From Angela MacDonald, Second Permanent Secretary
7 April 2026
Thank you for your continued tolerance and interest as we work to restore the services of the Civil Service Pension Scheme to the levels you should be expecting from us. I felt it necessary to bring my taskforce update forward to let you know about an important incident which occurred at the end of March when Capita was loading the 2024/25 Annual Benefit Statements (ABS) to the member portal.
On Monday 30 March 2026, a technical fault occurred and as a result, a small number of scheme members were able to view or download the Annual Benefit Statements belonging to others. The erroring ABS interface was available for 35 minutes.
Capita has advised that all individuals who accessed these files were authenticated pension scheme members who were signed into the portal; no external or non-member access occurred. During that 35 minute window 138 members were affected. This is the digital equivalent of more than one document being put into an envelope with each member seeing a very small number of other statements.
This is an unacceptable breach of confidentiality and we are working with Capita to ensure that all proper processes are followed. Capita has written to the 138 members and if you have not received correspondence from Capita, your data was not impacted in any way.
The ABS interface will remain offline until the root cause is fully resolved. In the meantime, if you need an urgent copy of your 2024/25 ABS, please contact Capita by submitting a request via the contact us form on the website, contact us from the portal or by calling 0300 123 6666.
I understand that this incident in addition to the existing service issues will be a cause of significant concern, but be assured that corrective action is being taken. I also have to be candid and let you know that the retirement modeller has been delayed due to functionality issues, the modeller should be able to show pension estimates for all members using different scenarios, pulling through accurate data, and only when it’s been rigorously tested will it be live. I know this is disappointing news.
On service overall, we continue to make slow progress but there remains a lot to do. We are focused on achieving the plans that Capita have set out to restore service levels by the end of June. We are on target to have written to those of you who requested a pension quotation before 1 December 2025 by Friday 10 April. If you are registered on the member portal, you will be contacted via the portal or by post if you do not have a portal account. Capita needs to check that you still want to retire, if your circumstances remain unchanged and gather any further information they may require to progress your quote. If Capita does not hear from you within two months, your case will be closed and you will need to make a new request if you need a quote, so please respond as quickly as possible.
The delivery of full retirement and partial retirement quotes is still focused on pre-1st December requests with only limited activity on quote requests post 1st December. There will need to be a significant acceleration of quote delivery to achieve the end of June target and we expect that to happen in May and June. I recognise this is frustrating and we are doing significant work to enable these deadlines to be hit.
Call volumes increased at the end of March, impacting wait times (average remains below 10 minutes). Additional surge resources will be retained as the overall service transitions to a position of long term stability.
Pensions in payment remains stable and the scheme is distributing the 2026 Pension Increase mailing which includes pensioner payslips and P60s to approximately 730,000 pensioners. Pensioner members are being encouraged to make their digital or paper preferences known to Capita as the Scheme moves to digital P60s and payslips in 2027.
I want to sincerely thank you for your patience while this work continues. I’ll share details of the future sprints in my next taskforce update.
Angela MacDonald
Second Permanent Secretary, HMRC
