Turning moribund government bodies into sparkling, efficient organisations owned by their staff is one of Francis Maude’s flagship policies. The cabinet office minister has a vision of millions of public employees setting up their own mini John Lewises and selling their services back to the state.
But becoming a mutual is no guarantee that services will improve, as the recent fiasco at pensions mutual MyCSP highlights. The Liverpool-based company, which employs 350 staff, spun out of the public sector in 2011. Its job is to run the civil service pension scheme.
Until September, responsibility for paying the scheme’s 660,000 pensioners remained with private company Capita. But on 16 September, MyCSP transferred all pension payments in-house and shifted its 1.5 million members to a single administration system. MyCSP says it notified those affected by the administrative change two weeks before the changeover, and updated its website and gave call centre staff intensive training. The letter to pensioners and those on deferred pensions from Tony Odams de Zylva, head of the pension schemes executive, said: “Your pension payments will not be affected by this change. You will continue to receive your pension in the same way and on the same date.”
Despite two years of preparation, however, things didn’t quite work out as planned. Although most pensions were still paid on time, some were delayed, mainly lump sum payments to new pensioners. That caused huge anxiety.
“I am one of those retired civil servants who has not received my pension. I have had no response to emails. I have just been holding on the phone for 80 minutes and still didn’t get through. As I live in the US this is becoming a costly experience,” says one irate former civil servant.
MyCSP admits a change in banking arrangements has led to longer currency conversion times in some cases for pensioners living overseas. To add insult to injury, as well as the delays themselves, MyCSP members living overseas are furious at the lack of response when they tried to contact the organisation. One email from MyCSP asked pensioners “not to contact us via any other channel as there is a risk that different communication chains could lead to duplication and delay an effective response. This is an auto response so please do not reply to this email.”
When concerned pensioners did get through to the call centre, often after a long wait, they found MyCSP staff friendly – but unable to answer their queries. Some resorted to tweeting the Cabinet Office permanent secretary Richard Heaton.
“I now find myself in the situation that because MyCSP avoids answering telephone calls and refuses to acknowledge or respond to emails, I have no efficient means of communication to sort out this shambles,” says a furious former civil servant. “I am angry, frustrated and feeling quite helpless. I no longer know when or even if I will receive future payments. This is appalling customer service, in fact, it is no customer service.”
In the past week, MyCSP says it has drafted in extra staff and extended its call centre opening hours. But it comes to something when an organisation takes a service over from Capita, the private company that earlier this year had to be shored up because it faced such a backlog of personal independence payment (PIP) claims for sick and disabled people, and manages to make Capita look good. Capita “not only offered an efficient service, they were … a pleasure to deal with,” says a former civil servant, now in Australia.
The lesson from this debacle is that if you deliver public services, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a mutual, a public body or a private body. What matters is how you react if things start going wrong and people want answers – fast.
It looks as though MyCSP was taken by surprise by the number of queries it had to field and wasn’t initially able to react quickly enough. It’s a good idea to ensure you can bring together any query from a customer, whether it comes in by phone, email or social media.
And if your job is to calculate pensions for a well-informed, intelligent group of people, try to get the sums right and pay people on time.
