Pay the Dartford Crossing (Dart Charge) beta reassessment
Service Standard reassessment report Pay the Dartford Crossing (Dart Charge) 19/07/2023
Service Standard reassessment report
Pay the Dartford Crossing (Dart Charge)
| From: | Central Digital & Data Office (CDDO) |
| Assessment date: | 19/07/2023 |
| Stage: | Beta reassessment |
| Result: | Not met |
| Service provider: | National Highways |
Previous assessment reports
Service description
A web service which allows users of the Dartford crossing to pay for their crossing online either as a one-off payment, ‘pay as you go’ or via a top up account. There are facilities to set up and pay via business accounts, used mainly by freight transport companies.
Users are able to pay or challenge a PCN (Penalty Charge Notice- a fine for not paying the toll charge in time) within the Service.
The Service will include IVR (Interactive Voice Recognition) telephone numbers for both Payment and Enforcement (paying a PCN), and an option to call a contact centre (number supplied within the Service).
There are also ‘contact us’ flows for the Payment and Enforcement parts of the Service, along with complaint form flows.
Key charging hours and statistics for 2022
- Charging hours are 0600 – 2200 daily.
- Number of crossings - 48.5 million
- Daily average – 133,000
- Daily average of crossings by vehicles with number plates not previously seen – 4,672
- Percentage of users who pay the crossing fee on time and do not receive a PCN – 94.4%
- Number of open accounts - 880,000
- Number of vehicles in these accounts – 2.9 million
Service users
- Fleet (national and international)
- Residents
- Foreign visitors
- Commuters
High level user needs this service aims to meet
As a user of the Dartcharge Service…
- I need…to be able to manage my payments in a way that suits me
-
So that…I can pay for my crossings quickly and easily without incurring a charge
- I need…to understand how the Dartford Crossing works
-
So that…I do what is needed of me and don’t incur a penalty charge
- I need…to understand how I make a payment for a penalty charge
-
So that…I can pay the charge on time and avoid additional costs
- I need…to understand why and how I can challenge a penalty charge
-
So that…I can make the decision whether to challenge the charge or not, and challenge it correctly
- I need…to contact Dartcharge to make a complaint
- So that…I can resolve or report an issue
12. Make new source code open
Decision
The service has not met point 12 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- The team clearly understands the reasoning behind why source code should be made available.
- There is acceptance with service providers that all intellectual property belongs to National Highways.
- All source code is being placed into a version control system to ensure it can be made openly available in the future.
- There is a plan for the activities needed to make the repositories available, which can be used to track progress over time.
- As this is the first service in National Highways that will be releasing source code openly, the team have collaborated across the organisation to establish the necessary internal policies to allow this to happen.
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- Identify a suitable open-source licence to use and release source code under this licence. This should ideally include any relevant test repositories as well as the application code itself.
- Decide how issues such as version history and commit messages will be handled, historically and going forward, to ensure sensitive information is protected.
- Ensure there is a clear understanding, both internally and with service providers, about how source code can be properly handled to separate code that can be released under an open-source licence from secrets that cannot be.
- Determine any protections that should be put in place to reduce the risk of secrets being leaked through open-source repositories. There should also be a well-understood process for handling when this does happen (for example rotating secret keys).
- Ensure there are contingency plans in place with service providers in case there are licensing issues identified with the current dependencies of the service.
13. Use and contribute to open standards, common components and patterns
Decision
The service has met point 13 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- The team considered the suitability of GOV.UK Pay and GOV.UK Notify early in the lifetime of the service, and identified sensible reasons why it did not meet the requirements of the service at the time it was being procured.
- A process has been put in place to periodically review whether further iterations of GOV.UK Pay and GOV.UK Notify provide the necessary functionality to justify changing to use these.
- Although the team has not integrated with GOV.UK Pay or One Login for Government, there has been specific effort put into being consistent with the journeys in these and to follow the same patterns.
- The team have engaged well with the One Login for Government team to understand how this may meet the requirements of the service in the future.
- The engagement with service providers includes a requirement for integrating with a third-party login provider, which may be suitable for One Login for Government, but this has not been progressed yet due to a lack of a clear user need.
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- Revisit their analysis of GOV.UK Pay and determine whether it now matches the requirements of the service better. As reconciliation is now on the GOV.UK Pay roadmap, the team should help feed their needs into this work to help ensure GOV.UK Pay would meet the needs of similar services in the future.
- Share the research done around recurring payments with the GOV.UK Pay team and, ideally, the wider cross-government community, to make the most of findings they have from providing a service to a large number of users.
- Continue to engage with the One Login for Government team to understand whether they will be able to accommodate the verification needs of the service, or if this will continue to be a responsibility of the service itself.
- Make a more detailed plan, including with service providers, for how One Login for Government can be integrated in the future. This may need to include support for supporting both login providers for a period of time, as well as a means for migrating users.