Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS)

Government Transformation and Service Delivery

Record date: 31 March 2026

Whole-life cost: £571.9m
Published schedule: 01/04/2025 – 29/10/2027
NISTA delivery confidence: AMBER
Senior responsible owner: Mike Beddington

What the project is for

Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) is a programme to modernise HMRC’s contact centre technology. It will replace ageing systems with a secure, cloud‑based platform that makes it easier for customers to contact HMRC and for advisors to provide a better, more efficient service. CCaaS will improve call handling, digital contact options and service resilience, helping HMRC respond more effectively to customer demand while supporting future service improvements.

Departmental delivery commentary

The Contact Centre as a Service programme is rated Amber as it moves into mobilisation and discovery following supplier approval. The rating reflects known delivery risks, including maintaining service continuity during transition from legacy systems; ensuring sufficient delivery and integration capacity; achieving business readiness and adoption across operational teams; and dependency on timely deployment to realise benefits. These risks are understood and are being actively managed through phased delivery, strengthened business readiness activity, clear accountabilities, and ongoing governance and assurance. Delivery is being actively managed to maintain control of cost, scope and delivery assumptions, while strengthening capability and business readiness to support successful implementation and adoption. Ongoing assurance and governance arrangements are in place, with actions tracked to completion, providing confidence that the programme remains deliverable and that benefits will be realised as planned.

Schedule

The schedule reflects the completion of procurement activity in line with plan and a continued focus on ensuring a safe and controlled transition from existing contact centre systems. The schedule continues to balance pace with service continuity, allowing sufficient time for implementation, testing and business readiness activities to minimise the risk of disruption to live services.

Cost

The programme continues to deliver within its approved funding envelope. This reflects cost estimates that are consistent with the approved business case and the programme’s current stage, with costs being closely managed as the programme moves from procurement into delivery.

Benefits

The programme has defined its expected benefits, and is expected to improve service resilience, customer experience and operational efficiency and is taking action to ensure it is affordable, delivers value for money and is achievable. The programme is establishing clear, measurable benefits with accountable owners, alongside baselining current performance to enable robust tracking of benefits realisation. Full monetisation of benefits will be completed following supplier selection and finalisation of the detailed design and operating model, when implementation choices and delivery profiles are confirmed.

Delivery ratings

NISTA assessment: AMBER
SRO assessment: Not disclosed

These are the published NISTA and senior responsible owner assessments, not UK Pulse scores.

Financial year

Baseline: £6.3m
Forecast: £5.6m
Variance: 10.9%

The budget variance exceeds 5% and reflects the transition from early, high-level estimates to a more mature and assumption-led forecast. As delivery plans and commercial positions have developed, previously indicative budget assumptions have been revisited, with greater clarity on scope, profiling and cost drivers. As a result, the current forecast provides a more realistic and evidence-based view of expected spend, with variance mainly driven by improved definition and the reclassification of uncertain elements rather than a change in overall delivery ambition.

Expected benefits

£238m

View official source