Service assessments and applying the Service Standard

Check if you need to meet the Service Standard or get an assessment

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From:
Standards and assurance community

What has to be assessed

If you’re developing a transactional service for central government, you must get it assessed. This applies even if your service is internal and will only be used by civil servants.

A service is transactional if it allows users to either:

  • exchange information, money, permission, goods or services
  • submit personal information that results in a change to a government record

Scope of the assessment

The Service Standard requires you to think about the user’s wider journey. But that doesn’t mean the entire journey will be assessed.

The things that get assessed are:

The service could still meet the standard if there are problems with the user’s wider journey, as long as you’re taking reasonable steps to make things better and fix the journey in increments.

Exception if you’re using an assured form building platform

You won’t need an assessment if you’re:

This reflects the fact that forms created using an assured form building platform have government standards ‘built in’. And it allows organisations to make cost savings and accessibility improvements by delivering digital versions of document-based forms quickly.

Even if you’re using an assured form building platform, you may find that your department has an assurance process for forms with a higher degree of reputational or financial risk. This will be a lighter touch process than a service assessment - for example, it might be an expert review carried out by a design or content professional. Contact your department’s assessment team if you’re not sure.

Who will assess your service

Your service will be assessed by a cross-government panel if either:

  • your service is likely to handle more than 100,000 transactions per year
  • civil servants in more than one organisation will use your service

Otherwise, your service will be assessed by a panel from your department. If your department doesn’t have an assessment team, you can ask for help in the #standard-assessments channel on cross-government Slack.

You can check when and how to book an assessment.

Services which do not meet the criteria for being assessed

Even if your service doesn’t need an assessment, you can arrange one to check you’re building it in a way that meets the Service Standard. Contact your department’s assessment team to ask about a voluntary assessment.

If getting an assessment is a condition of your spend control approval, you must get the service assessed - even if it does not meet the usual criteria.

Assessments in local government

If you’re working in local government you can use the localgov digital Slack channel to ask for a peer review of your work.

Adapting the Service Standard

You can adapt the Service Standard to suit different contexts.

For example, you might be building something that’s non-transactional, like a website or calculator. You won’t need to publish data on the mandatory KPIs, but you should still know what your users are trying to do and collect data that helps you work out whether they’re able to do that or not.

Or if you’re creating a service for people who work in government you could take a more relaxed view of things like uptime, as the service is unlikely to be needed 24 hours a day. But make sure to schedule any downtime outside office hours.

If you’re creating a service that’s not for GOV.UK, you can still use the patterns in the GOV.UK Design System. But it won’t be appropriate to make your service look like GOV.UK.

You may find the following guides useful:

From:
Standards and assurance community
Last updated
about 2 months ago
Last update:

Updated information on how using a form-building platform affects assurance - you won’t usually need an assessment if you’re using an assured form building platform and expecting a lower number of transactions.

  1. Page updated to align with policy around assessment responsibilities and contact details for voluntary assessments.

  2. Added information about when online forms made using form building tools do not need to have a service assessment.

  3. Guidance first published