UK tax collector hands Capgemini £600M contact center deal, delays start of £2.4B CRM contract

The UK's tax collector has chosen French consultancy giant Capgemini for a 600 million contact center deal, while pushing back the award and start of its 2.4 billion customer relationship management contract. HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) awarded Capgemini's UK unit its Contact Centre as a Service contract, worth 600 million including VAT and lasting up to 10 years, on 27 April. It received 13 bids and has also short-listed Canadian-headquartered CGI for the deal. The contract notice lists Bristol-based contact center technology supplier Route 101 and US customer experience provider Nice Systems as subcontractors. Capgemini is already one of HMRC's main suppliers. In July last year it awarded the company a 107 million support and services contract extension to its 2022 deal to support systems built under the two-decades-old Aspire project. The company's UK unit lists a number of HMRC case studies including development of its mobile app. HMRC also announced a three month delay to the award and start date of its 2.4 billion, 15 year contract for customer relationship management software. When it published the tender in July last year, the estimated award and contract start date were both 1 May 2026. In an update published last week, both dates are 1 August 2026. These timelines are always kept under review, and estimated dates can change as work progresses to ensure a fair and robust outcome that delivers value for taxpayers," said an HMRC spokesperson of the delay. This has no impact on our customer services." The tax collector is known for its monster technology contracts, with its procurement pipeline in January including plans to spend more than 2 billion over the next couple of years. In March it awarded Amazon Web Services (AWS), the only remaining bidder, a 472.8 million contract to migrate and host services provided by three datacenters run by Fujitsu. Sources told The Register that the "Procurement for the provision of Hyperscaler Services" deal had been designed so that only AWS or Microsoft could realistically win it. The House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee's 3 June report, which criticized the government's extensive use of controversial US supplier Palantir, also mentioned HMRC's AWS deal as an example of vendor lock-in. The public sector's dependence on AWS and Microsoft's cloud products undermines fair competition, fails to deliver value for money, can prevent domestic alternatives from scaling and - when outages occur - exposes a lack of resilience," the report said. (R)