Public procurement notice: Voluntary Ex Ante Transparency Notice
Published: 2020-07-23
Buyer: Department for Work and Pensions
Country: UK
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Contract award without prior publication
CPV classification: 72223000: Information technology requirements review services
Estimated value: 0.01 GBP

Technical requirements: The supplier currently provides managed IT services to the authority under a contract due to expire on 28 February 2022 (the ASIS Contract). The ASIS contract supports the authority’s separate contract for health and disability assessment services (HDAS) for a range of social security and other benefits (including Employment and Support Allowance and Universal Credit and other benefits).
The ASIS contract was awarded on 9 June 2014. It was modified in 2018 to include options to extend and is currently due to expire on 28 February 2022. This notice confirms that an extension of up to an additional 3 years to 28 February 2025 has become necessary and will be carried out subject to a successful negotiation with the incumbent and a business case being approved.
A change of contractor cannot be made due to technical and economic factors and would cause significant inconvenience and substantial duplication of costs for the Department. The extension period is needed to ensure the Department can continue to support live service for health and disability assessments, provide business continuity for the HDAS contract, continue its programme of disaggregating the ASIS service (returning service lines to the Department) with an eventual transition to a new in-house digital service, and ensure this digital service is able to support the Department’s changing requirements for health assessment services.
The extension is necessary because all other options are financially prohibitive and have significant technical restrictions:
— Re-procurement of the service: this is not a viable option due to timing and cost. Given the scale and complexity of the services in question, the procurement and transition to a new contractor would mean the new service would not be ready until well after the current ASIS Contract expiry date and close to when the Department’s newly developed IT service should be ready and a further transition required. This approach would result in substantial duplicated costs for the Department compared with its strategy of a single step transition,
— Dual transition of the service (transitioning the existing service in-house and then transitioning again to the new digital solution): transitioning the existing service in-house and then again to a new digital solution would result in substantial duplicated costs and inconvenience for the Department.
The above options would also carry a high risk of disruption to the smooth operation of health and disability assessments. Therefore, the Department’s strategy is to operate on a single step transition.
For these reasons, as explained more fully in Section IV, the Department considers the proposed extension to be justifiable under Regulation 72 of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015, namely Regulation 72(1)(b). The amendments will not be made before the end of a period of at least 10 days from the day after the date of publication of this notice.
This extension is permissible under Regulation 72 of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015, namely Regulation 72(1)(b).
The extension of the ASIS Contract has become necessary to maintain business as usual service for the health and disability assessments it supports, avoid the substantial disruption of a two-step transition to the Department’s new digital platform, and accommodate the changing requirements for HDAS brought about by Covid-19. As a result of these wider strategic changes, the future requirements of ASIS are now under review and therefore it has become necessary to extend the existing contract.
The alternative options to an extension and a single step transition would be cost prohibitive for the Department. A re-procurement exercise would result in significant duplication of costs for the Department.
There is a complex technology stack and legacy applications in the hosting environments written in outdated software languages. The technology stack is aged and requires significant upgrading that would be extremely difficult without existing knowledge of the solution. Transferring responsibility for managing, supporting and modifying the solution to another supplier would therefore carry a high risk of disruption to service continuity, with elements that another supplier may be unable to support or replicate.
Switching to a new provider followed by a second transition to the future digital service would cause substantial duplication of cost to the Department which would not be incurred via a single transition process. It would also cause significant inconvenience as complex processes would need to be replicated and risk significantly disrupting assessment services.
Any increase in price does not exceed 50 % of the value of the original contract: the estimated values for the extension fall within the parameters of this requirement.
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Winner: Atos IT Services UK Ltd
Award value: 0.01