The Home Office has entered a two-year, £30 million contract with PA Consulting as its central delivery partner for digital, data and technology (DDaT) services.
According to the contract award notice, the company will support the department’s DDaT directorate across all of its areas of work – including immigration, borders, policing and counter-terrorism – under a deal that came into force at the beginning of this month.
Although the Home Office has other suppliers delivering services for individual projects and programmes, it has not had a central DDaT partner to support its transformation.
The tender notice for the deal highlighted the increasing reliance on technology and specified a number of requirements for the partner. These include providing specialist delivery advice, leadership and governance, using insights from individual delivery plans to create a product roadmap and wider delivery plan, leveraging supplier frameworks, managing budgets and implementing feedback loops, data analysis and experiments to improve products and services.
Need for modern tech
“Home Office customers and employees rightly expect modern technology which helps customers receive the service they require and supports employees in protecting the public,” the notice says.
“We are increasingly reliant on technology to support the Home Office in its role to lead on immigration and passports, drugs policy, crime policy and counter-terrorism, and to ensure visible, responsive and accountable policing in the UK. We need to design and deliver technology which supports the transformation of the Home Office and the modernisation of our processes making them fit for a digital future.”
In July of last year the Home Office set out six principles for its use of DDaT as part of a strategy for next three years. These include the convergence of technologies where possible, creating shared products and taking a product-centric approach – efforts in which the new delivery partner could play a significant role.
Image from iStock, William Barton
