The justice department has retained a specialist consultancy to provide extra resources on demand to help kickstart key service transformation projects, before handing over to internal teams to take forward

The Ministry of Justice has signed a £5m “innovation bench” deal for a supplier to provide additional experts and resources to support early-stage work on digital projects.

On 25 February, the MoJ entered into an initial two-year agreement with London-based consultancy UBDS Digital, a newly published commercial notice says. The engagement, which can be extended by an additional six months, is intended “to support the delivery of the MoJ Digital Strategy… by bringing in an agile delivery team that can pivot and work on senior leadership team innovative priorities”, according to the text of the contract itself.

Bench agreements – in which a large organisation retains a tech partner to provide extra resources at short notice to support urgent or strategic projects – have become increasingly common across government in recent years. Departments to take advantage of such flexible on-demand arrangements include the Home Office, Government Digital Service, and the then Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities – which awarded a potential £20m-plus bench deal in April 2024.

In the MoJ’s case, the contract states that the ministry’s Justice Digital team “requires the support of a third-party partner to temporarily provide discovery- or alpha-phase agile teams to take ownership of deliverables that support the delivery of the strategy” – a plan which set an ambition to improve to users throughout the justice system.

The teams in question will encompass professionals in roles including: “software developers; technical architects; interaction and service designers; user researchers; business analysts; product managers; and delivery managers”.

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The contract adds that these external experts will supplement the MoJ’s internal workforce of about 1,700 people in digital and tech roles. Teams provided by the supplier will be deployed to support work on “new innovations deemed critical” by senior MoJ digital and tech leaders.

“The specific requirements [of this contract] are the provision of multi-disciplinary innovation services and other services that may be required to deliver projects from the [MoJ’s] Service Roadmap,” the commercial agreement says. “The scope of Innovation Services includes, but is not limited to: collaboration with internal Justice Digital teams to deliver fast paced, agile development, e.g. completing a discovery phase or alpha with clear, usable outputs (e.g. high-level designs, prototypes) within 12 weeks; [work to] rapidly prototype, test, and deploy innovative solutions by leveraging a flexible pool of Government Digital and Data [profession] resources; facilitation of cross-functional collaboration between Justice Digital teams, frontline operational teams and digital-transformation teams; [and delivering a] modular approach… with ideas flowing from discovery to prototyping to validation.”

The digital consultancy will not work on the scaling up of digital innovations, but will only “focus on early-stage development and hand off mature solutions to Justice Digital delivery teams”.

The roadmap of service-transformation projects encompasses two workstreams: the Access to Justice Services Programme; and the Modernisation of the Justice System Programme.

The deal, inclusive of the six-month extensions – which would take the end date to August 2028 – will be worth up to £5.1m to UBDS.

“The Justice Digital & Technology (D&T) team is made up of around 1,700 digital and technology specialists, located throughout the UK,” the contract says. “D&T provides services to all MoJ colleagues across prisons, probation, courts and smaller agencies, to service providers and to the public. The D&T vision is to create simpler, faster and better digital services for everyone.”