Denise Oates used to be a civil servant. She worked for the Lord Chancellor’s Department. Three months before her 60th birthday on 25 March, she contacted MyCSP, the provider of the lump sum and civil service pension to which she was entitled.
What happened next will be horribly familiar to many other former civil servants. Oates had to chase up MyCSP repeatedly to receive any information about her pension. She received an offer – but no actual payment – four days before her birthday. In May, she finally heard that she would receive her lump sum and pension by 18 June – 12 weeks late.
“I’ve heard nothing more at all,” says Oates, who has now made a formal complaint to MyCSP about the handling of her pension. “I am not in particularly difficult finances but there must be many other people who are. The whole matter is thoroughly disgraceful.”
So why are some former civil servants still waiting up to six months to receive their pensions from MyCSP, eight months after the government’s former flagship mutual scheme took on paying pensioners?
That’s the question civil service unions and former civil servants are trying to get answered.
Before 2011, civil service pensions were managed by the government’s in-house pension body, with calculations and payments made by third-party provider Capita. In 2011, pension provision was spun out of government into MyCSP by former Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude as part of his plan to promote mutuals and employee-owned organisation. On 18 September 2014, MyCSP also took over calculating and paying pensions. MyCSP is 24% owned by the government, 25% by its employees through a trust and 51% by private company Equiniti.
MyCSP has said it notified all 1.5 million pensioners of the changeover from Capita, something disputed by several pensioners. One former civil servant, now living in Spain, says neither he nor his wife received any notification and describes the communications from MyCSP as “a pretty amateurish setup”.
The situation has been complicated by the move to a new civil service pension scheme, alpha, on 1 April 2015. That does not, in itself, seem to have caused additional problems, but former civil servants are already infuriated by poor service from the provider. One former government employee, who worked in HR until his retirement, says that in his former role he received numerous complaints from staff that they could not get through to MyCSP and there were delays in the payment of lump sums and pensions.
“I am now experiencing some of that incompetence regarding my own pension scheme,” he says.
This former civil servant was asked for information about his civil service career, as MyCSP said it no longer held the records. “I then received a pension statement full of incorrect information and missing three other years of service,” he says. “I find it astonishing that the government considers MyCSP and other mutuals a success.”
Another former civil servant, Gerald Parker, says that after several reminders, his lump sum was paid two months late and his pension a month late. “I was not offered emergency payments to tide me over, and staff advice on whether I could get any varied,” he says. “Staff are unfailingly courteous and helpful, but performance falls short.”
Parker has made a detailed note of every time he has called MyCSP – problems include someone promising on 27 March to get a supervisor to call back. “It later emerged that he failed to record the call, hence the lady who answered my second call on 8 April wasn’t aware that I was waiting for someone to call me back,” he says.
Civil service unions have been trying to get satisfactory answers about the poor service at MyCSP’s service. On 14 May, the FDA, the union that represents 18,000 senior civil servants, passed a resolution noting with concern the deterioriation in the service provided to members of civil service pension schemes. The union wants talks to ensure the situation is corrected within a reasonable time; otherwise, it says, administration of civil service pensions should be transferred to another provider or brought back in-house.
PCS, the largest civil service union, has set up a form for members whose pensions are more than three months overdue. An official at the union says Maude and the new government should reflect on the “chaos” caused by imposing mutualisation on MyCSP. “It’s been a textbook case of the failure of ideology over service delivery,” he says.
MyCSP, which handles some 60,000 new claims a month, saysmany of the problems have been caused by a longstanding lack of investment in technology and the challenge of bringing together different departmental pension schemes into a single system.
“MyCSP has spent a lot of time and resources rationalising what were a lot of different systems into a single database and a single data centre,” a spokesperson says.
This meant that the company had to bring together data from different departments and often that data was not reliable.
“We acknowledge that some people have had issues,” the spokesperson says. “But there have been many years of underinvestment and a lack of joined-up systems.”
MyCSP has acknowledged that customers have faced considerable delays in trying to get through to the single contact centre in Liverpool. The company says it has hired and trained 250 more staff since last September, most of whom are working in the call centre, and that waiting times are now down to under three minutes.
Whether this message is getting through to those still waiting for pension payments is another matter. Another former government staff member emailed MyCSP five months before retirement, following up via email and phone calls.
“A month after I should have been in receipt of my pension, I do not even have the reassurance that they know I exist, let alone the schedule of service and calculations I asked for more than six months ago,” he says. “I would like to know that I am going to get a pension at all, and how much it will be. This does not seem unreasonable.”
Have you been affected by problems with your pension? Email us at public.leaders@theguardian.com
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