Why has Capita made my 81-year-old mum wait nine months for her widow's pension: STEVE WEBB replies

My dad who was in receipt of a civil service pension died in November 2025.Months after his death my mum has had no correspondence from Capita with regards to her spouse's pension although they returned the death certificate in December.I sent a letter of complaint in April which has not even been acknowledged although I have confirmed by telephone it was received.After eight weeks I contacted the Pensions Ombudsman only to be told there was a form that needed to be completed to lodge a complaint.It wanted no more detail than was in my original letter so I am not sure why that wouldn't suffice.I understand Capita now have four months to reply to that by which time my dad will have been dead 12 months. Pension delays: Widow has struggled to get payments started after her bereavementI have also contacted my MP who has contacted Capita but that doesn't seem to be having any effect either.It feels to me that those affected have nowhere to turn to get these issues resolved.What was presumably a simple task (take my dad's pension figure, halve it, and there you have my mum's pension figure) has now become much more complicated.There will now also be arrears and I assume interest and possibly compensation to calculate. There will also be the tax implications of income bunching to consider.For my 81-year-old mum it is all just too much.Steve Webb replies: I was very sorry to read of the loss of your father last year, and of the additional distress that has been caused to you and your mother by the way Capita has handled things.It is totally unacceptable for a widow to have to wait so long for a pension that was earned by her late husband and is rightfully hers.I’m pleased to say that you have now been contacted with details of your mother’s widow’s pension but was shocked when you told me that even the letter from Capita to your local MP saying things were sorted out got your father’s name wrong.Your experiences raise for me some pretty fundamental questions about what people can do when their pension scheme administrator is not responding, and also about how contracts of this sort are awarded in the first place.As you have gathered, the normal process when a pension scheme’s administration is falling short is for you to complain directly to the scheme.All schemes are required to have an internal process for dispute resolution and you are normally expected to exhaust this before going to an Ombudsman.In your case, you waited several months for your mother’s pension to come through and then complained directly. But you received no response, which left you in limbo.You then approached the Pensions Ombudsman, which has a standard complaints form which it asks people to complete.I understand your point that you felt your letter had all the relevant information, but I can also see why it is more efficient for an organisation that handles thousands of complaints if they are all made using a standard form.Although I think the Pensions Ombudsman does a valuable job, in this case, complaining to the Ombudsman was unlikely to help matters.It can sometimes take the best part of a year for the Ombudsman to pick up a case, and your mother’s need was clearly more urgent.You contacted your local MP who in turn contacted Capita, adding to the literally thousands of complaints which the company has received from Members of Parliament.When I contacted Capita on your behalf at the end of July I was told that your mother’s case was on an ‘escalations’ list, presumably because of the MP’s letter.But we then heard nothing more for several weeks.Eventually, you and your MP have received confirmation that the pension will be put into payment, although you have told me that the letter your mother received was confusing with regard to what would be paid and when.I see from the correspondence that Capita is planning to pay interest for late payments and will also be considering payments for ‘distress and inconvenience’ where people have had to wait a long time or been especially distressed.But it will be doing this in two stages, doing all the interest calculations first and then considering further compensation.When I spoke to Capita last week it said that it had dramatically increased the pace at which it is processing cases, including ‘bulk processing’ of more straightforward cases, and that this was helping to bring down the backlog.A Capita spokesman said: 'We continue to work at pace to resolve the operational issues in collaboration with the Cabinet Office.'Despite the progress made to date, we recognise the service has not been good enough, particularly for members waiting on bereavement, retirement, and quotation cases, and we are sorry for the impact this has had on those members.'We now have the processes, automation and technology in place to work through the backlog. We remain committed to working through the backlog as quickly as possible, protecting members, and ensuring new cases are processed within contractual service times.'Some people have asked why the Government doesn’t simply take the contract away from Capita, given everything that has happened since they took over just before Christmas last year.One answer is that there isn’t a long queue of companies out there who could take on this scale of work, especially at short notice.Although there are plenty of companies who do pensions administration, there are really only three big players for the government to choose from who could conceivably administer a scheme with millions of members.A petition was recently presented at Downing St calling for the administration of the scheme to be brought back in house, and if I was a Minister I would be looking seriously at this option.But this is not something that could be done overnight and would almost certainly create still further disruption.For the Government, there is a delicate balancing act between making sure Capita faces the consequences of what has happened whilst not creating yet more disruption at a time when it seems that some progress is finally being made.Capita was keen to point out to me that it holds contracts across government and that in the large majority of cases it is hitting performance targets.But there is no doubt that the company’s reputation has been badly damaged by the way the Civil Service Pension Scheme has been handled, and ministers will be thinking very hard before awarding new contracts unless and until this whole mess has finally been sorted out. Ask Steve Webb a pension question Former Pensions Minister Steve Webb is This Is Money's Agony Uncle.He is ready to answer your questions, whether you are still saving, in the process of stopping work, or juggling your finances in retirement.Steve left the Department of Work and Pensions after the May 2015 election. He is now a partner at actuary and consulting firm Lane Clark & Peacock.If you would like to ask Steve a question about pensions, please email him at pensionquestions@thisismoney.co.uk.Steve will do his best to reply to your message in a forthcoming column, but he won't be able to answer everyone or correspond privately with readers. Nothing in his replies constitutes regulated financial advice. Published questions are sometimes edited for brevity or other reasons.Please include a daytime contact number with your message - this will be kept confidential and not used for marketing purposes.If Steve is unable to answer your question, you can also contact MoneyHelper, a Government-backed organisation which gives free assistance on pensions to the public. It can be found here and its number is 0800 011 3797.Steve receives many questions about state pension forecasts and COPE ¿ the Contracted Out Pension Equivalent. If you are writing to Steve on this topic, he responds to a typical reader question here. It includes links to Steve's several earlier columns about state pension forecasts and contracting out, which might be helpful. SIPPS: INVEST TO BUILD YOUR PENSIONAJ BellAJ Bell0.25% account fee. 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