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Guidance

GOV.UK rebrand: what you need to do

How changes to GOV.UK branding affect DWP internal services

As part of the 2025 GOV.UK brand refresh, new versions of GOV.UK design system components were released and added to GOV.UK Frontend. If your service is on a service.gov.uk domain, you should update your service to use the new brand by following these instructions.

These changes can also affect services not on public-facing domains that use the internal service header and internal service footer components from the DWP Design system. We have updated these components in release 3.4.0 of DWP Frontend to:

  • fix the background colour of the internal service header component to black, rather than using the new GOV.UK blue
  • remove the blue accent bar above the internal service footer and fix the background colour to grey

These DWP components previously had no specified colours, but inherited their colours from GOV.UK. This meant there were two options:

  • continue inheriting colour from the GOV.UK components: components would change to blue
  • isolate the header and footer from the GOV.UK components to maintain the current colours

At DWP we have taken the second option, so that internal services can maintain the current white-on-black styling of the DWP components. This means we are specifying colours for this component for the first time.

What you need to do

To continue using the standard DWP internal service header and internal service footer, we recommend that you install or update to DWP Frontend 3.4.0 by running this command in your terminal:

npm i @dwp/dwp-frontend

If you continue to use an earlier version of DWP Frontend your components and use the latest GOV.UK frontend, you will inherit the non-standard (blue) branding on those components.

DWP Frontend release notes

Examples

Before

If you have not updated DWP Frontend your prototype will inherit design elements from GOV.UK Frontend and will look like this:

  • header has a blue background
  • blue bar above footer
  • background colour has a blue tint
Screenshot of an example internal service using the incorrect GOV.UK colours

After

After updating to DWP Frontend 3.4.0 your prototype should look like this:

  • header has a black background
  • there is no blue bar above the footer
  • background colour is light grey
Screenshot of an example internal service showing the correct colours

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