Apply for attendance allowance Beta assessment
Service Standard assessment report Apply for attendance allowance 16/04/2024
Service Standard assessment report
Apply for attendance allowance
| Assessment date: | 16/04/2024 |
| Stage: | Beta assessment |
| Result: | Amber |
| Service provider: | DWP |
Previous assessment reports
Subsequent assessment reports
Service description
Attendance Allowance (AA) is a disability benefit for those over State Pension age, which aims to support people with care needs to live independently for longer. Citizens can currently only apply for Attendance Allowance using a paper application form.
This service aims to solve the problem of:
- lack of awareness of the disability benefit
- complex and hard to navigate application processes
- user anxiety leading to financial difficulty
- reliance on a complex support network
- lengthy processing times
- outdated DWP legacy systems (longer-term)
Service users
This service is for:
- people with disabilities and care needs who are over State Pension age
- people who can legally act as the person with a disability and care needs for financial matters
- supporters of people with disabilities and care needs
- DWP and their agents
Things the service team has done well:
The team is utilising agile principles. It was good to see multiple stakeholders attending sprint reviews giving the opportunity for them to provide feedback on service development.
The number of permanent staff on the team has increased to 75% with support from leadership to reduce churn. New team members are upskilled quickly using improved documentation of insight gained influencing product and design decisions. An associate Product Manager is joining the team to support development of Assisted Digital routes.
The team is actively working with other teams within the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), including Personal Independence Payment (PIP) and Disability Living Allowance for Children (DLA Child) who are solving similar problems making sure there is a consistent user experience.
There is a clear outcome-based roadmap for enhancing the service into 2025. Long-term plans are in place for strategic design and replacement of legacy back-end technology, for which funding is available.
The team has worked with their stakeholder engagement team to speak with charities other than Age UK. This has helped them build a richer picture of the health conditions users of this service may have.
It is clear they have a good User Centred Design (UCD) planning process in place, generating hypotheses and assumptions to be investigated and proved or disproved through user research.
The user researcher has introduced the GDS Universal Barriers to the team, encouraging a more holistic view of the reasons people could be excluded from the digital service and moving the focus away from the rigidity of the Digital Inclusion scale.
The service team has done really well to make the service simple for users, within the constraints. The panel is impressed by their collaborative approach to working with stakeholders to iterate difficult parts of the form, and remove complicated questions, to make them easier for users.
The service team has considered the end to end journey that users take, and have designed other touch points where this sits outside the remit of their team. They have worked collaboratively with other teams, for example the Communications team.
While user research has uncovered evidence that a save and return feature would be useful, the team are mindful that implementing this may add additional barriers for some users, for example having to go through ID verification or remember passwords. Instead, they are monitoring carefully and have taken steps to mitigate this, for example adding ‘check your answers’ screens to allow users to pause, and improving messaging around the 90 minute time out.
The team is aware of the limited access to analytics at present and understand how this impacts on the ability to deliver robust analytics and data driven change. Within these constraints the team have implemented clear dashboards, frameworks and iterated based on the data as best they can. There are roadmaps in place to resolve this and the team understands the urgency. Cookie Consent, GDPR, PII security and data access are all high on the list of deliverables alongside DWP MI data sources. They have ongoing conversations with other areas and data professionals to discuss solutions and provide the DWP MI team with their requirements.
The team has made good reuse of shared DWP, and wider government patterns and technologies, such as the DWP CASA framework, and Gov UK notify. The team have also identified integration points with other government services like One Login for Government and are engaging with the relevant teams to explore these.
The team has made use of a robust and well-tested platform hosted on AWS, which provides a very reliable and highly available service. The team showed a thorough and efficient development environment, making strong use of automated testing and static analysis tools. The team is currently in the process of making more of their code open source, beyond just the shared components.
1. Understand users and their needs
Decision
The service was rated amber for point 1 of the Standard.
During the assessment, we didn’t see evidence of:
- the team carrying out observations of users interacting with the live service
- the team using data from the live service (existing paper form and new digital service) to recruit inclusively, helping them prioritise who to speak to in user research by weighting recruitment towards the most common health conditions or care needs
- detailed user needs that capture the nuances of the various health conditions or care needs users of this service have, for example pain from arthritis affecting users’ ability to type
- the personas and users’ needs marrying up. There were no detailed user needs for the third party supporter persona and user needs but no persona for the Visiting Officer. Planned field visits with Visiting Officers should help here.
2. Solve a whole problem for users
Decision
The service was rated green for point 2 of the Standard.
3. Provide a joined-up experience across all channels
Decision
The service was rated green for point 3 of the Standard.
4. Make the service simple to use
Decision
The service was rated green for point 4 of the Standard.
5. Make sure everyone can use the service
Decision
The service was rated amber for point 5 of the Standard.
During the assessment, we didn’t see evidence of:
- how assisted digital routes will be evaluated to check the users of these routes are not disadvantaged
6. Have a multidisciplinary team
Decision
The service was rated green for point 6 of the Standard.
7. Use agile ways of working
Decision
The service was rated green for point 7 of the Standard.
8. Iterate and improve frequently
Decision
The service was rated green for point 8 of the Standard.
9. Create a secure service which protects users’ privacy
Decision
The service was rated amber for point 9 of the Standard.
During the assessment, we didn’t see evidence of:
- a full understanding of user authentication and verification. If the service is to remain an untrusted, unauthenticated journey, then this is not as much of a concern, but if the team were to implement a save and return journey, then the service would require a robust authentication process to ensure user’s data is kept secure
10. Define what success looks like and publish performance data
Decision
The service was rated amber for point 10 of the Standard.
During the assessment, we didn’t see evidence of:
- implementation of implicit and explicit audit events. While the team hope to get access to DWP MI once in Public Beta implementation of these analytics are essential before progressing into Live or onboarding a significant number of users.
- a solution to their current data issues relying on assumptions and estimations as Google Analytics is impacted by cookie consent and sampling.
- a logged-in or verified journey. Long term plans indicate a possible shift to this in the future. If this is implemented, a logged-out exit survey path would add more qualitative and quantitative analytics as well as robust error tracking.
11. Choose the right tools and technology
Decision
The service was rated green for point 11 of the Standard.
12. Make new source code open
Decision
The service was rated green for point 12 of the Standard.
13. Use and contribute to open standards, common components and patterns
Decision
The service was rated green for point 13 of the Standard.
14. Operate a reliable service
Decision
The service was rated green for point 14 of the Standard.
Next Steps
This service can now move into a public beta phase, subject to addressing the amber points within three months time and CDDO spend approval.
This service now has permission to launch on a GOV.UK service domain with a beta banner. These instructions explain how to set up your *.service.gov.uk domain.
The service must pass a live assessment before:
- turning off a legacy service
- reducing the team’s resources to a ‘business as usual’ level, or
- removing the ‘beta’ banner from the service