How sticky notes saved 'the single biggest digital program in the world'

Success of UK's Universal Credit has lessons for government IT projects, former minister claims

Former UK government minister Sir Iain Duncan Smith has told a committee of MPs that the digitization of Universal Credit is a success story other government departments can learn from.

As Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the minister, often referred to by his initials IDS, was responsible for the early life of the project designed to replace six earlier benefits platforms and simplify the system.

While project costs increased by nearly £1 billion ($1.3 billion) and completion is more than ten years late, the achievements of the "single biggest digital program in the world" should not be played down, Duncan Smith told the House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee.

That success was attributed to a major reset of the project – which originally began in 2010 – just three years in. That 2013 "reset" was meant to integrate security into the design of the online payment system and bring technology and process experts into the same room, "literally," said IDS.

"They would sit opposite each other. When somebody within the DWP [Department for Work & Pensions] side or the digital engineers side hits a problem, you don't wait and email somebody; you write the problem on a Post-It note, you stick it on the board, and say, 'Here's my problem, give me a shout.'

"People would get their coffee; they would walk along and read the board. You'd go along and you go, 'Oh, wait a minute, I know how I can do that.' You've got this energy moving back and forwards as you design the system. There's not one bit doing software and another bit doing the job centers, they were absolutely together, and that helps speed the process up. It is how everybody does it now."

When the program was reset, it first had to recruit a new digital team, breaking salary caps for civil servants in the process.

"It's an either or: you have to pay the people that have got the expertise or you just don't have the expertise," Duncan Smith said.

Perhaps, though, later successes do not excuse earlier shortcomings of the project. In November 2013, Parliament's spending watchdog, the Public Accounts Committee, noted [PDF] "a shocking absence of control over suppliers [largely HP, Accenture, IBM, and BT] with the Department neglecting to implement basic procedures for monitoring and authorizing expenditure." Initial estimates valued the write-offs for software that could not be used at £140 million ($186 million).

Although the 2013 reset might have got the Universal Credit project back on track, it was not plain sailing from then on.

According to a report [PDF] from UK spending watchdog the National Audit Office in 2024, the estimate of the total cost of implementing Universal Credit had risen to £2.9 billion ($3.9 billion). In 2010, the DWP set out to transfer 8 million households onto the system by 2017. It rolled out Universal Credit for new claims nationwide in 2018, while setting out plans to complete the transition by March 2022. In November 2022, the DWP updated this business case, and by March 2023, 2.2 million households were still receiving legacy benefits. In 2022-23, DWP paid £41.2 billion ($54.8 billion) in benefits through the new system.

Since DWP's business case in 2018, the expected cost of implementing Universal Credit has increased by £912 million ($1.2 billion) and the date of completion delayed by at least six years to 2028.

Such shortcomings should not overshadow Universal Credit's achievements, Duncan Smith told MPs. The recent pandemic was a good example.

"If you think about COVID, [Universal Credit] took on 1.5 million people in about two and a half weeks. You could not have done that with the legacy system; it would have crashed. They did it without ever having to have a face-to-face with anybody because they could do it online, and that was the point," he said.

Even the delays to the rollout could be explained as a result of an improved iterative process, where the design was adapted in response to early implementation.

"You roll it out to a small section and then wait and see what it teaches you about its failings and your misunderstanding of what their [benefits] claims would look like," he said. "That's the bit that's gone all the way through this right into the digital program in exactly the same way, and people say, 'Well, it took longer than you anticipated.' Yes, because we realized the mistake of almost every other program change that's taken place in technology in government – and often in the private sector – is that those [design] assumptions don't turn out to be what humans look like when you hit them and then you're going back to change something which doesn't have the flexibility to change."

The success and the approach of the Universal Credit program should provide an example that other government departments can learn from as they tackle their own digitization projects, he said.

"If I were the government, the reality is that I would immediately say there is one place we learn from this, and that is DWP. Nobody in the world had done a digital system as big as that. If you think about the scale of the money that department handles in just one week, it dwarfs banks anywhere you can think of," Duncan Smith claimed.

There is no lack of candidates among government tech projects that might benefit from a lesson or two. They include replacing the NHS finance system, which processes around £170 billion ($226 billion) in health spending every year, and the tax system, which processes £750 billion ($997 billion) of transactions annually, and internal ERP systems across most Whitehall departments.

In that context, whether Duncan Smith's picture of Universal Credit's success is accurate may not matter. A failure to learn the lessons from Universal Credit would be the greater disaster. ®