A form service DWP runs itself, on open source it controls
The Client
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is a United Kingdom government department of His Majesty's Government responsible for welfare, pensions and child maintenance policy.
The case that made it urgent was Social Fund Budgeting Loans — the emergency loans people apply for when they are already in difficulty. The process they met was paper: forms to obtain, fill in by hand and return, with the delay that implies at exactly the wrong moment.
Digitising it was not the whole problem. Rules for a benefit like this change, and each change meant another round of specification and delivery — so the department wanted the capability in-house: business staff able to build a service, and then alter it themselves at the pace policy moved, rather than commissioning a project for every revision.
We built them a service rather than sold them a product. The foundation is open source, which is what let it be shaped to their requirements instead of theirs to its limits — and what let it be hosted in the UK, under their own control, with no dependency on a vendor holding the code or the data.
Key Features and Benefits:
Security drove the design. The service handles data at OFFICIAL sensitive, mapped to Business Impact Levels 2 and 3, in environments the department controls. The link from the applicant’s browser to DWP’s servers is encrypted for the whole journey, forms and data are encrypted across the infrastructure, and submissions can be delivered out by secure email. Those were the department’s requirements, met by building to them rather than by accepting what a hosted product offered.
Five DWP staff were trained on site over two days. By the end of the first day they were building multi-page forms that were GDS-themed and standards-compliant out of the box; by the second they were working with business rules, client- and server-side validation, and behaviour that changes with the answers given. The forms for this service are long and complex, and their building continued in-house for months afterwards, with our support team behind them rather than in front of them.
The result is a service the department owns the shape of. Its staff create and change the forms, the presentation meets GDS, and the security arrangements are the ones DWP asked for — not the ones a hosted product could accommodate.
What this involved
Social Fund Budgeting Loans — emergency loans — moved off a paper application, for people already in difficulty by the time they reach it
Data at OFFICIAL sensitive, mapped to Business Impact Levels 2 and 3, in environments the department controls
Encrypted from the applicant’s browser to DWP’s servers for the whole journey, with forms and data encrypted across the infrastructure and delivery out by secure email
Built on open source, so the department controls the code and the deployment and the data stays in the UK
Five staff trained in two days: GDS-themed multi-page forms by day one, business rules and validation by day two, then months of in-house form building with support behind them
GDS-compliant and assessment-ready, still working where JavaScript is unavailable