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<p>The Senior Deputy Speaker has asked me, as Chair of the Services Committee, to
respond on his behalf. The Voice Programme has been set up to address service quality
and user experience priorities regarding telephony in Parliament. The programme’s
high-level benefits include increasing business resilience and value for money and
improving customer experience across telephony services. The programme is upgrading
and replacing the existing telephony infrastructure (a combination of on premise MS
Teams and Skype for Business) and has completed procurement of a unified communications
service, to be implemented later this year, that will deliver resilient telephony.
Initially, the new service is expected- to re-utilise the existing Polycom telephone
handsets, however, replacement telephone handsets will be introduced as part of product
lifecycle replacement.</p><p>The House of Lords Services Committee, the House of Commons
Administration Committee and the Business Resilience Board are being consulted on
implementation plans for the new service.</p><p>The Investment Committee and Accounting
Officers have approved a business case for the Voice Programme which has an approved
whole life cost of £6.37m. These costs cover implementation, programme resources,
licences, and support costs until FY28/29.</p>
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