Service Design Payments: FOI Review

Information requested

Original request 202300380076

1. The total amount of money spent by the Social Security Directorate on ‘service design’ in the last six years, broken down by financial year (2018/19, 2019/20, 2020/21, 2021/22, 2022/23 and 2023/24 so far).

2. The total amount that each of the following companies have been paid by the Social Security Directorate in the last six years:
2i Limited
IBM UK Limited
Deloitte LLP
Sopra Steria Limited
Voice Ability Advocacy
New Verve Consulting Limited
Allpay Limited
Aaseya Software Services (UK) Limited
Vodafone Limited
Harvey Nash Consulting

Including what each company has been paid in total by the Social Security Directorate, as well as a breakdown by financial year in the last six years.

3. An explanation/description of how each company contributes to ‘service design’. Please acknowledge receipt of this email. If this request is too broad I am happy for it to broken into multiple requests. I can also narrow my request if required.

Response

I have now completed my review of our response to your request under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA) for :-

1. The total amount of money spent by the Social Security Directorate on ‘service design’ in the last six years, broken down by financial year (2018/19, 2019/20, 2020/21, 2021/22, 2022/23 and 2023/24 so far).

2. The total amount that each of the following companies have been paid by the Social Security Directorate in the last six years:
2i Limited
IBM UK Limited
Deloitte LLP
Sopra Steria Limited
Voice Ability Advocacy
New Verve Consulting Limited
Allpay Limited
Aaseya Software Services (UK) Limited
Vodafone Limited
Harvey Nash Consulting

Including what each company has been paid in total by the Social Security Directorate, as well as a breakdown by financial year in the last six years.

3. An explanation/description of how each company contributes to ‘service design’. Please acknowledge receipt of this email. If this request is too broad I am happy for it to broken into multiple requests. I can also narrow my request if required.

Context

In the email submitted to request a review of the original response, you provide further information regarding your request, specifically in relation to visibility of Scottish Government reports on spend over £25,000 and on service design. In order to respond to the specific questions within your FOI review, I will first provide clarifications, to provide context to the response.

• Government Spend Over £25,000 Reports

A record of all Scottish Government payments over £25,000 is publicly available here. Broken down by month, this data includes the names of organisations the payment was made to. The information is provided in Excel format and all figures are disclosed in the report. A ‘####’ error in excel suggests the cell is not wide enough to display the entire value. This issue can be overcome by manually widening the Excel column.

• Service Design

The term ‘Service Design’ has been used in the afore mentioned reports. This is a redundant, legacy categorisation of financial spend which does not directly relate to the delivery of work undertaken in the Social Security Programme. The Government Spend Over £25,000 reports include payments made to third parties for the design, delivery and implementation of the Social Security Programme.

Response to your review

I have concluded that a different decision should be substituted.

1.
The information in the original response did not cover all of the information in scope, as some of it was not published, so we are setting out the figures below. The total amount spent against the Advice, Policy & Programme budget line which includes the design, delivery and implementation of the Social Security Programme over the last 6 years split by financial year is as follows:

2018/19 (£m)	2019/20 (£m)	2020/21 (£m)	2021/22 (£m)	2022/23 (£m)	2023/24 (£m)
88.2	109.5	123.4	148.3	176.4	82.6

2018/19 to 2021/22 figures are taken directly from page 67, Table 5.3(b), line 4 of the Social Security Programme Business Case which is publicly available.

The 2022/23 and 2023/24 spend figures are not publicly available. The 2022/23 figures will go through quality assurance and verification processes prior to any official publication. The 2023/24 figure represents what has been spent so far this financial year to 1st October 2023. These will also be subject to a verification processes prior to their publication. As such, these figures are subject to change and shouldn’t be taken as a record of confirmed spend.

I maintain that 25(1) of FOISA was the correct exemption to use for the figures from 2018-2022.

2.
Upon review, I have concluded that the original decision to apply 33(1)(b) of FOISA in relation to this request was incorrect. The request was incorrectly interpreted, and we are retracting the application of this exemption.

The total amount each of the companies you have listed have been paid over the past 6 years by the Social Security Directorate, split by financial year is as follows:

Table 2 - See attached file

This data in the table has been derived by combining the publicly available data on Scottish Government spend over £25,000 with under £25,000 contract spend pulled from our internal systems.

Payments over £25,000 made to each company, over the past six years, up to June 2023 are publicly available here: Government Spend Over £25,000.

3.
Upon review, I have concluded that the original decision to apply 33(1)(b) of FOISA should be overturned. The information should be released and as such a description of the roles each of the Suppliers played in the Programme can be found below. To provide further detail, I’m also including the Statement of Requirement for the companies you have listed where there is a live contractual agreement. Statements of Requirements offer further specifics on the role each supplier plays in the design, delivery and implementation of the Social Security Programme.

Company Name	Role in Programme Delivery	Attachment Reference
2i Limited	2i Limited provide a testing service for the Social Security Programme and were required to define and implement a fit-for-future testing strategy across the Programme and into the Social Security Scotland Agency.	Testing Services SoR
IBM UK Limited	IBM have two live contracts: SPM Carers & Winters, where IBM support the design, development and delivery of Carer’s and Winter Benefits SPM Enhancements, Notifications, Live Running & SCP, where IBM support the design, development, maintenance, enhancements and delivery of Disability benefits, Scottish Child Payment, and associated service component requirements.	SMP Carers Winters – SoR SPM ENLR&SCP - SoR
Deloitte LLP	Supported with consultation work, development of an appointment booking tool, testing capabilities and developer resource	Not Available
Sopra Steria Limited	Sopra Steria build on the existing Digital Portal service capabilities. Digital Portal is the Client Facing Online Platform for benefit applications	Digital Portal - SoR
Voice Ability Advocacy	Voice Ability Scotland coordinate and manage advocacy support for those who, if owing to a disability, require an advocacy worker’s help to interact with the Scottish Social Security system.	Advocacy Services - SoR
New Verve Consulting Limited	As part of Social Security Programme and Agency commitment to using Jira and Confluence, there is a requirement for continued specialist Atlassian support, strategic input, implementation services and training provision.	This is a Call Down contract from the Crown Commercial G Cloud Framework G-Cloud 13 - CCS(crowncommercial.gov.uk)
Allpay Limited	Allpay deliver a payment solution for the distribution of benefits relating to Best Start Foods (part of Best Start Grant) which supports the purchase of nutritious food for low income families.	Allpay - SoR
Aaseya Software Services (UK) Limited	Support to the Outsystems platform to lead the design, integration and configuration of a technology solution for Other Government Departments built on our Outsystems platform	Data Sharing Portal - SoR
Vodafone Limited	Supported our Multi Chanel Contact Centre, providing digital communication channels such as web chat, voice and telephony services	Not Available
Harvey Nash Consulting	Harvey Nash provides interim resources or temporary workers to the Social Security Programme.	This contract is not held by Social Security Programme. Further details on this contract can be found at the following link: Procurement - temporary and interim staff services frameworks 2023 to 2027

 

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.

FOI 202300382501 - Information released - Annex

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255 page PDF

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