Contract Award: EESSI Progamme Accessibility Features

The Electronic Exchange of Social Security Information (EESSI) Programme is a cross EU initiative to move from the current clerical process for exchanging information between Member States to an electronic digital solution that will:

- Further protect the social security rights of citizens who are mobile across Europe; - Facilitate the effective application and management of EU social security law; - Speed up the administration and decision-making process for the actual calculation and payment of social security benefits, allowances and pensions to European citizens.

To deliver this solution within the UK, DWP is responsible for deploying two EU built applications consisting of a shared UK Access Point to be used by a number of Government Departments and a Departmental Specific (DWP, HMRC and DHSC) user application called RINA. For DWP, these applications are hosted within the Microsoft Azure Cloud.

The UK have decided to address the accessibility non-compliance by mobilising an Agile Feature Team to deliver compliance within a period of 9 months by re-factoring/re-skinning the RINA front end. As a contingent benefit of this activity we also endeavour to meet the Government Digital Services (GDS) Standards which have to date not been applicable as the RINA application is provided as a code-locked application to all EU Member States to simply configure and deploy.

These requirements relate solely to the RINA component i.e. the Front End of EESSI which Users interact with and not the Access Point Component.