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 with the subsequent PIN 2023/S 000-032248; dated 1st of November 2023, as 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, following the February PIN, the DWP is now proceeding to procure these services. In the PIN of 1st November 2023 DWP had identified the intended issue date for the procurement as 2 January 2024. The estimated launch date is now on or around 29 January 2024. DWP’s requirements for SIP Licences has also changed from 9,000 to 11,000, as set out below. 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