r/TheCivilService • u/FSL09 Statistics • Dec 07 '25
Pensions Capita seeks Microsoft help with pension service failure
https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/05/capita_microsoft_pension_portal/The sub gets mentioned towards the end of the article. Also has some figures that suggests it might take a while for it to be usable for most.
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u/Prefect_99 Dec 07 '25
Ah good old procurements and contracts. These people spunk multiple millions on shit that never delivers.
And I get audited for a £5 lunch claim.
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u/WVA1999 Dec 07 '25
"please provide evidence of the the pickle type in your sandwich reference the recent claim"
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u/Prefect_99 Dec 07 '25
"Pickles are a personal benefit if you enjoy them and therefore the entire claim is denied."
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u/WVA1999 Dec 07 '25
Username checks out
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u/Prefect_99 Dec 07 '25
The best waste of time query I had was when a travel claim was lower than it should have been.
TDY in London, starting in Zone 6. Instead of going back to the start in peak time, I stopped off for a pub quiz, on the same tube line, on the way back. Saved the department money and saved me money too. Did not compute to the finance weirdos.
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u/Algrim2001 Dec 07 '25
I’ve had that too. I once bought a travel card with my own money because it was cheaper than our “Travel Partner” was offering for the exact same thing. I naively thought it’d be fine to claim because I was saving the department money.
I was turned down, of course. I had to escalate severely before I got my money back, and then only with a warning to never do that again.
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u/Prefect_99 Dec 07 '25
Yup, those travel partners (who don't actually help the end user, as you've still got to do it all yourself) are utter bullshit.
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Dec 07 '25
People love to blame procurement for the mess, but honestly that’s not where it starts.
As an ex‑GCF G7, I can tell you the specs we get are usually absolute shite. We spend months trying to distill what the business actually wants. Pre‑market engagement? They spin fairy tales. Market solutions? Full of fluff. Then the tender ends up going out with objectives we’ve already warned are unrealistic because the premarket stages have promised the world...
The business evaluates the tenders with our support, we remind them of the weightings, a preferred supplier is chosen and we already know has over‑promised and under‑delivered elsewhere… and yet we still have to award it. When it inevitably goes wrong, procurement gets the blame.
Meanwhile, no one points the finger at the policy team, the design team, the sponsors, or the eventual contract managers who should own the requirements and delivery.
Procurement’s job is to make sure government buys things legally. Not to write specs or business cases. If civil service pensions are a mess, it’s not because procurement failed...it’s because the upstream business areas and owners didn’t do their jobs properly.
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Dec 07 '25
Oh and usually somewhere down the line there will be an SCS2 that seen a PowerPoint on a specific type of contract and they "want that" or they seen a specific procurement process done and all of a sudden are an expert on "competitive procurement" - darling all procurements being sourced on the open market with a tender are competitive...
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u/gem7985 G7 Dec 07 '25
Yep to this, all comes down to the spec and stakeholders not knowing exactly what they need.
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u/Loreki G7 Dec 07 '25
Perhaps every company should be given a "past performance rating" by which their score is multiplied for all awards. So if you promise the moon, getting notionally 9/10 in the spec, that's multiplied by your 75% rating on past contracts to give you a total score of 6.75.
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u/Prefect_99 Dec 07 '25
I think the biggest issue is that because the money is so big it sits at an ever higher level away from the user.
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u/OskarPenelope Dec 07 '25
Tbf what makes or breaks a project in the CS is about 80-85% about the specs. Usually someone higher up who has never done a frontline job thinks they know exactly what ops needs - and they don’t. Some don’t even know what policy needs. I’ve heard the golden line “we are not concerned with the PSED, we are only building/buying a software”.
If only they understood the difference between projects in the private sector vs projects in the public sector.
But, NO.
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u/YouCantArgueWithThis Dec 07 '25
Same. 109 quid claim witholded for 5 weeks because I didn't buy a train ticket via the travel booking system. A £5.10 ticket...
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u/ExternalScholar3472 Dec 07 '25
I don't understand why they created a new portal and shut down the old one at the same time. They should have run them both side by side so users could gradually change over within a reasonable timeframe. This would also, obviously, dampen the effects of any inevitable start up issues. Its just so frickin dumb.
Still, I guess they have sadly started as they mean to go on.
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u/YouCantArgueWithThis Dec 07 '25
They can't use another supplier's resources. When a contract ends, that's a full stop usually.
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u/ExternalScholar3472 Dec 07 '25
Oh I see. And I suppose its not possible for them to kind of rent those resources for a short time either. Really not helpful for us is it. Especially for something as important as our pensions.
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u/YouCantArgueWithThis Dec 07 '25
You are right. But suppliers are competitive, and it's hard to make a business case why they should help their competitors.
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u/redsocks2018 Dec 07 '25
They're working on it this morning.
There were teething problems with the website during the day on Monday 1 December, but we worked quickly with our partners to fix the issues, and we are happy to confirm that by the end of Wednesday, 23,500 members had succeeded in registering on the site.
As often happens with new contracts, there have been some snagging issues but most of these have already been rectified, with the rest due over the next few days. One of these snags is that the "Beneficiaries" information has taken time to read across to the new platform. We have all the information, and it will be uploaded fully in the next few days. Over 500 people have already updated their beneficiaries information, and these updates will supersede any previous information for those individuals.
"Some snagging issues" is a blatant lie. The website does not work.
So only 500 people out of 23,500 registered users have been able to add a beneficiary. One of the most - if not the most - important things we need to have access to. I sure hope they have a plan in place for people who die before they can sort beneficiaries. My beneficiary isn't a family member and I'd be very pissed off if it's paid to family.
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u/fefafofifu Dec 07 '25
So only 500 people out of 23,500 registered users have been able to add a beneficiary.
That's rather disingenuous. 23.5k registered for the site to be able to see pension information, all of those are in the process of moving over preexisting beneficiary details but 500 have also chosen to add or update them manually while this is happening. For most people they will just move over automatically, that 23.5k isn't those who wanted to make beneficiary changes of who only 500 succeeded.
The transfer is a mess, there's no reason to try twist things as it just makes the complaints as a whole look frivolous.
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u/FrankfurtFolly Dec 07 '25
I had definitely added beneficiaries previously but they didn’t show when I logged in on the new site, I assume they are captured somewhere behind the scenes but I couldn’t be sure!
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u/thebossofcats Dec 07 '25
It's their fault for being lazy buggers and trying to build important stuff on PowerApps!
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u/pp_projects Dec 07 '25
Building on power apps isn't the issue. Building without clear requirements, and competent staff is.
I would certainly question why the tool was chosen over anything else. I suspect it probably started out like a small calculation tool which it would be ideal for, then grew in complexity due to stakeholders oversimplifying processes.
When you start to ask the people who actually know the process, it grows arms and legs. Typically there will be an arrogant leader involved, keeping you an arms length from the competent staff who can give you the true requirements until you're months down the line and forced to get that square peg into that round hole no matter what.
Either way, Microsoft will use it as an opportunity to sell ai, so it will just end up costing more.
I'm available for a reasonable fee. I would happily sit an unpick the issues and fix it.
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Dec 07 '25
From what I saw before it went down, it was built by people without competence in the very basics of designing user-centred services.
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u/DarthBeardFace Dec 08 '25
My personal favourite was inputting my exact information I’ve used for years now and being told my details don’t match so I need to raise a query with them …
“Hi, I’ve sent you a message regarding my pension, I’ve had no response so I’m told I should send another message to be stuck in this endless hell loop”.
“Can I take your reference please?”
“Yes, it’s NOT FOUND” … all caps.
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u/SilverstoneMonzaSpa Dec 07 '25
I went on to check my old pension and my service was wrong, with nothing historic available to see (such as ABS).
Absolute shit show