Derek Hobbs, DWP’s head of digital services, also told an audience at Civil Service Live that the application system to access the weekly payment – which helps carers with their expenses – is too expensive to run.
The DWP is currently replacing the system – a decision, said Hobbs, that has “been driven purely because the service that we have currently for carer’s allowance is atrocious. It’s a really poor service that people need to use: it delivers poorly for the customer.” The service also “costs a lot of money to host”, he added, and is “horrendously costly to make minor changes to”.
Hobbs explained that the department is now a month away from a “minimum viable product” for the new system, but that the final product could take longer to deliver.
This is because the replacement is “a discreet project that’s not being driven by any major policy change, so we don’t have a time imperative on it,” he said.