The Department for Work and Pensions: Secure Card Payment Services Procurement

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is responsible for administering welfare, pensions, and child maintenance policy in the UK, serving around 20 million claimants. The DWP operates the largest contact centre in the UK government, providing support to customers from around 135 locations and offering specialist services such as debt recovery, card payments, and assistance for customers with complex needs. This is a follow up to the previous PIN 2023/S 000-004912 dated 17th of February 2023 and following the market engagement that took place in March 2023 with regards to the provision of Secure Card Payment Services (SCPS) for the DWP. Following the completion of the review of the Request for Information responses the DWP is now proceeding to procure these services. The current DWP provision allows business groups to receive customer payments in a Payment Card Industry, Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliant manner, including an Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) capability to facilitate payments. The DWP service and SCPS contract currently supports approximately 9000 agents. The current SCPS contract also includes the routing of outbound calls via the PCI DSS compliant service provider. DWP takes approximately 750,000 card payments per annum, totalling approximately £130M per annum. This is collected by two areas of DWP and Northern Ireland’s Department for Communities:

• Child Maintenance Group (CMG); and
• Debt Recovery. DWP is planning to procure a new SCPS Contract that can meet the current and future needs of the service while providing value for money and service continuity. This contract will replace a current contract that enables Debt and Child Maintenance business groups to take customer payments using a Dual Tone Masking Frequency (DTMF) facility. Under the new SCPS Contract the DWP has identified the following requirements, which may be subject to change before the issue of the Contract Notice:
• The ability to take customer payments us