The Government Digital Service is to reopen competition for the two existing commercial deals that support almost 1,500 UK public bodies in sending millions of messages to citizens every day

The Government Digital Service has kicked off the procurement process for new commercial arrangements to support the sending of four billion text messages a year via the GOV.UK Notify platform.

To support Notify’s operation, GDS currently has in place two supplier agreements – with Firetext and MMG – each of which is valued at about £46.4m, and is due to conclude its two-year term on 31 March 2025.

In the coming weeks, the digital unit intends to reopen competition for these contracts, with the aim of putting in place new deals by the end of 2024 – and allowing three months for any new suppliers to be successfully on-boarded.

With usage forecast to rise among NHS organisations, the chosen providers for these contracts will be expected to support the delivery of 3.8 billion individual SMS message fragments in the 2025/26 year, followed by 3.9 billion the following year.

This would seem to represent a significant hike on current volumes which, according to a recently published procurement notice, average three million per day. Across a whole year, this equates to a little less than 1.1 billion.

A total of 8,700 service teams from 1,500 individual government, local authority, and NHS organisations currently use Notify.

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“The notifications are typically status updates, requests for action, MFA codes, receipts of applications or supporting information, and reminders,” the notice adds. “The messages are sent via an API or manually through a web interface.”

The average length of an SMS message is two fragments, and the overall delivery rate is 95.7%.

“Notify uses two concurrently integrated SMS suppliers to ensure a resilient service,” according to the notice. “Typically, traffic is shared between the two based on supplier performance (speed of processing) and load. Ultimately, GDS reserves the right to allocate work between suppliers at its absolute discretion and there is no guarantee of volume as it’s influenced by both government policy and how the services choose to use Notify.”

The document adds: “To meet Notify’s SMS redundancy requirements, the suppliers should utilise independent computing and network infrastructures throughout their respective end-end services, avoiding any single points of failure that could simultaneously impact both providers. Suppliers are asked to provide sufficient information in their responses to enable GDS to evaluate this.”

An estimated value for the new agreements is not provided. But, with suppliers paid based on how many messages are delivered, a potential more-than-threefold increase in usage could – at current rates – mean that each supplier earns more than £150m during the initial two-year term of each contract.