Cabinet Office minister Georgia Gould has acknowledged that some retiring civil servants experienced delays in receiving lump-sum payments because of fallout from the McCloud judgment on public-sector pensions reform.
However, Gould – who is parliamentary secretary at the department – insisted that provider My Civil Service Pension has been achieving its service-level agreements for the last six months.
Her comments came in a response to a parliamentary written question, after Liberal Democrat MP Gideon Amos asked what steps the Cabinet Office is taking to tackle delays with former civil servants receiving their occupational pensions.
Gould said system and process changes introduced in October 2023, forced on the last government by the McCloud judgment, had “a significant impact” on MyCSP’s ability to offer retirement quotes and finalisations during the following months.
“This led to a dip in performance in providing retirement quotes and paying lump sum payments at retirement,” she said. “The delay in lump sum payments for some members was up to 20 days; however, monthly retirement benefit payments were not affected and paid on time.”
In her 17 April response, Gould said the Cabinet Office, as Civil Service Pension Scheme manager, has worked closely with provider MyCSP to rectify the delays and return to meeting contractual performance levels.
“This was achieved at the end of September last year,” she said. “For the last six months, up to and including March this year, MyCSP is back to achieving over 99.7% of their service level agreements.
“We continue to monitor performance carefully and work to ensure that any complaints or errors are identified and addressed as quickly as possible.”
The McCloud judgment effectively declared 2015 changes to public sector pensions, worked up by the coalition government, to be illegal as they discriminated against some scheme members.
Around 420,000 Civil Service Pension Scheme members are believed to be affected by the judgment – as well as firefighters, local government officials and other public sector workers.
The “remedy” designed to repair the botched reform is estimated to cost more than £19bn.
Under the arrangements, officials are being given the opportunity to choose between having their benefits calculated under legacy schemes that the 2015 reforms replaced or the Alpha scheme, which was introduced in April 2015 as part of the reforms.
A timeline in the Public Service Pensions and Judicial Offices Act 2022 said public sector pension scheme members affected by the 2015 reforms who have already retired should receive their personalised options on the remedy by 31 March this year.
However in February, MyCSP announced that some retired scheme members could face a wait of up to two years for their so-called “immediate choice remediable service statement” detailing their options.
Gould’s response did not address that development.