Following news that Barnet Council is to remove pensions administration from Capita and award it to Bradford City Council (West Yorkshire Pension Fund), Labour lead on Pensions Committee,

Cllr Alison Moore said:

“I’ve repeatedly called for Capita to be stripped of running the Barnet Pension Scheme, but the Council should have brought the service back in-house and not given it to another external provider – albeit a public sector one.

“Hopefully Bradford City Council will do a better job than Capita, but, once again, Barnet will still be reliant on a third party to sort out the problems when it should be taking back control itself.

“It’s critical, for the sake of employees and pensioners, that this failing service is now sorted out and got back on track.

“Poor membership data was just the tip of the iceberg. Things have been going badly wrong for some time but the Barnet Conservatives’ unswerving ideological commitment to their Capita outsourcing project blinded them to this.

“It has taken damning criticism from The Pensions Regulator, the External Auditor, the scheme Actuary, as well as multiple failures over individual pension cases and a significant fraud to force them to take these failures seriously.

“Shameful that it’s taken this long for them to listen and to take action.

“Labour colleagues and I will be scrutinising the choice of new provider very carefully to be sure that they really can deliver the change that’s needed and the quality of service we expect and Scheme Members deserve.”

Notes: For a copy of the Policy & Resources Committee (19 Feb)  report on this issue, see Agenda Item 9: https://barnet.moderngov.co.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?CId=692&MId=9853

For more information contact:

Cllr Alison Moore: 07971 956 250 / cllr.a.moore@barnet.gov.uk

To contact the Barnet Labour Group: 020 8359 2568