Sometimes the best ideas are under our noses, just waiting to be noticed. And I think GovWifi is one such idea. For years now, civil servants, contractors and visitors have enjoyed the ease of registering once and connecting seamlessly to secure Wi-Fi in government buildings across the country. It is not flashy, nor particularly well known, but I find it works perfectly, every time.
It’s a joy1 to visit a government building, open your device and instantly be connected. A simple initial sign up2, and your connectivity follows you around the government estate, without ever having to redo it on that device3.
Of all the building blocks in the platform foundations for more effective government this is a vital brick 4.
And it’s so good that I can’t be alone in wondering: what if the same model were made available to everyone?5
Imagine stepping into a hospital waiting room, a jobcentre, a library, or a family hub and being instantly connected. Extend that to courts and police stations, to council offices and leisure centres, to universities and classrooms. And then to trains, buses, and transport interchanges. A single, trusted, citizen-facing network, available wherever public money sustains the public realm – not just in civic buildings but in the places people live, work and play. That should include council housing and asylum accommodation, where digital connection is essential for the dignity, participation, and opportunity that help people to feel at home.
Isn’t it about time that we had a singular, national, network open to all, safe, and free at the point of use? Isn’t it about time for CivWifi6?
From GovWifi to CivWifi7
GovWifi was built with a clear need in mind: the civil service is a mobile workforce, moving between departments and sites, and it made little sense to juggle dozens of passwords and networks. The solution is elegant: federated authentication on top of existing infrastructure. Departments run their own Wi-Fi; the GovWifi team simply provides the glue.
The case for CivWifi is similar, but wider. Our public realm is fractured by logins and splash pages, patchy coverage and inconsistent branding. Sometimes it’s free, sometimes it’s paywalled, sometimes it’s advertised as “guest Wi-Fi” but only for certain categories of users. Undoubtedly there are many ropey commercial deals offering questionable value for money in the background. The experience is uneven, and that unevenness maps neatly onto existing inequalities. Those who most need digital access are often those least able to navigate the barriers.
Why doesn’t it exist already?
I can imagine a whole host of practical and political reasons.
Establishing a freely available national wifi for the public would no doubt raise concerns about cost, capacity, liability, and competition. Certainly, bandwidth bills for the local provider would rise. Abuse and illegal activity would need to be monitored. Commercial providers who currently run Wi-Fi would object to a government-backed alternative. And at a deeper level, there is the familiar ideological objection: government should only do what government has to do, leaving everything else to the market therefore putting connectivity firmly in the realm of private provision.
These are real barriers, and there are likely others too, but they don’t feel insurmountable. We have models, admittedly under serious strain, for providing public libraries, public transport, public parks. But I don’t think it’s too hopelessly idealistic to believe that access to certain common goods strengthens the fabric of society. In the twenty-first century, connectivity is as much a baseline utility as water or electricity.8
One thing can’t be questioned – GovWifi demonstrates, over many years, that this solution is robust and valuable. It’s easy to think of big things like this, which could be brilliant but will be complex, as impossible because of their complexity; but it’s not true. It can work. It already works. The problems here certainly aren’t technical.
How might it be brought to life?
It seems like there are really obvious places where there is clear public benefit and where the government would be able to tell a really compelling story about its ambitions for 21st century Britain. All of these places offer access to the Internet already but they’re not offering it with the seamlessness of once connected, always connected.
- Jobcentres. We require benefits claimants to search for and apply for jobs online. We have ambitions for the renewal of jobs and careers support that will be digital where possible (but still human when needed).
- Hospitals. Patients and carers shouldn’t need to be wrestling with getting online but be able to access fast, reliable connections to stay in touch with family and friends and the content that will keep them entertained and able to relax while they’re under medical care.
- Transport. Connectivity is already patchy but demonstrably possible. TfL has shown it can be done, even underground. On trains and buses, poor Wi-Fi is a perennial frustration and a drag on productivity. With the railways returning to public ownership, we could treat connectivity as part of the national transport offer, not an afterthought.
Yes, these examples cut across three very different corners of the state. But that is the point. We are supposed to be living in the era of mission-led government — a chance to tackle problems that exceed departmental boundaries. Yet too often, silos pull us back into the same old patterns. CivWifi would be a small but telling test of what it looks like when we act across the boundaries, and for the mission rather than the machinery.
As with GovWifi a central team would provide the authentication service, while local organisations would supply the bandwidth. GOV.UK One Login could make the registration seamless. Abuse monitoring – which is critically important – could be shared across those underlying providers. The commercial providers would still get their income, just without any hint of slurping up our individual data as part of faffing about with hot-spot specific credentials.9
If it worked, the scope could expand, step by step, until CivWifi became as expected and unremarkable as the telephone box or the post box10: part of the background infrastructure of public life.
Why it matters
The value of CivWifi is not only in convenience. It would be symbolic. A government that ensures you can connect wherever you encounter it is a government that signals trust, inclusion, and presence in the everyday. It would say: we see you, and we want you to be part of this digital society, not left at its margins.
Obviously CivWifi would not solve poverty or close the digital divide on its own. But it would be a thread in the larger fabric, a way of knitting public services and public lives a little closer together.
It also matters because of the chasm of trust at the heart of British public discourse. The idea would inevitably attract noise. Some would cry unfairness, not because they lack access, but because their instinct is to resent others gaining it. Others would mutter about surveillance, as though public WiFi were the decisive step towards a panopticon.
The route out of that hole is not by indulging those voices, but by delivering good quality government. Rebuilding trust is the missing mission. And restoring it must be a priority. And you do that by showing government can do things that work: practical, visible, everyday.
CivWifi could be one of those things. And quickly.
We know it would work, because GovWifi has proven itself over years: robust, reliable, quietly successful.
Which is why it doesn’t need fanfare. This is boring infrastructure: it just needs to become part of the civic fabric.
No song and dance. Just quietly get on and implement it: that’s what true as a platform thinking looks like. The wins don’t come from launching some tech, they come from inclusion improving, growth following, and digital divides narrowing.
Quick win. Big value. Job done.
A thought worth testing
Perhaps CivWifi will never exist in the form I sketch here. Perhaps it would cost too much, or run up too many political objections. But the principle, of extending the same simplicity and trust we already offer to civil servants, to the public at large, feels like one that’s worth testing.
The best ideas are often right under our noses. And the best infrastructure is the kind we barely notice, until it isn’t there11.
- Many things should spark joy, even small and insignificant things like immediate Internet access. ↩︎
- Can’t get much simpler than texting ‘Go’ or sending a blank email. ↩︎
- Assuming you save your credentials in your password manager for easy reference on a different device. ↩︎
- I recently encountered a similar cross-government approach to Wi-Fi in Kosovo. Unfortunately it relied on having a Kosovan phone number and didn’t offer the email fallback so it was impossible for me to get onto it. It was also not yet the singular, strategic approach to replace all Wi-Fi everywhere. ↩︎
- Or maybe I am, and I’m just overly influenced by the experience of getting onto WiFi at the school where I’m a governor… ↩︎
- I think PubWifi is better but probably confusingly like a Pub – though with 8 pubs closing a week maybe there’s a branching out of GOV.UK on the High Street into a state-backed takeover of pubs as community spaces (GOV.UK in the Pub is not as good an acronym as GOTHS though is it). ↩︎
- There’s also a good argument for keeping the name GovWifi and expanding its remit to be available for all. One of the things that plagues the popular conception of government effectiveness is the disassociation of useful things from government. A clear brand is important in making the link between a public good and effective government visible. Maybe the best answer is to rely even more on the GOV.UK branding. ↩︎
- That’s not a novel or controversial claim – Labour’s 2019 manifesto said the same as part of a commitment to provide free household fibre for all by 2030. ↩︎
- Though who among us does not use fake details for these purposes? ↩︎
- I am deliberately choosing things that are no longer ubiquitous. ↩︎
- Just ask the Hockley Heath WI ↩︎