As the new Labour government presses on with unification plans first set out 13 years ago, online customer experience experts from IBM have been brought in to support digital elements
The Department for Work and Pensions has signed a near-£1m deal for digital design specialists to advise on plans to merge Housing Benefit and Pension Credit.
The intention to incorporate into Pension Credit a housing allowance – and thus enable pension-age recipients to claim a single, unified benefit – was first outlined in 2011 by the then coalition government. Having been delayed multiple times since then, the new Labour administration announced within a few weeks of taking power this summer that it would press on with the merger and would “bring together the administration of Pension Credit and Housing Benefit as soon as operationally possible”.
To support the digital element of this unification, on 7 November the DWP entered into an initial four-month engagement with IBM, which will work with the department to deliver a discovery procedure.
The aim of this exercise will be to “to explore and identify the best strategic solution for bringing together the administration of Housing Benefit and Pension Credit”, the text of the contract says.
IN doing so, the DWP will work with the IBM iX unit which specialises in online customer experience and sits within the tech giant’s IBM Consulting operation. In a deal signed via the G-Cloud 13 framework, IBM iX will provide the department with “digital transformation – strategy and experience design services”, according to the contract.
According to service specification documents published on GOV.UK, the IBM unit’s “engagement will aways begin by working with the sponsor and key stakeholders to understand the desired scope and outcomes, before then engaging with customers and employees to create an end to end and front-to-back map of the services offered”.
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The document adds: “Highly-skilled service design practitioners will lead the planning and execution of these activities, delivering agreed artefacts such as insights, service blueprints, outcome measures, and prioritised enhancement backlogs. These activities require direct access to customers, employees, and owners of enablers such as platforms, products, automation, and process modelling. The power in this approach lies in bringing together core teams of experts to understand services and identify the ‘right thing to do’, before engaging with execution capabilities, to do the ‘thing right’.”
Across its initial four-month lifespan, DWP will spend £479,340 with the vendor. If the department chooses to sign a 12-week extension, this value is set to rise by an additional £478,800 – taking overall spending between now and the end of May 2025 to almost £960,000.
Housing Benefit is in the process of being entirely phased out and, largely, replaced by Universal Credit. Pension-age claimants – alongside those living in supported, sheltered, or temporary housing – are among only a limited number of people that can still make a new application for the benefit, which can help the unemployed or those on low incomes with rent costs.
The government hopes that the merger will help boost uptake on Pension Credit, with ministers claiming that “thousands” of eligible claimants are currently missing out on an extra £3,900 a year, on average.
