Department for Work and Pensions: Digital Technology

(asked on 1st September 2023) - View Source

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps their Department is taking to improve its digital services to provide better (a) accessibility and (b) user experience for the public.


Answered by
Mims Davies Portrait
Mims Davies
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Work and Pensions)
This question was answered on 11th September 2023

DWP is continually working to improve the accessibility of DWP gov.uk services and for users of assistive technologies.

Colleagues now follow a formal DWP Digital Accessibility Policy, which sets out the standards that product teams must adhere to when creating new products or updating existing products.

Training and consultancy is provided for product teams to enable them to create accessible content and test it with assistive software.

It is our ambition to digitalise our experience although we will also ensure we are inclusive in our design and provide an alternative non-digital service for users who are unable to use a digital channel.

Some of our improvements include also changes to our channels and the ways in which customers interact with us, such as enabling voice activated customer service on our telephony channel introducing new channels, including webchat in some areas.

We are also in the early stages of designing a new interface where a user can access key information across their benefits.

We know that access to our products and services is key, and to make this easier we are improving our identity solution. We intend to converge with the Government One Log in service which will provide a single identity access solution across Government. In the meantime, DWP has its own online identity solution that enables a user to identify themselves once, and then re-use that identity across multiple channels with a simple credential check. This will ensure fast and simple access to support for our users.

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