DWP says TWO benefits will be 'merged' in £1 million move

The Department for Work and Pensions says TWO benefits will be "merged" in a £1 million move. The DWP has signed a £1m digital design deal to support plans for the merger of Housing Benefit and Pension Credit, it has confirmed.

The intention is to enable pension-age recipients to claim a single, unified benefit after the plan was first outlined in 2011 by the then coalition government. Having been delayed multiple times since then, the new Labour Party government 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.

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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.

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”.

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’.”