Apply for Maternity Allowance Alpha Assessment

Apply for Maternity Allowance

DWP's Apply for Maternity Allowance  alpha assessment report

From: Government Digital Service Published 13 April 2026 Assessment date: 4 November 2024 Result: Amber Stage: Alpha
| Assessment date | 04/11/2024 |
| Assessment stage | Alpha |
| Assessment type | Assessment |
| Service provider | Department for Works and Pensions |
| Result | Amber |

Service description

Maternity Allowance (MA) is a DWP Benefit available to pregnant women, or women who  have recently given birth to enable them to take paid time off work.

MA is one of the last options for financial maternity leave provision for those women who do  not qualify for Statutory Maternity Pay, Occupational Maternity Pay or who are self employed.

Previous discovery work on MA clearly identified a need to improve the way citizens apply  for Maternity Allowance. The new digital service will enable citizens to make an online  application for Maternity Allowance.

Service users

This service is for pregnant women or women who have recently given birth. To qualify,  claimants must:

• not be entitled to Statutory Maternity Pay (paid by their employer)

• have been employed or self-employed for 26 weeks out of the 66 weeks test period  preceding the baby’s due date

• have earned at least £30 a week during 13 out of the 66 weeks test period preceding  the baby’s due date

| Things the service team has done well: |
The MA team demonstrated they work effectively, in the open, with policy and other digital  teams. They referenced agile ceremonies like daily stand ups and open show and tell  sessions with wider DWP Digital and have had positive feedback through these sessions  that have informed iterations. The Product Manager demonstrated a good understanding of  their governance process and other dependencies.

The panel was pleased to see a North Star metric that considers the efficiency of the whole  service. The service team has thought about the impact their digital service will have on the  processing time for claims, not just how long the claim information will take the user to  provide.

The team also demonstrated a good understanding of the users and their needs. They had  focused on two personas (Claimant with a Supportive Employer; Claimant with an  Unsupportive Employer) developed in Discovery. The team used user needs developed in  Discovery to inform designs tested in Alpha and developed newly ‘created’ user needs in  Alpha. These were backed up by a good amount of evidence in the form of quotes and  comments from user research sessions.

The user researcher handled sensitive topics that came up in the user research sessions  with a trauma-informed approach, e.g. when they identified that a user had suffered a  bereavement.

The team showed standardisation and use of best practices in DevOps practices across  the different microservices and deployments. The team demonstrated good early adoption  of SRA components and practices and undertook comprehensive Accessibility testing  using standard practices.

| The team also exhibited standard departmental engineering best practices for GitHub workflow branching strategies. Contract testing using PactFlow is specifically a welcome |

| practice in the interdependencies within microservices as well as aim of thorough security  testing with standard Gitlab pipeline fragments e.g. OWASP ZAP, DAST and SAST. |
The team completed good design work in alpha, experimenting with a range of solutions to  establish the overall shape of the service and testing some of their riskiest assumptions.  They have a clear shared understanding of the project’s success measures which will be  valuable as the team changes.

| The panel was also impressed with the way design has been driven by information from a  wide range of sources including user research, analytics and feedback from operational  colleagues. This has allowed the team to make well-informed design choices and identify  pain points for future work. Although some design challenges remain, the team’s strong  ways of working should ensure that these are tackled. |

1. Understand users and their needs Decision

The service was rated green for point 1 of the Standard.

Optional advice to help the service team continually improve the service: • consider alternative approaches to recruiting participants that are harder to reach,  e.g. via third party organisations, or by asking the participant recruitment agency to  build up a pipeline of users for this service over a longer period rather than for a  specific round of research • observe real users going through the journey, uploading their own documents • research more around the point of decision making related to ‘Should I apply for  Maternity Allowance if it will affect my Universal Credit payment, and how do I find  out’?

2. Solve a whole problem for users

Decision

The service was rated green for point 2 of the Standard.

Optional advice to help the service team continually improve the service: • the team should continue to work closely with GOV.UK One Login, actively sharing  research insights on this part of the journey and advocating for Maternity Allowance  service users

3. Provide a joined-up experience across all  channels

Decision

The service was rated green for point 3 of the Standard.

Optional advice to help the service team continually improve the service: • in beta, the team should work to understand more about nonstandard entry paths to  the service, for example, landing directly on the GOV.UK Forms page

• the team should use analytics collected in beta to understand more about the ‘off  ramps’ out of the digital service and how users who drop out will be supported to  continue their application in other channels

• the team should continue their work on making evidence upload as easy as possible,  for example, their work on accepting iPhone HEIC format images

4. Make the service simple to use

Decision

The service was rated amber for point 4 of the Standard.

During the assessment, we didn’t see evidence of:

• making it easy for users to understand and manage the potential impact of Maternity  Allowance on other benefits, particularly Universal Credit, and make appropriate  choices about whether to apply

5. Make sure everyone can use the service

Decision

The service was rated green for point 5 of the Standard.

Optional advice to help the service team continually improve the service: • the panel was impressed with the team’s recognition that MA service users may face  contextual accessibility issues not considered by standard accessibility checks, for  example, feeding babies and parenting small children while using the service. They  could explore further what this might mean for the design of the service • the team should build out and test fully realised journeys for people needing  alternative contact formats (reasonable adjustments). The team is planning to adapt  existing agent-facing screens but, in beta, should also research these journeys with  MA service users and feed back insights to the relevant project

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 green for point 9 of the Standard.

10. Define what success looks like and  publish performance data

Decision

The service was rated green for point 10 of the Standard.

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 amber for point 12 of the Standard.

During the assessment, we didn’t see evidence of:

• a plan to publish any backend microservices application code to the public DWP  GitHub at https://github.com/dwp

• any specific concerns around security, fraud algorithms or policy which might prevent publishing the code to the public GitHub repository

13. Use and contribute to open standards,  common components and patterns

Decision

The service was rated green for point 13 of the Standard.

Optional advice to help the service team continually improve the service: • the team is actively working to be an early adopter of common components and  patterns. In beta they should include these patterns in their research prototypes so  they can contribute research insights back to the relevant projects

• the team should continue to engage with the DWP Design System team on patterns  for alternative contact formats, add another thing, find an address and file upload

14. Operate a reliable service

Decision

The service was rated green for point 14 of the Standard.

Updates to this page

Published 13 April 2026 Contents