Department awards contract to Computacenter

Credit: Kirsty O’Connor/PA Wire/PA Images

The Department for Work and Pensions has signed a £35m contract to fulfil its desktop computing needs for a year.

Newly published procurement documents reveal that the department awarded the deal to IT firm Computacenter on 1 December last year. The contract runs until 30 November, with an option to extend its term by a further 12 months.

The agreement, which was awarded through the HealthTrust Europe ICT Solutions Framework, covers the provision of commodity desktop devices that can ordered via a catalogue. 

Orders of up to 30 standard devices will be expected to be delivered to any UK address within five business days of the order being placed, the terms of the contract stipulate. Machines for users with additional accessibility needs must be dispatched within two business days – again, up to a limit of 30.

All standard orders must be logged with the DWP’s asset-management team within a week of being placed, with reports of non-standard requests filed after the end of every month. 

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In all cases, Computacenter will be expected to meet these requirements more than 98% of the time in order to comply with service-level agreements. Failure to do so will result in “closer monitoring and plans for corrective action”.

“The contract managers shall have regular meetings to monitor and review the performance of this agreement, the achievement of the KPIs and SLAs and the provision of the services,” the procurement documents add. “Such meetings shall be minuted by the supplier’s contract manager and copies of those minutes shall be circulated to and approved by both parties.”

A volume of devices is not specified but, if each machine cost £400, the £35m value of the deal would represent a new computer for practically all of the core department’s 87,650 employees.

Computacenter has previously worked with the DWP numerous times, on contracts covering a range of hardware and software products.

In the last year alone, the department has spent £3m with the IT reseller on a deal for products from storage firm Nutanix, as well as £2.9m on Oracle hardware and a cumulative £1.9m on security kit from Check Point and F5.

Earlier this year Computacenter was added to government’s 38-strong list of strategic suppliers, each of which works with a named crown representative, who manage commercial relationships on a government-wide basis.

The tech firm’s addition came in light of its work over the past year as the primary supplier on the Department for Education’s Get Help with Technology scheme, which has distributed laptops to disadvantaged students to allow them to continue learning while schools and colleges have been closed.

Since last summer, Computacenter has provided the programme with more than a million devices, at a cost of about £250m. 

The company also works with a huge range of other government and public sector customers, and recent notable contract wins include an £8.5m deal to supply PCs, printers and phones to coronavirus vaccination centres, and a £5.15m order of iPhones from HM Revenue and Customs.