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Thoughts from the mind of Ben Welby

Author: Benjamin Welby (Page 3 of 18)

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 – Part 2

July 10, 2025 / / 5 Comments
This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Pocket, Pavement, Platform: Government in the App Store and on the High Street

This was one big post, and now it’s five smaller pieces thinking about what public service really means in a digital age, and the risks of mistaking convenience for coherence. In Part 1, I wondered about how far fitting government into our pockets offers real transformation, or just a sleeker surface. In the third the focus is on what does it mean for services to be completely AI-led. The fourth argues for an omnichannel approach that designs for every doorway. And the final piece is all about Goths.

But now in Part 2, I want to look beneath that surface: to the plumbing that makes service delivery possible. Because no matter how beautiful the interface, it’s only as strong as the data, infrastructure and coherence behind it.

Pipes before Pixels

Ukraine’s Diia app is the gold standard for what pocket government could look like and undoubtedly an inspiration for governments wanting to make a statement about transformation. Diia works because of years of relentless infrastructure work: national ID, open APIs, robust data registers and long-term political will, sharpened by the focusing energies of being at war. Diia isn’t magic. It’s a lot of unsung hard work paying off in a crisis. It’s the product of infrastructure work that too often gets ignored in glossy launches elsewhere.

Similarly, Portugal have been doing transformative things, enabled by underlying infrastructure, since before GOV.UK existed. Back in 2010 they used integrated data to automatically enrol eligible people (7% of the population!) to access a special tariff to reduce their energy costs. In the UK we’re relying on Nationwide, EntitledTo and Turn2Us, to support people to receive up to £23bn of benefits that otherwise remains unclaimed.

The UK has remarkable teams and a superb toolkit for building world-class services. But the pipes leak. Data is patchy, open government data has been abandoned1, and for all the enthusiasm about the latest approach to digital identity2 we remain out of step with our international peers. Services remain siloed, stitched together at the front-end but not the back. An app that forces OneLogin onto you in order to browse a website, through which you’ll still have to use other authentication methods isn’t solving this – it’s just adding friction. People without smartphones, or confidence, or connectivity, are pushed further out.

Focusing on the interface, whether that’s an app or a website, without fixing the underlying data flows or service design risks building on sand. A truly joined-up state requires shared data infrastructure that enables seamless services, whether accessed via a tap, a call, or a walk-in. Without it, digital promises remain just that: promises.

None of this is to deny the value of good apps. They do reduce friction and make things easier and more convenient – there are things you can’t do with the web that you can do more readily in something with persistent state and hooked into a wider, more personalised interface. But apps are only ever as good as the foundations beneath them, foundations that benefit all those who are not persuaded by the idea of installing an app for an occasional, ‘once and done’, need.

With strong plumbing, user-centred design, and joined-up infrastructure, an app can be a joy. But if that doesn’t exist, it’s just a Potemkin interface: a facade that crumbles when pressed.

This was quite a short piece in my five part series so read on to Part 3 to ask what happens when the facade disappears altogether. When AI agents replace screens, can they carry the weight of transformation, or just hide its absence?

In Part 1 I interrogated the appeal of “government in your pocket” and whether it is more valuable than simply being a good soundbite. Part 4 returns to one of my soapboxes in arguing for an omnichannel approach. And in the last part we’ll talk about putting GOV.UK on the High Street.

  1. The OECD’s OURdata Index helpfully tracks the ebbing away from being a leader to lagging behind in just six years. ↩︎
  2. Consider how the BlueSky community has got into a frenzy about identity verification due to some not brilliant legislation which leaves the platform having to scrabble around rather than the burden being carried by an effective, trusted and whole of society approach to proving that you are who you say you are have the attributes you claim to have on the Internet as well as in person.  ↩︎
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 – Part 1

July 10, 2025 / / 6 Comments
This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Pocket, Pavement, Platform: Government in the App Store and on the High Street

This was one big post, and now it’s five smaller pieces thinking about what public service really means in a digital age, and the risks of mistaking convenience for coherence. The second in the series thinks about the underlying plumbing we still don’t have. The third about what it means for services to be completely AI-led. The fourth argues for an omnichannel approach that designs for every doorway. And the final piece is all about Goths. But first, I interrogate the appeal of “government in your pocket” and why that metaphor may sell us short.

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?

The idea of pocket government is seductive. If the BBC fits in your pocket, why not government? It’s tidy, mobile, modern – all the promise of the frictionless state. It’s an easy shorthand for ambition, especially when pitching to digital-native generations.

But reducing transformation to a form factor is a dangerous simplification. It collapses structural change into a UI trick. It trades hidden infrastructure for showy presentation. And it distracts from what actually makes services usable, inclusive, and effective.

In the next post in my series (which is a nice short one), the focus is on what’s happening behind the scenes: the pipes, the data, and the infrastructure that makes, or breaks, the promise of digital government.

In Part 3, I want to engage with the questions thrown up by AI and what it means when our services disappear into chat. Part 4 returns to one of my soapboxes in arguing for an omnichannel approach. And in the last part we talk GOV.UK on the High Street.

  1. Centrally at least. And for England. Though sometimes Wales. So it is a bit of a stretch to say ‘whole-of-government’ but there’s at least a strategic clarity. ↩︎
  2. This would have been immeasurably better if the colour scheme was still black and white ↩︎
  3. Explored in some detail in the OECD’s report on Digital Government in Chile – Improving Public Service Design and Delivery ↩︎
  4. And an important element in their human rights based approach to public services that is looked at in the OECD’s Civic Space Review of Portugal ↩︎
Illustration with the title “Beyond the Screens: Can an Omnichannel Approach Make Digital Public Services More Human?” A red line connects a smartphone, a laptop, a woman wearing a headset at a desktop computer, and a public building with a GOV.UK crown logo. The image represents seamless public service delivery across multiple channels.

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

June 11, 2025 / / 3 Comments

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)?

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Text on a dark background reads "VIBE CODING, FIREWORKS AND THE MORTAR OF GOVERNMENT." A laptop displaying colorful code is illuminated, with fireworks bursting in the background.

Vibe Coding, Fireworks and the Mortar of Government

June 3, 2025 / / 9 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. (Though if you’re looking for what happens after the display ends and what to reflect on how we turn these sparks into sustainable, governed public services, then you might be interested in my follow up – Beyond the Vibes).

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.

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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 / / 4 Comments

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”.

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Thinking about the foundations of mission-led government

December 13, 2024 / / 5 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.

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Praying for representatives: US edition

December 9, 2024 / / 1 Comment

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.

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Visualising Government as a Platform

November 25, 2024 / / 3 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.

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Back to work

November 19, 2024 / / 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.

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Text on a black background states, "Since 2003, Movember Mo's have raised over $1.5 billion for men's health." The Movember logo is also present, featuring a small mustache icon.

A Movember reflection on the US Presidential election

November 6, 2024 / / 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.

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