Tata says hello to £14.5m 1-year contract extension for UK child support system, while DWP figures out how to procure a new one
(2021/03/19)
- Reference: 1616160490
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/03/19/tcs_gets_145m_oneyear_contract/
- Source link:
The UK’s Department for Work and Pensions has awarded a £14.5m year-long contract to Tata Consultancy Services without any competition.
The deal is an extension to TCS's tenure running the department's Digital Children and Families service technology estate, and primarily its Child Maintenance Scheme (CMS) System, which went live in 2012, although TCS's work began on that £36m [1]deal in 2009 .
[2]
In an award notice, the department responsible for welfare and pensions in the UK said it was necessary to extend the contract without going to market "to accommodate CMG's changing requirements brought about by the impact of COVID-19."
Apparently, the shift to remote working of many child maintenance and support staff "meant that the delivery of key business and transformation initiatives to enable the Department to safely transition and exit from the contract were delayed."
[3]
The existing contract is set to come to an end on 31 March. "The Department currently has no capacity within its current headcount to absorb this activity owing to difficulty in recruitment of permanent resources with the correct skill set and competing demand from both public and private sector," the [4]notice said.
"An extension of up to 12 months will allow for delivery of these key projects and safe exit and transition from the contract," it added.
The original TCS contract was signed in 2009. That deal came to an end in October 2018 after which the DWP offered TCS a two-year extension, and then another six-month extension in August 2020.
The system is based on Oracle's Siebel customer relationship management system, Tata's BaNCS banking system and products from Experian, Genysys, IBM and Oracle, and replaced a Child Support Agency system which was famed as a classic public sector IT disaster.
So lemme get this straight. UK.gov ministries are getting better value from AWS... by spending more on AWS? [5]READ MORE
In 2006, spending watchdog the [6]National Audit Office found that for every £1 collected for child maintenance, it cost 70 pence to run the administration system, leaving the taxpayer short-changed. Auditor general Sir John Bourne noted the "hardship and distress" put upon families by the CSA and its IT contractor, EDS.
The EDS deal had been procured for £427m under the notorious private finance initiative in 2000, one of the last deals to go through before the Treasury outlawed the use of the funding model for IT contracts.
The lesson learned from that disaster was that it was much better to build something using off-the-shelf packages than develop bespoke software.
Although the TCS system functions and is cheaper than its predecessor, it has become "a complex multi-application, multi-supplier environment," which it turns out is not so easy to replace. The DWP has literally bought itself another year to figure out how it might do so.
[7]
"The extension will allow for the delivery of key business and transformation initiatives to enable the Department to efficiently transition and exit from the contract," the tender document said. ®
Get our [8]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/government-computing-network/2009/apr/07/tata-child-maintenance-07apr09
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YFTYsLM3f@9bU0cZzk3-DAAAAMY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YFTYsLM3f@9bU0cZzk3-DAAAAMY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://bidstats.uk/tenders/2021/W11/746979406
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/17/aws_dwp/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2006/06/30/eds_csa/
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YFTYsLM3f@9bU0cZzk3-DAAAAMY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
The deal is an extension to TCS's tenure running the department's Digital Children and Families service technology estate, and primarily its Child Maintenance Scheme (CMS) System, which went live in 2012, although TCS's work began on that £36m [1]deal in 2009 .
[2]
In an award notice, the department responsible for welfare and pensions in the UK said it was necessary to extend the contract without going to market "to accommodate CMG's changing requirements brought about by the impact of COVID-19."
Apparently, the shift to remote working of many child maintenance and support staff "meant that the delivery of key business and transformation initiatives to enable the Department to safely transition and exit from the contract were delayed."
[3]
The existing contract is set to come to an end on 31 March. "The Department currently has no capacity within its current headcount to absorb this activity owing to difficulty in recruitment of permanent resources with the correct skill set and competing demand from both public and private sector," the [4]notice said.
"An extension of up to 12 months will allow for delivery of these key projects and safe exit and transition from the contract," it added.
The original TCS contract was signed in 2009. That deal came to an end in October 2018 after which the DWP offered TCS a two-year extension, and then another six-month extension in August 2020.
The system is based on Oracle's Siebel customer relationship management system, Tata's BaNCS banking system and products from Experian, Genysys, IBM and Oracle, and replaced a Child Support Agency system which was famed as a classic public sector IT disaster.
So lemme get this straight. UK.gov ministries are getting better value from AWS... by spending more on AWS? [5]READ MORE
In 2006, spending watchdog the [6]National Audit Office found that for every £1 collected for child maintenance, it cost 70 pence to run the administration system, leaving the taxpayer short-changed. Auditor general Sir John Bourne noted the "hardship and distress" put upon families by the CSA and its IT contractor, EDS.
The EDS deal had been procured for £427m under the notorious private finance initiative in 2000, one of the last deals to go through before the Treasury outlawed the use of the funding model for IT contracts.
The lesson learned from that disaster was that it was much better to build something using off-the-shelf packages than develop bespoke software.
Although the TCS system functions and is cheaper than its predecessor, it has become "a complex multi-application, multi-supplier environment," which it turns out is not so easy to replace. The DWP has literally bought itself another year to figure out how it might do so.
[7]
"The extension will allow for the delivery of key business and transformation initiatives to enable the Department to efficiently transition and exit from the contract," the tender document said. ®
Get our [8]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/government-computing-network/2009/apr/07/tata-child-maintenance-07apr09
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YFTYsLM3f@9bU0cZzk3-DAAAAMY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YFTYsLM3f@9bU0cZzk3-DAAAAMY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://bidstats.uk/tenders/2021/W11/746979406
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/17/aws_dwp/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2006/06/30/eds_csa/
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YFTYsLM3f@9bU0cZzk3-DAAAAMY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
They sent me a refund once ...
alain williams
to an address in Dewsbury - I have never lived there, I live some 200 miles away. I only found out when I asked for a subject access request (data protection act). They refused to refund me as it was more than 6 years ago and claimed that, somehow, I should have known about it.
If you deal with them only do so in writing; what they record on their computer is not always what is said on the 'phone.
Anonymous Coward
"The lesson learned from that disaster was....."
....actually nothing. We'll be reading the same old tired shit years from now.
That system is absolute rubbish. It's taken and are ready for this... 3 years, yes 3 years to finally get my CM payments right and even then I'm not sure they are. If universal credit can get real time access and work our my wage versus benefits then so should CMS. Moving from Analyst to retail and soon back to analyst has been an absolute nightmare. They base the numbers on the previous years wage unless you inform them which I did on every occasion however they still asked me to pay more than I was actually earning. In fact they told me not to pay in a letter as I offered to do the calculation myself. The fun part is getting it all corrected is not as simple as one would expect by looking at earnings for the year, no, they have to put a change through on every single change. £14.5m for a system that essentially doesn't do the job it's supposed to. Then on the other side you have people actively avoiding paying it by squirreling it through dividends which they could easily resolve by looking at filed company accounts. I want to pay towards my kids but they made it nearly impossible until now.