Impact Report

Achieving better outcomes for
the public good in 25/26

In a year of geopolitical challenges and rapid change in what digital is expected to do, dxw has continued to deliver high quality work for an increasing range of clients. 

A note from our CEO

This was the year that AI moved from the edges of the conversation to the centre of it. We’ve been investing in the skills, tools and judgement our teams need to use new technologies well, and helping clients separate opportunity from hype.

At the same time, we’ve grown into new sectors, retired more legacy technology than in any other year, put modern, reusable foundations in its place and helped organisations harness their data.

This report shares some highlights.

Dave.

Our impact this year: Improving services across the digital public realm

We want everything we do to have a positive impact:

  • creating services that make life better for people 
  • improving the capability of the teams that deliver them 
  • replacing legacy systems so organisations can move faster, safer, and at lower cost 
  • making sure new technologies like AI are used responsibly and in the public interest

Education

Justice

GDS

Health

British Business Bank

Publishing

Education

We continued to build on our long-running partnership with the Department for Education (DfE), marking 4 years of working together in the Regional Services Division. 

This year we completed one of our largest ever legacy replacement programmes. All 3 of RSD’s ageing systems were fully retired and replaced with a coherent set of modern services, built on shared infrastructure.

Reusable Terraform modules, a common design system, and work towards a shared service patterns library mean DfE can now build new services faster, as well as saving significant costs on licensing. 

Using shared infrastructure, we accelerated delivery of the new Manage School Improvement service to just 5 months.

We also ran a short experiment looking at where generative AI can help a busy central team answer policy questions. Following the test and learn approach, we designed, built and tested 2 agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio. One agent was able to significantly reduce admin time and is now being rolled out more widely.

17%

reduction in average conversion project completion time

87

service usability score, up from 65

72%

reduction in data-quality failures

Justice

With the prison population still at historically high levels and the cost of reoffending to society estimated at over £18 billion a year, finding better ways to support people leaving custody and manage community sentences remains a priority. 

This year we started a major new programme with the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) to digitise Community Payback. We’re building a new digital service for community payback teams to track and record progress on unpaid work. 

These are the first steps in a multi-year programme to modernise legacy processes and implement the Sentencing Bill.  After successfully completing build, we’re now taking the service into private beta, then on to full national rollout. 

We also continued to work on Community Accommodation Services, extending the digital service to support people eligible for bail in finding an appropriate place to live. This year, the team delivered a new digital application journey, so referrers have real-time visibility of applications and decisions.

The Digital Centre of Government

We marked 11 years of our partnership with the Government Digital Service (GDS) on the platforms that host the government’s blogs and campaigns. Working closely with the team, we rolled out the refreshed GOV.UK brand on these channels following its launch in July 2025.

The GDS Campaigns platform that dxw designed, built and now hosts, is currently home to over 60 live government campaigns that reach millions of people. With 26 new campaigns created this year, including:

We continue to support GOV.UK Publishing, which enables the publication of content across around 1 million pages on the GOV.UK web domain by several thousand civil servants.

Health

We took our first significant steps into Health this year. Working with NHS England’s Digital Prevention Services Portfolio teams to transform services in vaccinations and screening that support the shift from sickness to prevention. A key part of the Government’s 10 Year Health Plan for England. 

Our Business Change Leads have been providing technical and business direction to help new digital services land, and make sure they’re resilient enough to work within the complex landscape of secondary care. Something we’ve begun to think of as managing “the space around the thing.”

We’ve supported the following programmes:

  • Vaccination programmes: the annual COVID-19 vaccinations programme and a one-off MenB vaccination programme for Kent students
  • Lung cancer screening: launch of a new London pilot, successfully delivering 10,000 CT scans
  • National breast screening programme: facilitating policy change to improve planning and replacing 75 legacy systems with one cloud based service
  • National bowel screening system: successful cloud migration of the system to unlock opportunities for continuous improvement

We also worked with Cohorting as a Service (CaaS) to redesign genetic referrals to screening programmes and reduce the amount of admin time needed to manage them.

75%

of lung cancers detected in early stages through the pilot

6.5m

people to be covered by new breast screening service every 3 years

British Business Bank

We worked with the British Business Bank on its Guarantees Portal and Cloud Platform, supporting the delivery of finance schemes to small businesses.

Our developers have been working on improved pipelines, accessibility, GOV.UK Design System patterns, multi-factor authentication, and a user interface redesign.

Our platform engineering team is also working with the Bank’s Cloud Centre of Excellence to modernise its underlying infrastructure.

  • We removed 3–5 day deployment bottlenecks, enabling daily application releases.
  • Cloud mean time to recovery was reduced from days to hours.

Web publishing and hosting

We continue to provide high quality web design, publishing and hosting for clients with a wide range of needs. From The Department of Health and Social Care and The National Audit Office, to social housing provider Settle.

This year we supported the UK Atomic Energy Authority, the UK’s national fusion energy research organisation, with a discovery to consolidate 6 separate websites into one.

“[dxw…] deepened our understanding of what people really look for from our online service and helped us establish effective procurement documentation to secure investment to develop it.”

– Simon Darby, Website Manager, UKAEA

Maximising our wider impact

When we’re not working with clients we spend time widening the benefit of our work.

Net Zero since 2022

ISO 20000-1 certified

4 years of employee ownership

Looking ahead

We end the year even more focused than we began it, and better equipped to do good work in an AI-shaped world.

The achievements in this report are the result of a team committed to making digital services that work better for people.

Thanks to everyone at dxw, our dxw-friends, clients and partners.