HM Revenue & Customs has divided a low-code technology programme with maximum contract values totalling about £657 million between Atos, Cognizant, and Coforge, creating separate delivery and oversight roles for an application estate that has become a substantial part of the department’s modernisation work. The contracts sit within HMRC’s Digital and Legacy Application Services procurement framework and run for an initial three years, with options that can extend the work for a further two years.

Cognizant has the largest award, worth up to £360 million, while Coforge has secured work worth up to £219 million. Those two suppliers will provide specialist low-code build, configuration, DevOps, and live-service management, covering the design, testing, deployment, operation, and continuing improvement of applications. Atos has a separate leadership and configuration-services role worth up to roughly £78 million, providing programme oversight, supplier management, technical governance, assurance, and delivery support.

The figures are ceilings rather than guaranteed expenditure, so the combined £657 million should not be read as an immediate technology bill. Even so, the maximum values and five-year potential duration show the scale at which HMRC expects low-code platforms to be engineered and managed. What began across many organisations as a way to build relatively simple applications with visual tools and less hand-written software has developed into an estate requiring the same disciplines around architecture, release management, security, testing, and operational resilience that accompany more conventional systems.

The awards form part of the wider DALAS framework, through which HMRC is replacing or modernising technology while reducing dependence on ageing applications. Procurement material for the relevant configuration-services lot includes DevOps support, digital design, build and transition, end-to-end development, data management, and knowledge transfer, which makes low code one component of a broader attempt to create a more manageable application environment rather than an isolated productivity tool.

Low code becomes enterprise infrastructure

Low-code software allows applications and processes to be assembled through visual development environments and reusable components, reducing the amount of conventional programming required for many tasks. Government teams have used the approach because policy changes and operational requirements can create a constant demand for new workflows, forms, case-management tools, and internal services, while specialist software engineering capacity remains limited. A cross-government low-code community now includes hundreds of practitioners sharing standards, reusable components, and governance approaches.

Ease of development creates its own management problems once usage spreads. An application may be quick to create but still process sensitive information, connect to critical services, depend on third-party components, or become operationally important long after the person who originally built it has moved on. Large organisations can therefore accumulate low-code systems that are faster to produce than traditional software but no easier to govern if ownership, testing, security, documentation, and retirement are neglected.

HMRC’s procurement structure acknowledges that tension by separating hands-on delivery from an independent leadership and assurance function. Cognizant and Coforge will be responsible for much of the build and operational work, while Atos is expected to provide governance across suppliers and the technology estate. Multi-supplier arrangements can reduce dependence on a single contractor and create competitive tension, although they also increase the need for clear architecture, interfaces, accountability, and decision rights when something fails.

Modernisation still depends on supplier control

The department’s broader technology programme has to reconcile two pressures. HMRC needs to replace legacy systems and respond more quickly to policy and service changes, yet every new platform can itself become tomorrow’s legacy estate if applications proliferate without consistent standards. Low code reduces some barriers to creating software, but it does not remove lifecycle costs; applications still need maintenance, security updates, data controls, support, and eventual retirement.

Knowledge transfer consequently remains central to public-sector outsourcing, where suppliers can stay embedded for years and institutional understanding can migrate away from the department buying the service. The DALAS framework explicitly includes skills development intended to support the buyer’s own capability, although contract wording alone cannot guarantee that expertise will remain inside HMRC once individual projects mature. The practical test will be whether the department becomes better able to govern its application estate while relying on several large external technology suppliers to build and run substantial parts of it.

The size of the awards also complicates low code’s reputation as a lightweight way to reduce development costs. At HMRC, the platforms now sit inside contracts with nine-figure potential values because the work covers engineering, DevOps, support, governance, and operations over several years. Once thousands of staff and critical public services depend on an application estate, the apparent simplicity of producing software does little to reduce the organisational cost of keeping it reliable.

HMRC’s measure of success will therefore be less about the number of applications produced than whether the estate becomes easier to change, secure, support, and retire. The department has bought considerable external capacity to accelerate that work; the harder task is ensuring that faster software creation does not simply replace one generation of difficult-to-manage systems with another.