The British Medical Association’s (BMA’s) pensions committee has called for the general practitioner (GP) pension scheme to be brought in-house due to Capita’s lack of “ability” and “capacity” to run it.
With Capita facing intense scrutiny due to its failures in administrating the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS), a scathing letter to two parliamentary select committees has further fuelled the fire.
In the letter to the chairs of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) and the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee (PACAC), dated August 20, Vishal Sharma, BMA pensions committee chair, wrote that GPs are suffering “inconvenience” and “distress” because of mistakes made by Capita.
“Doctors across the country are working harder and seeing more patients than ever before, they should not, on top of their personal work, have to face an additional workload chasing, correcting and managing errors made by their pension administrator,” wrote Sharma.
Sharma pointed the finger at Capita. He told Computer Weekly: “Dentists and doctors in Wales, whose pensions are not managed by Capita, don’t have these problems – leaving no question where the blame lies.”
Capita is currently facing huge criticism over pensions administration. In July, the PAC and the PACAC held a joint meeting on the botched CSPS, which Capita has been administered since 1 December.
The CSPS contract transferred from MyCSP to Capita in December 2025, after being awarded in 2023. Despite having two years to prepare for it, there have been long delays and problems. An HM Revenue & Customs troubleshooter was brought in to lead an “urgent recovery plan” just a month after Capita took on the contract.
Civil servants have waited up to 10 months for their pensions, and more than 4,000 have been forced to take emergency loans.
In his letter to the select committees, Sharma wrote: “I thought it may be helpful, in light of the concerns which were raised [at the recent PAC/PACAC hearing], to draw your attention to the similarity of problems and shortcomings experienced by GPs in England, whose NHS pension scheme records are also administered by Capita, through primary care support England.”
Missing records
In the letter, Sharma highlighted a response to a BMA freedom of information (FOI) request in January 2026, which revealed that more than 17,000 GPs in England are missing years of pension records, which amounts to 150,000 missing years.
Sharma updated Computer Weekly on more recent figures: “For those pensions managed by Capita, freedom of information data now shows that more than 19,000 – or around half of GPs in England – have missing years of pensions records. In total, this amounts to over 137,000 missing years, underlining the true scale of this scandal.
“[This is] making it impossible for those impacted to adequately calculate pension benefits, related tax liabilities, and plan for retirement,” he wrote in his letter to MPs. “All of this can be incredibly stressful.”
He said the BMA is committed to ending what he described as a “scandal”, adding: “In the past couple of years, we have been engaging with and holding to account the various pension scheme administrators across the UK. We have reported scheme providers to the pension’s regulator, lobbied government officials and MPs, and will continue to explore all regulatory and legal avenues to solve this.”
In his letter, Sharma called for the GP pension scheme administration to be brought in-house “with sufficient resource and support in place to ensure that backlogs and errors occurring across the scheme are rectified as a matter of urgency for all effective policyholders.
“It is our view that Capita have neither the capacity or the ability to successfully manage not one but multiple public sector pension schemes, and that these schemes should be brought in-house…”
Computer Weekly put Sharma’s claims to Capita, but it did not respond.
There are also calls for the CSPS, which has 1.7 million members, to be brought back in-house. The government has said it is “actively shaping a long-term strategy to bring the pension scheme back in-house” – a statement repeated by Sally Jameson MP, parliamentary secretary in the Cabinet Office.
