Accenture gets £350m slice of DWP's business

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has signed a £350m, seven-year application services contract with Accenture for systems associated with the Universal Credit benefits system.

The contract, worth £50m to £70m per year to the consulting giant, which will be working on the project with fellow supplier Atos, means the last Lot of the ADEP (application deployment) procurement process has been completed.

So this part of ADEP means Accenture will deliver application development and maintenance services for the application suite used by claimants who contact DWP for benefits by telephone or via its website.

Other sections of ADEP already filled are the Business Facilitating Systems and Business Prototyping, which were won by IBM and Capgemini respectively.

The supplier also, of course, has a long-standing commercial relationship with DWP. It was main supplier on a couple of major development projects like the Pensions Transformation Project (implementing a one-stop call centre service) and its Customer Information System (designed to give civil servants a 'whole person view' of the personal details of claimants and other citizens).

The application development and maintenance services that Accenture will provide will help DWP make substantial cost-savings and deliver key programmes, such as universal credit, says Accenture, and will feature use of Agile to meet the targets.

"Our work with the Department will help to further improve the service they deliver to reflect the changing needs of UK citizens," said Mark Lyons, Accenture's UK and Ireland head of Health & Public Service.

"This new contract builds on our longstanding relationship with DWP and the successful delivery of similar projects with other public sector clients, based on the deep industry skills and insight from our global network."