A critical new report shows how much work remains to be done if the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is to achieve a digital transformation and good customer service – flagging “outdated legacy IT systems”, paper-based benefits and appalling call centre performance.
The DWP operates one of Europe’s largest call centre estates, with 33,000 staff across 200 locations. But in 2023-2024 its in-house call centres abandoned a shocking 5.3 million calls from those seeking help, a report by the National Audit Office (NAO) published this month reveals.
Who's calling?
“Telephony outcomes vary substantially between benefits” it noted.
For a benefit available to those with a disability, called “Employment and Support Allowance” (ESA) fewer than half of calls were answered, with an extraordinary 21% of calls abandoned and 35% blocked, the NAO found.
By contrast 93% of calls relating to Universal Credit were answered.
DWP call centres: In-house worse
The DWP has two contracts with outsourced call centre providers.
Both performed better than its internally run call centres, the NAO found.
(DWP has a contract with Teleperformance for Universal Credit queries lines that runs to August 2025 and is worth £200 million. A contract with G4S for other lines runs to March 2026 and is worth £120 million.)
Behind the scenes ageing technology and siloed data are in part to blame, the NAO said: "DWP is still using some outdated legacy IT systems, such as for ESA, which are inefficient to use and increase the risk of error.
"Its IT systems are not fully integrated, with separate systems for different benefits. The systems do not allow staff to view at the same time all the information DWP holds about a customer," the report added.
New tech challenges
A ‘customer view’ app that will let citizens view their own information and access DWP services"has been delayed due to unexpected complexity around updating the legacy systems... DWP [now] plans to ‘go live’ with a minimum viable product in October 2024 rather than in March 2024."
Despite what is no doubt hard and thankless work by its IT staff building such applications on top of challenging systems, on the call centre side things have worsened: “In 2020-21, DWP’s in-house lines exceeded its standard by answering 86% of calls. With blocked and deflected calls included in the total, DWP answered 66% of all calls in 2023-24” NAO said.
Extraordinarily, DWP “has not conducted research to determine the reasons why calls are abandoned and the action it may need to take in response” – nor do its individual transformation strategies “include measurable objectives or… performance indicators to judge success.”
It is, however, as The Stack earlier reported, procuring a new Digital Channels Contact Centre (DC3) platform, to be based in the cloud. (A £159.6m contract notice was published in August 2023. A deadline for expressions of interest was later pushed from October to December ‘23.)
DWP is meanwhile working through a Service Modernisation Programme (SMP); an 11-year organisation-wide programme, running from 2022-23 to 2032-33. As part of that it has both a digital and a data strategy to 2030.
Money money money
There are some warning signs here, auditors noted.
For example, in January 2023, DWP estimated that the SMP would cost £312.1 million over 11 years (to 2032-33) but just 14 months later it had spent £211.5 million on the programme NAO reported.
As a critical major government project, the SMP was reviewed by the Infrastructure and Projects Authority in March 2024 which flagged that there is "not yet consensus among DWP senior leadership about the future design and the pace of transformation that should be adopted, and the associated organisational risk appetite..."
As part of its Digital strategy objectives 2030, it aims to:
"1 Enable delivery of DWP’s channel strategy through introducing more digital communication options.
2 Automate processes through use of artificial intelligence.
3 Enable the use of joined-up data through providing the data platforms that make this possible.
4 Modernise DWP’s digital platforms including by removing legacy systems.
5 Improve digital capability within DWP."
Under its data strategy it aims to improve DWP’s capability in seven areas:
"1 Data collection by building applications with high-quality interoperable data.
2 Data-sharing by effective data-sharing with other government departments and third parties.
3 Data access by providing timely and accessible data.
4 Data analysis by having staff extract insights on all aspects of business performance.
5 Acting on insights by making sure service lines have the necessarily data capability.
6 Data collaboration by introducing new tools to improve collaboration and effective use of data across DWP.
7 Data-focused culture by improving data literacy across DWP."
NAO said that DWP “recognises that significant parts of its services remain largely unmodernised – some benefit processing is still paper-based, which is slow and expensive to administer and makes it more difficult for DWP to track customer experience for the products involved…”
It concluded that "our review of the business cases for the SMP [DWP's long-term digital transformation programme] indicated that DWP’s vision for improved customer service is based on a good understanding of the issues that need to be addressed. However, DWP could strengthen the SMP’s foundations by finalising key performance indicators to measure progress against the objectives set out in the business cases; identifying which objectives take priority; and being clear how interdependencies within the programme will be recognised and managed."
