Letter: Steps have been taken to rectify Capita’s issues

We are writing in response to the editor’s comment and Moneo’s opinion piece in the July 8 2016 edition of Optician and the accusation that the optical bodies have been ‘inactive’ in regards to late payments from Capita. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth and we would have welcomed the opportunity to comment before the articles were published.

Issues with reconciling ophthalmic payments emerged as a result of a move to batch processing of the payments by Capita in some areas early this year. We had warned NHS England and Capita about the problems this would cause and, although Capita had planned to move all areas to batch processing, this was halted due to the level of concerns raised by the Optical Confederation (OC) and Locsu. We also pressed Capita for a mitigation process for areas where batching was in place, to enable contractors to reconcile payments. This took longer than we hoped but it is now in place and being test run in all affected areas.