Government’s digital centre first created the SMS platform nine years ago, since when it has expanded steadily and is now projected to see a potential fourfold increase in message volumes
The Government Digital Service has signed a pair of deals set to be worth up to £200m to retain the two core suppliers whose services underpin the sending of billions of public sector text messages via the GOV.UK Notify platform.
On 1 April GDS entered into new two-year contracts with long-standing Notify commercial partners Firetext and MMG. These engagements follow directly on from the previous deals with the two firms, which concluded at the end of last month.
According to freshly published commercial notices, these new arrangements each come with an estimated worth of £98.2m – more than double the £46.4m projected value attached to the preceding contracts with the tech companies.
In specifications published in August 2024, GDS outlined the expected growth in the demands placed on Notify. The document indicated that the service is currently used by about 8,700 individual teams across 1,500 public bodies to send an average of three million SMS fragments each day. This equates to about 1.1 billion a year.
As the message-sending tool becomes increasingly relied upon by the NHS, this volume is forecast to rise to 3.8 billion during the current financial year, and 3.9 billion in 2026/27, last summer’s tender notice said.
The document advised potential bidders, however that “this figure may vary significantly due to changes in demand”.
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“Notify uses two concurrently integrated SMS suppliers to ensure a resilient service,” it said. “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.”
It added: “We’re looking to procure SMS suppliers for two years, with options for contract extension. The unit price for a single SMS fragment will be fixed throughout the duration of the contract, independent of volume. 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.”
The contract award notice that followed eight months later indicates that these needs were ultimately best met by Notify’s existing providers.
Created by GDS to support public bodies in communicating with citizens, Notify was first launched for Whitehall agencies in 2016 and expanded into local government the following year. The service went through a period of rapid expansion during the coronavirus crisis. Across the course of 2020, the number of public sector entities using the tool grew almost twofold to more than 900. By 2023, another 500 organisations had adopted the SMS platform.
During the same period the number of individual services sending updates via Notify increased by almost 500% from about 1,500 to the current tally approaching 9,000.
Throughout this time the system has been largely supported by mobile marketing specialists MMG and FireText, with contracts with the firms renewed periodically. During the 2022/23 year an additional provider, Reach, was added to the mix, before GDS returned to the two-supplier line-up.
