The Department for Work and Pensions: Secure Card Payment Services Procurement

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is responsible for administering welfare, pensions, and child maintenance policy in the UK, serving around 20 million claimants. The DWP operates the largest contact centre in the UK government, providing support to customers from around 135 locations and offering specialist services such as debt recovery, card payments, and assistance for customers with complex needs.

This is a follow up to the previous PIN 2023/S 000-004912 dated 17th of February 2023 and following the market engagement that took place in March 2023 with regards to the provision of Secure Card Payment Services (SCPS) for the DWP. Following the completion of the review of the Request for Information responses the DWP is now proceeding to procure these services.

The current DWP provision allows business groups to receive customer payments in a Payment Card Industry, Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliant manner, including an Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) capability to facilitate payments. The DWP service and SCPS contract currently supports approximately 9000 agents. The current SCPS contract also includes the routing of outbound calls via the PCI DSS compliant service provider.

DWP takes approximately 750,000 card payments per annum, totalling approximately £130M per annum. This is collected by two areas of DWP and Northern Ireland’s Department for Communities:

• Child Maintenance Group (CMG); and
• Debt Recovery.

DWP is planning to procure a new SCPS Contract that can meet the current and future needs of the service while providing value for money and service continuity. This contract will replace a current contract that enables Debt and Child Maintenance business groups to take customer payments using a Dual Tone Masking Frequency (DTMF) facility.

Under the new SCPS Contract the DWP has identified the following requirements, which may be subject to change before the issue of the Contract Notice:

• The ability to take customer payments using a Dual Tone Masking Frequency (DTMF) facility.
• The provision of up to 9000 SIP Licences, with an option to increase by 2000 SIP Licences. (Further detail on this potential increase will be provided in the procurement documents).
• The ability to take Inbound and make Outbound (Average 170 million minutes per annum) calls for any Business Group including any systems that take card payments across the whole network.
• The availability of a customer self-service Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) solution.
• A potential requirement to provide a ‘Nailed ‘Up PSTN service for up to 6 months.

The new SCPS Contract is required to ensure continuing capability for DWP to receive customer payments in a PCI DSS compliant manner and provide all Outbound Telephone calls for the department.

DWP anticipates entering into a Contract for an initial 3-year period (Estimated Value £6.1 million) with the option, exercised wholly at the discretion of DWP, to extend the Contract for a period or periods not exceeding a total of 36 months in aggregate (Estimated Value £7.2 million).

The DWP anticipates that the effective date of the contract will be 1 August 2024 following which there will be an estimated 6 month implementation period before the commencement of the delivery of the services under the contract.

The Contract will be procured using the Restricted Process through FaTS. The form of contract will be the Cabinet Office Mid-Tier Services Contract, amended as necessary to reflect the DWP’s requirements. All dates stated above remain approximate and are subject to achieving the necessary governance approvals.