A notification ought to be a small job. Reuse some code, send a message, move on. On an HM Courts & Tribunals Service housing-disputes programme, that assumption met the people responsible for content, design and accessibility. Once different channels, templates and translation needs entered the conversation, apparently simple notification work earned a larger estimate. The code was only part of the service.
Solirius Reply’s account of that exercise offers a useful introduction to the company. Working alongside HMCTS and other suppliers, its team helped size more than 170 features across seven work packages. Workshops lasted 45 minutes; individual discussions were capped at ten. Designs appeared in Figma, estimates went into Excel, and the work connected to Jira. The aim was enough shared understanding to plan, while keeping uncertainty visible.
Scope first. Estimates second. A plan that can change.
The business behind the forms
Solirius sells the people and expertise needed to make complicated digital services work. Its six service areas cover business consulting, cloud and cyber, data and AI, digital engineering, user-centred design and digital delivery. A client can need several at once: someone to understand the process, someone to design the interaction, engineers to build it and specialists to test whether it behaves as intended.
The buyer is an organisation; the person eventually using the service may be a citizen or a public servant. Reply’s acquisition announcement names HMCTS, FCDO Services, the Department for Education and Building Digital UK among clients. Solirius also lists the Crown Prosecution Service and Pension Protection Fund. Its homepage carries a testimonial from Growth Intelligence’s chief technology officer about engineers integrating into the startup’s team. Public-sector experience is a defining feature, with private-sector work alongside it.
The commercial proposition is practical. Business consultants develop cases for change and turn requirements into work a technical team can deliver. Delivery specialists coordinate that work. For a department with several suppliers and changing requirements, the value includes making decisions understandable across professional boundaries. A beautifully written requirement achieves little if the people building and operating the service interpret it differently.
A £60m ceiling, read carefully
The Planning Inspectorate’s Digital & Data Partner award illustrates the scale available to this business. Published in January 2025, the notice names Solirius and sets a maximum of £60 million for an initial four years, with an optional extra year capped at £10 million. It explicitly says work volumes are not guaranteed. Treating the ceiling as money already earned would misread the deal.
There is also a smaller unit of purchase. Solirius’s G-Cloud 14 listing for Mobile and Device Testing quotes £350 to £1,300 per unit per day. The service covers areas such as compatibility, performance, usability and localisation. That range belongs to this particular listing. Buyers still need to establish the roles, duration and deliverables their project requires before a daily price becomes a useful budget.
Mobile and Device Testing listing
Planning Inspectorate contract
Daily service pricing and a contract ceiling cannot be read as company revenue.
This is a professional-services model: clients commission expertise and delivery capacity. The relevant comparison is the cost of a suitable team over the life of the work, including the client’s own involvement. An inexpensive day can be expensive if the brief is wrong. Equally, a large programme does not justify a large team for every task. Procurement has to connect the purchase to a problem small enough to inspect.
The filter panel someone had already built
At the Planning Inspectorate, interaction designer Claire McShane describes a recurring discovery in weekly design meetings: another service had already solved a similar problem. Filters, uploads and other patterns were being tackled in parallel. The team audited existing work, prioritised together and began with filters.
They adapted an existing internal prototype to house shared guidance, extending the GOV.UK Design System for local needs. Documentation included implementation examples and accessibility considerations. Patterns remained subject to testing and revision. The intervention began with people comparing their work, then gave that conversation somewhere durable to live.
The lesson is easy to borrow: inventory before invention. It depends on teams being willing to expose unfinished work and somebody maintaining what gets shared. A library without those habits can become another place to search for an answer that nobody owns.
Testing has a social side
Software engineering at Solirius includes quality assurance as well as construction. Its service offer spans building applications and checking their reliability. Cloud and cyber specialists address the surrounding infrastructure and security. These are connected concerns: a useful interface still depends on the systems underneath it, and a move to the cloud still needs decisions about access, operation and risk.
The company’s October 2024 account of an HMCTS QA Town Hall makes the testing work tangible. The Testing Centre of Excellence provided shared resources, templates and training; its website then had more than 230 users. Sessions covered AI-assisted test automation and hands-on screen-reader testing. PA Consulting hosted the Solirius-run event, a reminder that government delivery often brings several organisations into the same room.
A procurement record published in June 2026 reports a £7.62 million award to Solirius Reply for the HMCTS Testing Centre of Excellence, with a September 2026 to September 2030 contract period. That establishes the continuing commercial importance of testing. The award value measures the contract, rather than proving how many defects were prevented or how much time citizens saved.
A policy is only the beginning
In a June 2026 accessibility account, Solirius describes adapting existing maturity models after finding that none covered the mix of evidence and lived experience it wanted. A four-week assessment combined interviews, a staff survey and document review. An unnamed client had enthusiasm for inclusion, alongside gaps in knowledge, coordination and accountability.
“We have a commitment, but we struggle with the knowledge to follow it up.”
Anonymous staff member, published accessibility assessment
The recommendations separated immediate improvements from work requiring planning and sustained organisational commitment. The useful distinction is between possessing a policy and being able to act on it. Interviewing staff can reveal where the instructions stop helping.
Solirius’s own accessibility statement adds an awkward, relevant detail. Last reviewed in January 2025, it described its website as partially compliant with WCAG 2.2 AA and listed problems involving navigation, focus and screen-reader behaviour. That dated statement is evidence of disclosed shortcomings. Buyers assessing accessibility expertise should examine the work and its maintenance, including the supplier’s own digital front door.
AI meets the data dictionary
Solirius’s Data and AI offer starts with discovery: understanding the work, available data and objectives. It also includes data engineering, machine learning and AI-assisted quality assurance. Organisations can bring consultants into an existing data-science team or commission a team around the work. The practical buying question is which decision or process the technology will improve.
An August 2026 account of Civil Possessions work at HMCTS focuses on a quieter foundation. Solirius describes mapping the service and its information flows before refining data models through conceptual, logical and physical stages. Dictionaries define what individual data elements mean. Models evolve as requirements change, with developers, testers and business specialists involved.
- 01 Understand the process
- 02 Define the information
- 03 Model and build
- 04 Review as needs change
A simplified view of the Civil Possessions data-architecture approach.
For a buyer, this suggests a useful sequence: establish meaning and ownership before expecting sophisticated tools to produce dependable answers. A model cannot settle a disagreement about what a field is supposed to represent. That decision belongs to people who understand the service.
The rowing kit that changed the brief
Solirius’s graduate programme supplies a smaller, more personal example. In a seven-day application challenge, Rachel Bradley researched a rowing-kit concept and discovered that potential users attached importance to items’ sentimental history. She changed the emphasis towards community. Her first technical obstacle was environment setup; mentors and AI explanations helped her work through it.
Fellow graduate Kieran De La Cruz used research to shape a music concept and AI as a coding tutor, checking his thinking with peers. These were training projects. Their interest lies in the decisions: ask before committing, use help, and let evidence alter an attractive initial idea.
The company’s published values emphasise honesty, curiosity and supportive teamwork. Its careers material describes consultants working project by project with client teams and contributing to internal work between assignments. Those arrangements make communication a working skill. People have to enter an organisation, learn its habits and challenge assumptions without making collaboration impossible.
A specialist inside a larger group
Established in 2007, Solirius joined Reply in October 2024 through an acquisition of its full share capital. Reply identified founder Hemel Popat as managing director and described government digital transformation as the strategic attraction. The legal name became Solirius Reply Limited in July 2025. Group membership gives the consultancy access to a wider network of specialists.
Its position is therefore specific: an experienced government delivery consultancy within a larger technology group. Buyers can compare that proposition with building capability internally or engaging other consultancies and systems integrators. The case for Solirius rests on relevant people, institutional experience and the ability to work across disciplines. Its published projects offer a sensible place to begin that examination: a disputed estimate, a reused design, a tested interaction, a definition everyone can understand.