Author: Benjamin Welby (Page 1 of 16)

I’m Benjamin Welby.

I live in Croydon with my wife and two children. I church at Croydon Vineyard. We’ve had season tickets for Bradford City since 2007. I’ve got degrees in History, Post-War Recovery and Public Administration and have spent the last 15+ years working at the intersection of digital transformation and good governance.

I began my career in local government, went on to help launch GOV.UK and most recently worked on defining global standards for digital government at the OECD. I'm currently currently co-authoring a book integrating biblical values with civic life, encouraging Christians to adopt a hope-filled, faith-inspired perspective on democracy and how we are governed.

I’m interested in too many things: being a good husband and father, following Jesus, the theology of governing well, a warm welcome for refugees and asylum seekers, that ‘digital’ leads to fair, inclusive and equitable transformation, exploring the world, League Two football, Pantomime, various England sports teams and Team GB…

A pocket of denim jeans contains a red briefcase, a smartphone displaying app icons, and several small model houses labeled with business names. The arrangement suggests a theme of business and organization.

Pocket, Pavement, Platform: Government in the App Store and on the High Street

July 10, 2025 / Benjamin Welby / 0 Comments

The illusion of pocket-sized government

Life in 2025 is mediated by thumbnails. The Family Group Chat, social media, mortgages, season tickets, commute planning, music, telly, groceries, takeaways – you name it and it’ll be sat behind a colourful little square. Little wonder that ministers want to compress their red boxes into that same form factor. Last week we had the GOV.UK App promise “public services in your pocket”, the Health Secretary hail the NHS app as the “doctor in your pocket”, and, back in November, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions pitch the “jobcentre in your pocket” in launching the Get Britain Working White Paper.

Convenience makes a cracking soundbite.

But between screen and street there’s a stubborn gap. Three decades of first e-government and then digital government have certainly moved things online, and in many cases brought about genuine transformation. The Blueprint for Modern Digital Government sets out a vision for services designed around citizens’ needs, not government silos, emphasising accessibility for all. Yet digital exclusion persists. Every day, people rely on library PCs, borrowed phones, neighbours’ Wi-Fi, or using AI to decipher government’s Nietzsche-esque content.

Those gaps aren’t only socio-economic. They’re structural. Creating a single government domain gave us a whole-of-government¹ web presence, a single digital front door. But the same logic has never been applied to the state’s physical estate. Austerity has hollowed out council services, libraries, SureStart Centres, and community hubs, leaving Jobcentre Plus as the last nationwide, vertically integrated, walk-in presence of central government.

When we developed the OECD service design and delivery framework, we included bricks alongside pixels because closing a counter doesn’t eliminate demand – it displaces it. Support shifts to schools, GP surgeries, Citizens Advice, food banks, police stations, faith venues. They’re fragmented proxies for the state people wish they could reach directly.

What if we applied the same design discipline that built GOV.UK to the built environment? Imagine GOV.UK on the High Street (yes, of course I’m going to use the acronym GOTHS²) as a physical twin to the digital front door: one roof, all life circumstances, staffed by people with the tools to help. Canada, Chile³, Greece, and Portugal⁴, among others, have been blending web and bricks for years to deliver services where people are. As the European Union researches what it means to go beyond the screens we risk falling behind by betting on apps alone. The real need isn’t for more digital products but better omnichannel services – channels that cooperate, not compete.

The question isn’t just what fits in your pocket? It’s how should government show up where people already are?

Beyond the screens: Can an omnichannel approach make digital public services more human?

June 11, 2025 / Benjamin Welby / 1 Comment

The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) is currently doing a piece of work to develop an omnichannel framework for public services across the EU. A week ago I joined a workshop alongside people from the OECD, Portugal, Sweden and Denmark.

It’s a topic close to my heart. Beyond my years learning from the best at GDS I was fortunate in shaping the OECD’s Framework for Service Design and Delivery that was developed during this research in Chile, summarised in this Going Digital Toolkit Note and further embedded into the OECD’s Good Practice Principles for Public Service Design and Delivery in the Digital Age. That work laid the groundwork for the OECD Recommendation on Human-Centred Public Administrative Services. I didn’t work directly on the Recommendation itself (it kicked off in earnest after I left) but those earlier pieces helped to shape the foundations it builds on. Bruno shared the definition from the Recommendation.

Omni-channel refers to the approach to managing service delivery channels in an integrated, interoperable way to enable users to access the service they want seamlessly and with consistent quality across channels (such as websites, physical offices, self-service kiosks, video-calls, call centres, etc.), as opposed to a ‘multi-channel’ approach that refers to the ability of the user to access services through different entry points, often operating independently of each other.  
OECD Recommendation on Human Centred Public Administrative Services (2024)

Now, through my work with DWP on the jobs and careers service, it’s great to be revisiting those ideas afresh, and in concrete terms. Part of our vision is to design a service that is ‘digital where possible; human when needed’. As an organisation with a national footprint of Jobcentres and a wide range of services that can (and should) be delivered online, we’re asking: how can we bring the best of in-person services into people’s palms and pockets, while at the same time bringing the best of digital into those frontline conversations for both staff and our users?

From tailored CV advice online, to guidance offered face-to-face, to the potential of personalised prompts and nudges through an agentic interface in the future, our aim is to meet people where they are, in the mode that works for them.. And for that, we need to be focused and ambitious in pursuing an omni-channel approach.

All of which is to say: thoughts, I’ve got a few. I wanted to write up the post it notes I stuck on the Miro board – it’s not a formal report, just an open reflection. If you’d been in that call, here’s what you’d have heard me say – but what would you have added (or objected to)?

Vibe Coding, Fireworks and the Mortar of Government

June 3, 2025 / Benjamin Welby / 2 Comments

A few days ago, I lit the fuse on a working prototype of a government service. No team, no procurement cycle, no waiting for approval. Just me, a few prompts, and a handful of AI tools. And honestly? Fireworks.

Vibe coding (or vibecoding) is an approach to producing software by using artificial intelligence (AI), where a person describes a problem in a few sentences as a prompt to a large language model (LLM) tuned for coding. The LLM generates software based on the description, shifting the programmer’s role from manual coding to guiding, testing, and refining the AI-generated source code.
Vibe coding, Wikipedia

I’m not new to what’s now being called vibe coding. Over the last year ChatGPT has helped me to bring a few random ideas to life¹. Last weekend I thought I’d see what Codex CLI could do and I was again blown away. I mentioned this at work and in the conversation that followed we mused on whether some of the frustrations we’d been feeling could be shifted by trying the same thing there.

So I sat down with a laptop, some product instinct, and a handful of different AI tools. I wanted to see whether we could finally conjure the ‘fireworks’ we’d been waiting weeks to set off. I started with ChatGPT and the scale of the task was a bit intimidating. But then I remembered about Firebase and in minutes had something to show off. As I did, another colleague responded by asking if I’d seen Stitch, and another colleague said I should check out Jules.

And once I discovered Jules, that was when things got really interesting. Very quickly I had something live. Not a sketch or simulation, but something real. It’s up and running on Render (and I’d love to give you the link but I probably shouldn’t let it escape into the wild; at least not yet).

Obviously it’s just a prototype. But that also seems to do it a disservice. What is true is that it absolutely appears to do the job we had in mind. No engineers. No designers. Just me, some prompts and decisions, and it works, and it works in a way that will absolutely elicit the right sort of oohs and aahs.

I suppose I ought to make one small confession. I really shouldn’t have done any of this. Inside the department, everything except Copilot is blocked (and even then you only get Copilot on a Windows machine, not a Mac). Which means this burst of delivery joy has happened off network, off platform, and probably against better judgment. But that, too, is part of the problem. When the path of least resistance leads outside the system, it’s the system that needs fixing, not the people finding their way around it. Well, I would say that wouldn’t I?

Now, for our purposes as a team this exercise might be the perfect fireworks but more broadly for government, what are the repercussions?

I’m going to call it: Jules and Codex earn their hype.

A split image featuring two scenes: on the left, a woman in a yellow shirt passionately singing in a church setting with a cross in the background; on the right, a smiling woman in a green sweater is engaged in conversation with a man at a desk with a "jobcentreplus" sign visible.

Singing of the Goodness of God… and of the State?

May 20, 2025 / Benjamin Welby / 1 Comment

At church this weekend we sang the worship song Goodness of God

All my life You have been faithful,
All my life You have been so, so good…
With every breath that I am able, I will sing of the goodness of God

And in the middle of worship I found myself wondering whether anyone could ever sing the same about public institutions.

All my life, the state has been faithful
All my life, public administration has been good to me

It may have surfaced because I’d been able to make some progress with PrayReps this week. Or perhaps because of my day job helping the Department for Work and Pensions to design a new approach to providing jobs and careers support for the country. A life-long companion to help people navigate work, whether they’re seeking their first job, having a mid-career reinvention, or easing into a well-earned retirement.

What would it take for one of our future users to say: “All my life, it’s been good to me. It didn’t fail me. It was there”.

Thinking about the foundations of mission-led government

December 13, 2024 / Benjamin Welby / 2 Comments

In the past week, speeches from Keir Starmer, Pat Mcfadden and Georgia Gould¹ have painted a bold vision for the work of government. The Plan for Change is ambitious, rooted in missions designed to tackle the nation’s most pressing issues—from housing and NHS waiting lists to economic inactivity.

It is really good to hear our government talk up a positive, attractive narrative about the future they want for our country. Show me someone dismissing the combined story they’re telling and I suspect you’ve found someone choosing partisan tribalism over good faith engagement although, and perhaps more likely, they may just be someone understandably browbeaten by years of disappointment, frustration and hypocrisy.

Speaking personally I want to be optimistic. I really want to believe that mission-led government can make a dent in these seemingly intractable problems. And because I’m now working in a team directly tied to one of the missions I’m closer than most people to what it means to translate these ideas into practice. But that means I can see a stark challenge: acknowledging the extent of the gulf between rhetoric and reality.

Praying for representatives: US edition

December 9, 2024 / Benjamin Welby / 0 Comments

Over the last year Dave and I have been kicking around the idea of “Kingdom Democracy” (or maybe kingdœmocracy) as we try to encourage our fellow Christians to adopt a hope-filled, faith-inspired perspective on democracy and how we’re governed. We haven’t quite managed to write the book yet, but it has been brilliant to take things that we know in our bones and put them into words.

It’s also been a powerful exercise in challenging me to put what I believe into practice at a personal level. That led to my prayer walk along the boundaries of the Croydon constituencies, the election night prayer watch party, the time spent praying for every one of our new MPs and subsequently trying to turn that tool into an actual product called PrayReps at Code for the Kingdom BUILD.

I was hoping PrayReps would be online by now. It’s not there yet, although good progress made with the underlying data. Going back to work has definitely slowed progress. So, no product on the internet but I did repurpose my old locally hosted ChatGPT-assisted code for the US Presidential, Congressional and Gubernatorial elections. Now, with the final result finally being confirmed at the end of last week I can finally publish this blog post.

It’s a blog post in three parts.

Visualising Government as a Platform

November 25, 2024 / Benjamin Welby / 2 Comments

In Richard Pope’s essential book Platformland he pitches a new ‘anatomy of public services’ and uses helpful images to dismantle, reconstruct and develop for 2024 ideas that he was first part of putting forward in 2015. Given how well the book does this we should all hope that he’s moving the conversation forward in terms of the UK’s inertia in this area.

Over the weekend he popped up on BlueSky and LinkedIn to ask what people who had seen those original drawings in 2015 thought about them at the time.

Question for digital government people c 2015. Did you see these at the time? What worked / didn't work about them (conceptually, not graphically)
— Richard Pope (@richardpope.org) 2024-11-23T10:14:39.259Z

This will be the nudge I needed to finally finish a series of posts (I don’t think you want it as a single post 🙃) I started writing about my reflections on Government as a Platform so if you want them straight to your inbox then do subscribe.

I remember being treated to a sneak peek of what Richard and others were cooking up and being persuaded pretty quickly that they were absolutely spot on. When it was subsequently presented to GDS more widely at an All Staff (I don’t think any public version exists but Tom Loosemore’s October 2015 Code for America talk captures a lot of it) it was one of those moments at GDS, of which there were more than a few, that made me feel so lucky to be working alongside such inspiring minds.

So perhaps I was too close to the thinking and experiences that produced the visualisation to be an impartial observer – I was already fertile soil for these seeds to land in. I expect people who were further away from the conversation (and the shape it subsequently took) might give more insightful responses to Richard’s immediate question for his purposes in 2024. Nonetheless, here are some thoughts of my own.

Mark Foden’s “Gubbins of Government” was another reference point at the time and I thought these images and the ideas they put forward were a great complement to that and spoke of a similar ambition in ways that could land with a not-inside-GDS audience.

I liked how the visuals were helpful beyond the ‘whole of government’ perspective. The obvious takeaway is that the data, consent and components layers are about the role of the centre to enable vertical services at the top. I think it’s also a helpful cross section for specific services to think about as well. Any end to end service trying to meet a whole need is going to do that through a composite of elements (micro-services if you will), that sit on top of a service-wide approach to data and identity.

At the OECD I wrote the Government as a Platform pillar of the Digital Government Policy Framework. That exercise was really helpful for me in marshalling my thinking as a partial retrospective on my work as the Lead Product Manager for Government as a Platform in the UK (more on this in those upcoming blog posts).

One of the biggest things I felt when it came to writing it up was the need to take a wider-angle lens on how you enable and equip teams to move quickly, at scale, and with quality. This 2015 visualisation sits alongside a whole host of contextual assumptions about things we at GDS didn’t exactly take for granted but which we saw as self-evidently important: fixing procurement, controlling spend, assuring quality, building capability, etc.

So as powerful as I think the visuals are and were, I think they only tell a partial, more technical story, about what it means to create a Government as a Platform ecosystem.

Back to work

November 19, 2024 / Benjamin Welby / 2 Comments

When I left the OECD last summer, it was for several reasons (some of them implicit in this blog post). And I’m pleased that I decided to do so. This has been such a valuable slice of time – a luxury I recognise few people are able to enjoy.

I’m so lucky to have had the career I’ve had to this point and the breadth and depth of what I’ve done. But it has given me a bit of a dilemma about the shape of who I am and the role that best fits, especially in this new, post-OECD phase.

In terms of substance, the OECD was a good match and I was fortunate to have been adept at what the job required. I’m really proud of all the work I contributed to there. But it’s also true that I missed the “gnarliness” of delivery – the practical, hands-on experience without which I wouldn’t have been as good at the job. So I always knew my time focusing on the conceptual and advisory wasn’t forever – it’s testament to the team and the content that I surprised myself and ended up staying for five years.

A Movember reflection on the US Presidential election

November 6, 2024 / Benjamin Welby / 2 Comments

Every November since 2007 I have taken part in the annual facial hair fest that is Movember. I do this because men’s health matters – on average we die 4.5 years earlier than women, and for largely preventable reasons. If you enjoy this and want to support my efforts this year then I, and the causes Movember supports, would be very grateful. You can donate using this link.

In the aftermath of the US elections plenty of talking heads are providing razor-sharp analysis about the reasons Trump won and Harris didn’t. But I doubt anyone is giving you analysis about the sharpness of razors and their role in the race. So, let me plug that gap.

In becoming Donald Trump‘s Vice President, J. D. Vance becomes the first successfully bearded Presidential or Vice Presidential candidate to win over the American public in almost 100 years.

An elegant bronze scale stands on a cobblestone quay beside a calm river, with the British Houses of Parliament and Big Ben visible in the background. On one side of the scale, a woman in professional attire stands with her back to the viewer, symbolizing human values. On the opposite side, a digital figure illuminated with glowing blue circuitry represents artificial intelligence. The scale is heavily tipped in favor of the woman, showing that human values outweigh technology. The scene has a warm and optimistic atmosphere, with a clear sky indicating a pleasant spring or early summer day.

AI in government: it’s about people, not technology (as always)

September 13, 2024 / Benjamin Welby / 4 Comments

It was our first week back for Vineyard English School after the summer break¹. Many familiar faces were absent, but one young Eritrean was eager to see us – he’d just received a letter about his asylum claim.

We were back in the hotel today after stopping over the summer (more volunteers would allow for doing this year round). Here's a photo of a letter that had been received by one of the hotel residents. Two native English speakers had to check with one another that we actually understood it.

[image or embed]
— Benjamin Welby (@bm.wel.by) 11 September 2024 at 18:13

The letter was dense, bureaucratic, and impenetrable. It’s a far cry from the aspirations for content design that so many advocate for as a central plank in reimagining the relationship between the state and its users.

He looked to us for an explanation. But even among the fluent English speakers, we had to consult amongst ourselves to ensure we understood it correctly. Hardly surprising, since according to The First Word’s readability test, this letter is on par with reading Nietzsche.

A visual display of book covers arranged by difficulty level, ranging from "Very Easy" (0-20) to "Very Challenging" (61-100). The cover in the middle, labeled "20 - 30," stands out in yellow and features the title "Beyond Good and Evil" by Nietzsche. Other covers represent a range of genres and styles.

The power of AI

I reached for ChatGPT.

The illusion of pocket-sized government

The power of AI

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