Civil Service Pension Scheme

Lord Spellar Excerpts

Tuesday 30th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend. We have already withheld nearly £10 million in transition contract payments for undelivered milestones from Capita. This represents our continuous position that public funds will only ever pay for what is successfully delivered to the required standard, and this figure is not the sum total of withheld payments across the wider contract lifecycle. This is obviously only stage 1. I look forward to being able to further update your Lordships’ House next week.

[Lord Spellar (Lab)]

My Lords, is not the systemic failure here that the Civil Service refused to take past performance into account? That is completely contrary to normal life. If someone did a job on your house or on your car and failed, or if you took a holiday with a company that failed, not only would you not use them again but you would advise everybody else not to. If we want only one example, it was the Capita failure on the Army recruitment programme, which was an utter disaster for service recruitment. Is it not time that we changed that so that past performance counted? That would focus the attention of management on fulfilling the contracts they have got rather than on the contracts they hope to get.

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend—I think. He is absolutely right. He and I were members of the Defence Select Committee in the other place and discussed the terms of the recruitment contract for the Armed Forces in great detail. There have clearly been challenges in the past, but I remind noble Lords that Capita is meeting 87% of its KPIs on other contracts. However, the issue that the noble Lord has raised is incredibly important. Given that, only last week, the Cabinet Office issued a Written Ministerial Statement making clear our insourcing drive and the public interest test, I hope all these factors are brought into account.