienced delays and said it was working to resolve them.

Capita has also been scaling up staffing on the contract, telling the PAC it went live with 332 full-time equivalent employees and would shortly exceed 500, including a 16 per cent expansion of the contact centre compared with the previous provider.

It has inherited a sizeable backlog, including 132,100 complex remediation cases and more than double the expected number of unresolved items from the previous system, with rising Civil Service departures adding further strain.

In a separate statement earlier this week, Capita apologised for “any inconvenience” caused, saying an earlier system blackout and the inherited backlog had generated “several times the normal volume of contacts” during the first days of operation.

The company said more than 500 staff are now working on the contract, 50 per cent more than the former provider, and further digital improvements are planned in the coming weeks.

The Cabinet Office initially awarded Capita the CSPS administration contract in November 2023, with an option for a three-year extension.

At the beginning of December, Capita announced it had reached a voluntary recognition agreement with the PCS ahead of the administration transfer.

---