Development and Live Support of the DWP Digital Children's Platform

Tender description

The Child Maintenance Group (CMG) is responsible for obtaining maintenance from absent or non-resident parents and paying it to parents with care not in receipt of benefit. CMG depends on the Child Maintenance Scheme (CMS) 2012 System to deliver its services to customers. The supplier currently provides an Application Development and Live Support service to the Department under a contract that is due to expire on 31st March 2021. The primary purpose of the contract is to provide development and maintenance in relation to the core CMS2012 application so that it remains operational and fit for use. The CMS2012 application underpins the CMS 2012 System and enables the CMG's administration of child maintenance services. For context, 750k children are covered by 530k child maintenance service arrangements and £960m per annum in child maintenance is paid to parents with care. The CMS 2012 System also supports the processing of 6.5k applications per month by CMG through its various channels. The services provided under the contract include the provision of delivery of products, projects and programmes, architecture strategy, product design, engineering and quality (build and test), service management and support/development/enhancement of application functionality to meet and deliver evolving business requirements. Lot 1: The contract was awarded as a call-off contract under the Digital Outcomes and Specialists 2 framework. It provided for a 2-year initial term from 1st October 2018 with a right for the Department to extend for a further period of up to 6 months, which was exercised in August 2020 and is currently due to expire on 31st March 2021. This notice confirms that an extension of up to an additional 12 months to 31st March 2022 has become necessary to mitigate the high risk of disruption to the critical public services provided by CMG which are dependent on the CMS2012 application. The extension will allow for the delivery of key business and transformation initiatives to enable the Department to efficiently transition and exit from the contract. Under the contract, the supplier provides flexible capacity and capability to support the Department by providing digital teams for the Development and Live Support of the DWP Digital Children & Families service line technology estate, primarily the Child Maintenance Scheme (CMS) 2012 System which is underpinned by the CMS2012 application. Digital teams support the delivery of outcomes for required regular releases to deploy a range of additional business and technical requirements and provide live support to the production system, within a complex multi-application, multi-supplier environment, to ensure it remains current with legislation, operational and fit for use. In addition, the contract supports all applications in the CMG IT estate which have interfaces to various other applications used within the Department. The CMG IT estate is integrated into the critical public services provided by the Department that UK citizens rely on for the payment of their benefit and pensions. Issues with the service continuity of CMG's systems, including those supported under this contract, are likely to impact other areas of DWP service provision, for example, notifications of citizen changes of circumstance may not be fed through to other relevant services e.g. change of address. Options considered: Re-procurement of the service before 31 March 2021: This was not a viable option due to timing and cost. Given the impact the COVID-19 pandemic had on the delivery of CMG's services including the delivery of key business and transformation initiatives to enable the Department to efficiently transition and exit from the contract and the scale and complexity of the CMS2012 application, the Department has had to defer re-procurement of the contract. Transition to a new supplier earlier would have led to inevitable service disruption of the critical public services delivered by the Child Maintenance Scheme (CMS) 2012 System which is underpinned by the CMS2012 application resulting in significant inconvenience to the Department dealing with the impact of COVID. In addition, a change of supplier before 31 March 2021 could not have been made for technical and interoperability reasons. Transitioning the existing service in-house: The Department currently has no capacity within its current headcount to absorb this activity owing to difficulty in recruitment of permanent resources with the correct skill set and competing demand from both public and private sector. Furthermore, the extension provides the opportunity to safely run a new procurement, mitigating the risks of transitioning at the same time as delivering key requirements. The Department will exit the contract at the earliest opportunity subject to a new agreement being placed and allowing time for the necessary transition and exit activity to be concluded. The variation to extend the contract will not be entered into before the end of a period of at least 10 calendar days from the day after the date of publication of this notice. For these reasons, as explained more fully in this Notice, the Department considers the proposed extension to be justifiable under Regulation 72 of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015, namely Regulation 72(1)(b), 72(1)(c) and 72(1)(e).