Email your MP about the Capita civil service payroll contract.
The DWP has named Capita as the preferred bidder to be given the £700m contract to handle the payroll for more than 250,000 civil servants.
The award sits within the Synergy shared services cluster, one of five government platforms intended to replace hundreds of ageing systems with a single Oracle cloud‑based solution covering HR, payroll, finance and procurement.
Acting as lead department, the DWP has selected Capita to run payroll for staff in DWP, the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. PCS has warned that this is a serious and unnecessary risk to the livelihoods of civil servants who depend on accurate, timely pay.
Capita is currently failing to pay pensions to thousands of retired civil servants, leaving many without income and forcing government intervention. This is part of a wider pattern of poor performance. In 2024, the defence committee confirmed that the army recruitment contract delivered by Capita would be replaced after the company met only 63% of its recruitment targets. A cyber incident in 2023 exposed the personal data of millions, resulting in a £14 million fine from the Information Commissioner’s Office. Handing responsibility for paying a quarter of a million civil servants to a company with this record risks further chaos within essential services.
The government must rethink this decision. PCS is calling for the insourcing of outsourced work, the return of offshored data to the UK civil service, guarantees of no redundancies arising from shared services cluster changes, urgent action on recurring shared services problems such as pay errors and pension miscalculations, and the creation of meaningful consultation structures at both cluster and national level.
Where PCS has been involved from the outset, far better outcomes have been secured. The HMRC Unity programme has already brought outsourced work back in‑house, with staff transferring into HMRC. In the matrix cluster, proposals for full privatisation were halted, allowing work to remain within the public sector. These examples show that early, genuine consultation leads to better and more stable services.
The risks in the Synergy programme are too great to ignore. Civil servants rely on secure, dependable pay systems, and the unfolding pension crisis demonstrates what happens when these functions fail.
PCS has launched an e‑action for you to write to your MP and ask them to urge the government to reconsider the decision. Please contact your MP today.