Recommendation 2

There is a risk that the Department will deliver a new service without the important improvements to claimant’s experience. The Department intends to make a lot of changes to the process of making a claim before it launches the new health assessment service in 2029. In advance of this, it plans to build its own case management IT system and develop the new service. It then needs to use a ‘test-and- learn approach’ to trial changes and identify what works to improve the claimant experience. The Department needs to have identified exactly what its new health assessment service will look like by 2027 to either invite the private sector to bid for new contracts or prepare to bring the service in-house. The Department recognises that if its test-and-learn activity reveals the proposed changes do not deliver the intended transformation in claimant experience, it can still issue the contracts for 2029 based on the current service. Given the extent of changes it wants to trial before 2027, we believe the greatest risk to the programme is that the Department focuses exclusively on the delivery of a new digitalised service, without achieving the important transformational change in the experience of claimants on which the wider benefits of the programme rely. Recommendation 1: The Department should publish a revised business case, no later than spring 2024, with details on how its desired transformation of the health assessments for disability benefits will result in the promised benefits for claimants and how it will track and assess progress towards this.