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Capita helped the Cabinet Office write the government's rulebook for what happens when an outsourcer collapses. Its own pension contract shows what happens when one does not.
The Sourcing Playbook is the Cabinet Office's rulebook for buying outside help, built chapter by chapter around the risk of a supplier going bust. Capita, one of the firms that helped shape it, took over the government's own Civil Service Pension Scheme in December 2025 without going anywhere near insolvency. Twenty million records went missing in the handover, sixteen of twenty-one headline targets were still failing seven months later, and the government has withheld 9.9 million pounds. We tested the document's own promises against the National Audit Office's account and two parliamentary hearings.
The Construction Playbook has a chapter for exactly this moment: a big contractor going bust mid-project. When the Ministry of Justice's prison builder did, prisons lost up to eighteen months anyway.
The Construction Playbook told every central government department that resolution planning would keep public building work running if a supplier collapsed. In September 2024, ISG, the Ministry of Justice's main prison contractor, went into administration anyway. The National Audit Office found the same prison programme already 4.2 billion pounds over budget, in part because a flagship modular scheme's own costs were never properly scoped, the exact failure the Playbook's Should Cost Models exist to catch.
The Service Standard tells every government team to publish proof their service works. The replacement for the tool that did this lists two dozen services, one of which no longer exists.
The Service Standard tells every central government team to publish performance data so the public can check whether a service works. The tool built for that job, the Performance Platform, closed in March 2021. Five years on, its named replacement on data.gov.uk carries 23 datasets in total, several untouched for years, one of them for a service that itself shut down in 2023.
The Cabinet Office guide to hiring consultants tells civil servants to contact a Whitehall unit for help. That unit closed down in January 2023, and the guide has not been rewritten since.
The Consultancy Playbook still tells civil servants to contact the Government Consulting Hub for triage, training and a knowledge-sharing platform. The hub closed in January 2023. The document has not been updated since September 2022, and the National Audit Office has now said so in public.
The government's Data and AI Ethics Framework tells every team building AI to record, audit and explain their decisions. Nobody outside the team ever has to check the record.
Retitled and expanded in December 2025 to cover artificial intelligence, the government's ethics framework asks every public sector AI team to name an owner, log every decision and complete a self-assessment. Nobody outside the team ever marks it, and the transparency standard it leans on for accountability has 152 published records to show for three years of mandatory use.
The department on this code's cover stopped existing in 2023. The nine pages underneath needed the attention to detail they ask of software vendors.
The government's voluntary Software Security Code of Practice defines "shall" as a requirement, cites EU law through a commercial training website, and cannot number its own principles consistently. It also gets a lot right. We counted, both ways.
The government's AI Playbook tells civil servants to check everything. A line-by-line reading suggests nobody checked the playbook.
The 118-page guide that tells every civil servant to verify AI output misnames its own department three times, mislabels a famous security incident, and overstates the data protection law most likely to govern its readers' projects. We read it line by line.
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