CABINET OFFICE “turmoil” was exposed as ministers contradicted each other on Labour’s insourcing policy, PCS general secretary Fran Heathcote said.

She told the Morning Star today that a government minister wrote to Britain’s largest civil servants’ union to say the outsourcing of pensions administration “was still the favoured model” earlier this month.

“Perhaps reflecting the current turmoil at the top of the Labour Party,” she added that this was following another minister who “got up in the House of Commons and declared the age of outsourcing was over.”

Responding to an MP’s question on April 23, Cabinet Office minister Chris Ward said that he was “proud” that a Labour government is “ending the age of outsourcing.”

The Labour MP for Brighton Kemptown and Peacehaven said that ministers will introduce a public interest test for all government departments to assess whether a service can be better delivered in-house and require them to publish insourcing strategies.

This was while PM Sir Keir Starmer faced fresh calls to resign over his handling of the Lord Peter Mandelson scandal as a senior minister reportedly refused to say his decision to sack the Foreign Office civil servant Olly Robbins was fair.

Ms Heathcote’s comments came as Labour’s pre-election promise to bring about “the biggest wave of insourcing in a generation” was rubbished at PCS’s annual conference in Brighton today.

Delegates passed a motion noting the “ongoing controversy, legal uncertainty, and serious concerns about the Department for Work and Pensions’ (DWP) decision to award the Synergy Business Process Services contract to outsourcing giant Capita.”

Capita is to run the major government initiative to consolidate back-office functions for major departments for £370 million over 10 years.

The procurement decision was described as “extraordinary” by public accounts committee chairman Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and is subject to a legal challenge by former rival bidder Sopra Steria, which alleges Capita’s price was “abnormally low.”

Capita and the DWP deny the claim and that the process was contrary to British public procurement rules.

A month after the deal was announced in March, paymaster general Nick Thomas-Symonds also announced the termination of Capita’s contract to administer the Royal Mail Statutory Pension Scheme.

He stated that “the security and dignity” of public servants “are not negotiable” and that delivery failure from contractors “will not be tolerated.”