The Government Digital Service (GDS) has committed up to £200 million over the next two years to ensure continued resilience and scalability of its GOV.UK Notify platform, renewing contracts with long-standing SMS suppliers Firetext and MMG.
The new deals - each valued at £98.2 million - reflect an uplift from previous agreements, which carried projected values of £46.4 million.
Notify is now embedded in the day-to-day operations of over 1,500 public bodies, supporting more than 8,700 individual services. On average, the platform sends three million SMS fragments daily, equivalent to 1.1 billion messages per year. That figure is expected to more than triple to 3.8 billion in 2024/25 and continue growing as NHS usage and wider adoption accelerate.
Critical to the Notify architecture is its dual-supplier model, which allows GDS to dynamically balance message traffic based on supplier performance and system load. This dual-path strategy not only ensures speed and uptime but also guards against single points of failure - suppliers must maintain independent infrastructure to meet strict redundancy requirements.
GDS retains full discretion over traffic allocation, maintaining flexibility to respond to shifting government priorities and usage patterns.
Since its launch in 2016, Notify has evolved from a Whitehall tool to a core pillar of public sector digital communication. During the pandemic, the service rapidly scaled to meet critical information needs, and its user base has continued to expand, with more than 500 new organisations coming on board since 2020.
James
