In order to deliver the new service from 2029, the Department told us it needs certainty over the design of the new health assessments service by 2027 to either procure the new 12 Qq 45–46 13 Q 47 14 Q 76 15 Q 12; C&AG’s Report, para 3.14 16 Q 22; C&AG’s Report, figure 10 17 Q 1; C&AG’s Report, para 3.21 18 Q 25; C&AG’s Report, para 2.10 19 Qq 25–26; C&AG’s Report, para 2.10 12 Revising health assessments for disability benefits services from contractors, or allow it sufficient time to bring the service in-house.20 The NAO found that, to date, the Department had focused on building the digital system to manage cases and had not set out what evidence it needed for the test and learn activity to understand how the health assessment service it is designing is working.21 The Department recognised that it had made a mistake early on in the programme, between 2018 and 2019, where it thought it could incorporate the transformation it wanted to achieve from the Programme into the procurement of the new contracts. It told us that its procurement timetables meant that this was not possible. As a result, it reset the programme so that it was able to separate out the initial transformation activity from the day to day running of its functional assessment services but still have contractors involved in both.22 However, the Department told us it will need to work with the new contractors and its evaluation team to understand where in the country it needs to test the health assessment service to assure itself that it gets the data and information it needs to be able to assess the success of the transformed service.23 Monitoring progress