Since first being implemented in 2021, the contract’s value has expanded by two thirds and now represents about 30% of the overall delivery costs, as per the most recent estimate

The Department for Work and Pensions body responsible for delivering the near-£300m Pensions Dashboard Programme has added another £18m to the value of the core tech supplier engagement to support the rollout of the project.

First announced in 2016, the Pensions Dashboard Programme (PDP) is intended to o provide citizens with a single online service for accessing information on both the state pensions and any employer or private schemes in which they are enrolled. The Money and Pensions Service (MaPS) – an arm’s-length body of the DWP – is leading delivery of the scheme.

In September 2021, MaPS signed an initial five-year contract with Capgemini to provide the dashboard project with “central digital architecture and associated services”. This engagement was valued at about £52.2m, once VAT is included. Last year, the term of this agreement was extended by two further years, with about an extra £16m added to its value.

According to a newly published contract notice, spending via the deal has been further expanded by another £18m – taking the overall value to £86.4m, inclusive of VAT. The notice adds that the latest uplift comes as “additional services are being added to the contract”.

The new overall spending tally represents an increase of about two thirds on the original contract value, and constitutes about 30% of the £289m figure that is the most recent estimate for overall delivery costs of PDP.

Since the dashboard project’s launch, the delivery date has been gradually pushed back from an initial scheduled end point of 2019.

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This was first pushed back to late 2023 but – as that deadline neared, and with the recognition meeting this target was “no longer viable” – a full reset of the project was launched.

Last year, the DWP revealed that it would be taking a staged approach to connecting different types of pension providers to the programme’s tech infrastructure, with incremental deadlines from April of this year up to an ultimate cut-off for connectinons of  31 October 2026.

The latest set of government major project data for PDP does not specify a final delivery date or overall cost for the programme. The project was assigned a delivery confidence rating of Amber, with an assessment made in April 2024 concluding that “the Amber rating reflects the progress made over the year in a number of key areas including:  delivering a revised baselined delivery plan; strengthening the senior leadership including the appointment of a full-time SRO (senior responsible officer); improved ways of working with the supplier; more effective governance arrangements; significant progress made against previous assurance review recommendations; progress made in addressing capability gaps,” the data set indicated.

“These measures have placed the programme back on a viable footing and equipped it to meet the new single deadline in legislation of October 2026,” the document added. “There remain a number of risks to delivery that are being actively managed and tracked by the programme board.”