Credit: Piqsels

The Department for Work and Pensions is seeking to appoint a supplier to a £10m contract to support a two-year programme of work to revamp its digital services focused on retirement, bereavement and the provision of care.

The DWP has published a contract notice indicating that its digital services function is “working towards a common set of strategic outcomes to simplify and transform the citizen and DWP user experience through service modernisation” of a range of digital platforms.

This includes the Get Your State Pension service, for which the department has set a target of 90% of all new claims made online to be entirely supported by the functionality of the digital platform – to which an online change of circumstance tool will also be added. 

Other planned improvements to retirement services include linking digital systems to data feeds from pensions dashboards, an online platform being created by DWP agency the Money and Pensions Service. Once complete, the system aims to “enable individuals to access their pensions information online, securely and all in one place”.

The DWP also wishes to “fully automate online claims” for Pension Credit, as well as trying to “maximise automation” of seasonal payments, thus enabling “the decommissioning of [the] winter fuel computer system”.

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A “fully digitalised service” will be developed for citizens that wish to access bereavement support payments.

Those claiming attendance allowance – which is available to people who have a severe or complex disability and require care – will be supported by “new online claim journeys for both simple and complex claims”, according to the department.

The goal for the online Carers’ Allowance service is to “introduce eligibility processing efficiencies for online new claims”.
To support the delivery of all these improvements, the DWP is seeking bids from firms that could provide additional expertise in a range of software-development disciplines, including user research, content and interaction designers, front-end developers, data and business analysts, and product owners. 

“There are currently a number of teams working on these services predominantly delivering using agile methodology, with experience to deliver to waterfall methods when required,” the contract notice said. “The teams have detailed knowledge and experience in the retirement, bereavement and care arenas. The successful supplier team will work with these existing capabilities – from other suppliers as well as DWP staff. A part of the role of the supplier will be to assist DWP in growing its own capability across the design job families and we will expect a level of support for our staff with a view to contributing and sharing knowledge.”

A budget of up to £9.9m is available to spent over the course of a two-year contract scheduled to commence in August. Suppliers wishing to bid for the project have until midnight tomorrow to do so.