Work services platform and food courier Deliveroo was forced to scrap an £18 million deal with Capita, after five months when it failed to deliver on its promise to recruit a team of 150 multilingual staff for the takeaway company, reports The Times (paywall). Capita had an agreement with Deliveroo at the start of 2022 to build up a new support centre in Poland for its restaurant partners.

Deliveroo reportedly was willing to pay a premium for workers because of their language skills, but this was not advertised on the ground in Poland because Capita did not want to see other contracts for which it had tendered undermined by the high salaries. By April last year, the whole Capita team working on the project was replaced and Deliveroo pulled the plug a month later. Capita was far short of the 150 agents it promised Deliveroo in total. By last May, 50 employees were supposed to be in place but only a handful were. The Times added that it is not known what the financial implications of the collapsed contract are for either side, or the terms of the final commercial negotiation that wrapped it up. SIA reached out to Deliveroo and Capita for comment, but the companies had not yet responded.

Capita recently provided an update on a cyber incident it had experienced in late March which had primarily impacted access to internal applications. The group said that while the incident caused disruption to some services provided to individual clients, the majority of its client services remained in operation. Meanwhile, the BBC reported that the UK’s Pensions Regulator has asked trustees responsible for funds that use Capita as an administrator to assess whether clients' data is at risk following the incident. Capita said it has been in regular contact with authorities since the hack and that it will update them on the investigation as it progresses.

A spokesman for the Pensions Regulator added, "We take IT security and the risk of cyber attacks extremely seriously." Capita's systems administer pensions of more than four million savers on behalf of 450 organisations, including Royal Mail and Axa.