When the first briefings appeared over the weekend about abolishing the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), I decided to wait.
Machinery of Government changes have an awkward period in which the headline is certain but most of the consequential detail is not. Which teams are going where? Who owns the budgets, controls and responsibilities? Which minister is accountable? What has actually been abolished rather than renamed or moved? And what is this all supposed to make better?
The dust has not entirely settled and there is still detail to follow. But we know that the Government Digital Service (GDS) is moving into the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DDCMS). We also know that responsibility for AI is being pulled towards the new Office of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, with the Minister for AI attending Cabinet.
The reason there’s so much dust to settle is that this is more than blowing the bloody doors off.
I can’t say that bodes well.
The other reason not to dive in was that wise people were quick to say much of what needed saying.
Sam Freedman has offered an important counterargument to the idea that this is simply random rearrangement. His case is that Burnham has a theory of power: a stronger prime-ministerial centre, a clearer set of priorities and a deliberate attempt to put more strategic and delivery capacity under his own control.
His piece is a useful warning for me. When digital government is your hammer, a lot of things will look like nails. It would be wrong to assess the whole Burnham project through what is happening to digital, data and AI, or to treat either continuity or change as inherently good or bad.
There is continuity I welcome. I’m pleased that the work Alan Milburn has led on young people and employment is continuing. I wrote about the importance of its diagnosis in Strong branches and good shade, and I’m pleased too that Pat McFadden remains at DWP to oversee the emerging delivery of the reimagined jobs and careers service (and I assume skills brief is staying there too and is not on the move again).
So, as I now join everyone else who has committed key to board, I’m trying to ask a narrower question: does an apparently serious theory of political power include a sufficiently serious theory of how an AI era state will operate?
On Thursday 9th July 2026 I sat in the audience for the launch of Mind’s Mental Health in the Age of AI Commission. Here are some thoughts provoked by that evening.
On the face of it, “AI and mental health” sounds like it fits neatly around a panel and a commission. In practice, it spills out of health care into a messy overlap of consumer protection, online safety, public-service design, and the raw capacity of health services. The tidy categories of policy do not hold up particularly well against the lives people actually live.
After the panel I joined a breakout group focused on regulation. The conversation flowed well and we discussed the Online Safety Act and the boundary of responsibility between users and systems; where the MHRA’s role starts and stops; how to restrain actors who have no intention of behaving well, and what to do about those who say the right things while taking unacceptable risks.
And one conclusion seems hard to avoid: AI is already part of our mental health ecosystem, whether or not the tools being used describe themselves that way.
It fills the gaps left by waiting lists. Someone might use it to prepare for a GP appointment. A conversation about employment might be rooted in the ways their mental health is a work-limiting condition. Someone who doesn’t think they’re ill enough to ask for help, is too ashamed to ask, or has asked before and had a bad experience, might well be typing instead.
So arguments about whether people should use AI for mental health are largely academic. The reality has outpaced them: people are using it.
The harder question is what happens when that use takes place through tools and services that do not think of themselves as mental health services at all. Because “AI” isn’t one thing. It ranges from regulated clinical technologies and purpose built tools to general purpose chatbots and AI embedded in services designed for something else. Their risks are not identical, but people move between them far more easily and quickly than regulation does.
Mind’s Commission begins in that blurred reality, asking how AI is changing help-seeking and support pathways, how people can be kept safe, and what it means for inequality in access and experience.
About a year ago I wrote about Vibe Coding, Fireworks and the Mortar of Government, back when I was first getting excited by the new art of the possible. Since then I’ve had a lot of fun with these toys, at home and at work, while learning a lot along the way.
This post finds its origins somewhere else: in a throwaway comment someone made that, by making those arguments, I seemed to be excited for the most pessimistic future of the labour market.
I’d rather think of it as being optimistic about being pessimistic. And hopefully by the end of this you’ll see what I mean.
Because this is a post that asks what follows if the argument is even half right.
I’m not here to make any kind of prediction that all office jobs will disappear by Christmas. I am not trying to join the queue of people announcing that everything has already changed.
But I think we should sit with a possibility.
What if AI doesn’t destroy work, but shrinks, thins or rearranges it enough to expose how much our social fabric relies on a particular framing of work in order for it to function?
Last June I wrote a reflection on how vibe coding had made it possible to create some fireworks that helped bring our vision for the future of public employment support to life. In the months since, those fireworks have become a portfolio of provocatypes, and a lot of learning and a cascading number of new ideas.
And it all has the feeling of standing close to fast machinery. You’ll know what I mean if you’ve ever been to an old mill turned industrial museum where the looms are up and running. Powerful, amazing, machinery. That could absolutely rip your arm off.
It’s hard to imagine what it would have been like when Edmund Cartwright first showed off his power loom, let alone what it was like when mill after mill was filled with them and all you’d ever known was hand looms and spinning wheels.
AI-assisted delivery and the craft of confidence
But I think if you’ve spent any time with AI-assisted development tools over the last year and a bit then you’ll know what I’m talking about. Maybe you’ve only just started with the new models in the last few weeks and you’ve read Matt Shumer’s widely shared Something Big is Happening piece which says things I can absolutely identify with. Or maybe, like me, this has been a slower burn and for a while now you’ve had that intoxicating mixture of exhilaration and dizziness.
Either way, I do think we are past an inflexion point like the one that greeted the start of the 19th century: a kairos moment for digital delivery where the nature of what it is to work in digital government has changed shape.
There’s a popular term for this: vibe-coding. But as I explore in the chapter why vibe-coding matters (and what it isn’t), the phrase is really the hook, not the substance. This world where we can use natural language to describe what we want and have working software generated moments later. But there is a tension in that language. It immediately sounds like flimsy demo-ware, and like a rejection of discipline or craft.
Vibe coding: the hook, not the point
And when it comes to building services that respond to the needs of the public, vibes aren’t enough.
So some months ago now I started to try and write about what this might mean for our disciplines and our craft. It has taken me longer than I wanted, but I’m happy enough with them to publish my reflections on on what changes for product management in a vibe-coded world — and the broader argument collected at https://vc-product.wel.by/.
A small warning: it’s long. I think it deserves your time (which will be much less than the time I gave it), because it’s trying to take seriously what AI-assisted delivery changes, and what it doesn’t. So I’ve woven in links to take you into the dedicated chapters where I try and unpack each idea. You’ll see there’s breadth but that’s because the implications are broad: for how we work today, and how we’ll need to work tomorrow.
But while vibe-coding is the hook, I think we are really talking about something that needs its own name.
Andrej Karpathy, who coined the original phrase, has suggested ‘agentic engineering‘, and that’s useful because it insists that this is becoming a professional workflow: you orchestrate agents, you scrutinise output, and you keep the quality bar intact. That makes it serious rather than a good party trick.
But it’s not the frame we need when it comes to our public services.
‘Agentic engineering’ names how software gets written. But we’re grappling with how public value gets added. In government (and more than likely elsewhere too), the unit of delivery is not an individual with a clever workflow – the unit of delivery is the multidisciplinary team, and the enabling environment wrapped around it. It’s policy, ops, analysis, content, design, engineering, and their leaders getting closer to runnable reality sooner, together. That’s why in my writing I’m using AI-assisted delivery.
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?
This final post of the series is the longest of the five. But it brings us firmly into the real world: the bricks, the people, the kettle in the corner. What does trust look like when the state is tangible and physically present? How do design, infrastructure and humility combine to make that possible?
To me, it seems pretty clear that someone somewhere in government should be thinking about how to create a shared platform for presence. Not necessarily a single uniform entity but wherever government is, it should be compatible and consistent. Concessions in a bigger whole. Not discretely branded fiefdoms, but clearly signposted services that feel like they belong together.
GOV.UK on the High Street (GOTHS)1 wouldn’t be a new competing department but a shared interface. Not just a domain name but a design system for physical delivery, co-created with the whole public sector. Not a new empire, but common infrastructure.
Picture a shared space. It might be in a library. A shopping centre. A co-located space in a school, a church hall, or a Family Hub. It might have a touchscreen and a kettle. It might be open late. It might have someone who knows your name.
But the point isn’t the venue. It’s the coherence. It’s not House of Fraser with brand-specific sales teams, but John Lewis: partners invested in the outcome, knowledgeable across domains, enabled by technology to deliver a seamless experience. This shared space thrives when it’s rooted in the communities it serves, leveraging the expertise of those closest to people’s needs.
Which means it absolutely has to be rooted in local government. Not as an afterthought, but as the primary delivery layer. Because it’s local government that carries the burden of the state’s complexity. It’s where housing, education, social care (for adults and children), SEND, and early years intersect. It’s where people go when the other bits of the state don’t fit. And it’s often where the state still has human eyes, ears, and hearts.
GOTHS should be a platform for place: hosted by local authorities, resourcing their frontline ingenuity. Not empowering them in a paternalistic sense, but equipping them and always asking, how can the centre help teams better meet the needs of their users? It’s back to making Government as a Platform a reality by offering all the enabling tools and resources that help teams of excellent people to soar. National grid, not interior design. That’s how you support neighbourhood-level action without chaos. That’s how a shared physical interface can support coherent state action across the frontline.
Staff with tools to handle health, work, benefits, special educational needs, local services, under one roof, backed by shared data, flexible appointment booking, digital ID that works in-person too, and all the rest. Flexible configurations to adapt to local needs, but the logic is universal: one state, one journey. The evolution of GOV.UK, not so much as the brand on the door but as the reassuring infrastructure underneath it all.
Because this isn’t just about digital plumbing; it’s chairs, staff, kettles, and trust. ChileAtiende. Lojas do Cidadão. Service Canada. KEP. They show it’s possible; integrated physical and digital services woven into the state’s operating model. The UK’s world-class digital shopfront needs a physical twin.
Local government has been left to patch things together but Britain needs a state that shows up wherever we are, with the tools to help, and the humility to listen.
Consistency is coherence
The early GOV.UK era got one thing very right: brand discipline for the whole of government. It actively removed departmental ego. It made a clear decision: citizens shouldn’t need to understand the structure of government to interact with it. There was one voice. One domain. One design system. It was award-winning but it was also, infamously, very much not flashy.
But that discipline is fraying. In some cases you might say it never held – for example, the Department for Education somehow has a load of things on education.gov.uk. But there’s also now a subdomain for business. New initiatives want their own presence on the internet, styled differently to GOV.UK. White papers turn into branding strategies. Speeches give birth to concepts that expect launches before the underlying services get a chance to be designed. And at the end of it all the public experiences a more disjointed experience. That’s just me in the corner gently muttering ‘user needs, not government needs’ to myself and wondering how good an idea it really was to move the digital centre into a department.
Brandlessness isn’t facelessness; it’s familiarity, simplicity, trust. In public services, design is infrastructure, and infrastructure works best when it’s shared. A state that puts the emphasis on apps over data flows or where the language of ‘digital by default’ returns (as I heard the other day) risks losing both coherence and kindness.
A mandate might get you adoption, but it rarely gets you success. But convening and setting standards and building capability and quietly solving apparently intractable problems for teams, and with teams, builds trust. Success in digital transformation comes from helping others to do their work. That was one of the joys of Government as a Platform – to shift gear into asking how do we help teams to focus on meeting the needs of their users?
The strength of any digital centre isn’t really about its branding. It’s visibility by being open, not by being marketed. The value of the centre doesn’t come from having all eyes on it for the sake of it, it comes from being reliable enough that people stop noticing it.
Platform thinking only works when the platform is useful, maintained, and trustworthy. And when it lets local teams, of every type and style, build what works for their communities. The centre isn’t the hero. But it is the foundation.
If we want a state that shows up with coherence, we need to re-invest in the things that make coherence possible: communities of practice, good registers, shared APIs, consistent playbooks, infrastructure, identity. The things nobody cheers at a press conference but everybody needs.
Presence over presentation
Can we hope for GOTHS as a physical experience? It seems highly unlikely, yet the NHS 10 Year Plan and the concurrent push to reimagine Jobcentres creates a rare window of opportunity to think boldly. Unfortunately, it seems inevitable, and frankly bananas, that the Neighbourhood Health Service will go in one direction, and a newly rebranded jobs and careers service in another even while we’re talking about mission-led government.
The state can borrow the grammar of thumbnails, but it cannot shrink-wrap public duty into a 180-pixel square without risk. When a crisis lands, we need to be able to look up from our phones and know that something more concrete than an icon is there.
Britain needs a state that is nearby; that designs for lives, not silos; that knows every need doesn’t start with a tap or end in AI; that offers self-service when it’s wanted, and human service when it’s not.
That means plumbing that works, a centre content to fade into the background, and shared infrastructure sturdy enough to let local experiments take root, and when they do to scale those benefits for the system as a whole.
Above all, it means that when life gets tough the state is within reach, not just in your pocket.
The Dot, the new branding associated with GOV.UK, is frankly very silly but perhaps instead of GOTHS maybe there is a role in the physical landscape for Saatchi’s grand idea of the ‘guiding hand, for life‘. Unfortunately though, only 2 of the 150 pages of that brand guidance talk about something offline (print) so clearly this isn’t what was in mind. And just to chalk up another disappointing thing about the whole rebranding exercise, how is it that GOV.UK’s brand guidelines are published as a 152MB PDF, and not HTML!? ↩︎
But real people, with real needs, still interact with real-world services. So this part is about omnichannel: what it means to design public services that flex across tap, call, or walk-in. This isn’t about fallback channels. It’s about making every route dignified, seamless and human.
Designing for every doorway
Omnichannel isn’t a legacy concession; it’s the core strategy for a state that shows up. Unlike multichannel, where websites, apps, and call centres operate in silos, omnichannel means a single service journey that flexes across touchpoints with memory, continuity, and context done right, it’s integration, not options. Public services should work whether you tap, call, walk in, or rely on a friend. This only happens with shared logic and data that flows across government with active consent, not siloed in departments or stuck on a user’s device. Betting on apps as the future without fixing this plumbing risks entrenching exclusion, not solving it.
Omnichannel gives dignity to every route: an AI assistant, a call centre adviser, a library kiosk, a community worker with a tablet. All draw from the same well. It’s a design philosophy rooted in empathy, meeting people where they are. Because real life rarely fits a channel. People with disabilities, people in crisis, people balancing work, care and pain, they need services that move with them. That don’t punish the mode they choose.
But coherence doesn’t just happen, it depends on what you choose to optimise for and where you put your focus.
In 2023 GDS put its hopes firmly in the idea of growth. Not in the sense meant by the growth mission as a unifying ambition for the whole of government but with growth at the heart of GOV.UK. Not trust, not usability, not coherence but growth. As if GOV.UK were a startup chasing market share, not a public platform designed to serve everyone.
At the end of last year Ed Zitron wrote an unmissable reflection on the enshittification of the Internet that perfectly encapsulated my disquiet at that strategic approach. The shift from usefulness to capture is bad enough in our private sector experiences but when government follows this path — prioritising numbers going up over people’s needs and outcomes then it just feels like we’ve lost sight of the purpose of digital government. The job is not to drive traffic. The job is to help people get what they came for. The work isn’t to be famous, it’s to be the mortar that binds modern, twenty first century government together in the real world, as well as online.
Omnichannel is the only credible strategy to make sense of the future. In a way it’s also firmly about growth but I really do think it works best when it considers place as the platform.
Place, not pocket
The NHS 10-Year Plan, the better start in life strategy, and the evolution of jobs and careers support point to a shared truth: that services must meet people in places, not pockets, because most societal challenges don’t actually arrive in neat policy-shaped or departmentally boxes.
I found it really interesting that during the media round before the 10 Year Plan was published, the Prime Minister talked a lot about something that wasn’t about technology: the Neighbourhood Health Service. Community-based, proactive, and under one roof. Not just a “doctor in your pocket,” but a support system round the corner. And less than a week later, that vision is taking concrete shape with the expectation that from September this help will be distributed into and throughout the places people already visit, making joined-up healthcare part of everyday settings.
Similarly, DWP has long-recognised the barriers to employment are often tied up with life circumstances – housing, childcare, health, wellbeing and others that demand wrap-around care and holistic support. Realising the ambition to Get Britain Workingmeans more than just job listings. It means being a personalised People Team, championing, supporting and guiding someone to a place where work is a fulfilling enabler for all of their life, not just a thing someone does to earn money. And while the services that help you get there might be ‘in your pocket’, our vision is for a service that’s digital where possible, human when needed.
These initiatives in health and employment are fundamental to the government’s mission-ledplan for change: helping people back to health and into work. Yet despite this common agenda it feels inevitable that two different departments are going to lean into two different brands and two different locations to build separate interfaces to serve the same communities. If each service builds its own brand, stack, training, and footprint, we replicate the very fragmentation GOV.UK once solved online. We create postcode lotteries of support and institutional overhead just when our fraying society needs coherence most, and when physical presence matters more than ever.
You’re very close to the culmination of my five part series. In the final post we turn to the high street, and ask what it takes to rebuild trust and coherence in public services that are present, not just presented.
But now, in this third part, I want to you to think about the future (which isn’t too far from being the present): where where the interface melts away altogether. What happens when services are no longer tapped, but summoned? As AI agents emerge, does that realise the dream of transformation, or is it just that it keeps complexity out of sight?
Disappearing interfaces don’t disappear the problem
If apps promise pocket government, AI now promises agentic government: services summoned through conversation, no forms or websites needed, just a natural interface that handles everything for you. It’s an appealing vision, and maybe not far off in some domains. But abstraction without foundation risks leaving people behind.
Apps, when done right, can be transformative. They can bring government closer, offering convenience and speed for those who want it. The GOV.UK App and the wider GOV.UK ecosystem could deliver that promise. Pick the most recent government service you interacted with and imagine its app-enabled future.
For me that’s renewing my driving licence: a push notification from the GOV.UK App, thumbprint authentication (GOV.UK One Login), reusing a passport photo (Home Office), paying via GOV.UK Pay, confirming via GOV.UK Notify and a renewed credential in my GOV.UK Wallet. A seamless journey in seconds, where the user barely notices the machinery – DVLA, Home Office, GDS, or otherwise – because the ecosystem just works. Apps shine for tasks like these – quick, personal, and always on hand; when the infrastructure supports them.
That’s also the transactional promise GOV.UK has offered since 2012: one platform, one ecosystem with one consistent user journey. And, in 2012 and still today, that vision demands simple, integrated, permissioned services: plumbing that works and data that flows.
But without that plumbing then an app is just another channel, not a platform. Right now the GOV.UK App feels like it’s a solution in search of a problem. In being distinct from the GOV.UK website, for which 100% of government services are built it’s introducing friction – like requiring authentication to access a website that takes people to services using different ways to log in.
Back in 2013, GDS famously declared: “We’re not ‘appy. Not ‘appy at all.” The principle was clear: standalone apps must wait unless the core web service works as well on mobile, and even then, only by exception and driven by user need. Do not read my callback to that as an oversimplified holding to an outmoded point of view. A decade on, as user needs have evolved and so has technology, apps have a clear and valuable role.
But for government they should always be additive to the web experience. Digital inclusion is not a solved problem and while releasing early and failing fast has its merits, there is a deliberate decision to launch the GOV.UK app before the core web service meets that bar and with the open expectation that many features are going to be exclusive to the app creates a walled garden, not open doors. And for me that runs counter to what made GOV.UK a global exemplar in the first place.
AI amplifies this challenge. An AI-led bit of government in your pocket might navigate complex services but it can’t fix contradictory policies, confusing eligibility, or poor service design. I’ve learnt so much from my vibe coded experiments, one of which was to create an AI-led experience of jobs and careers support. But that example also clearly showed that the value lies not in the interface but in the underlying service.
Anthropomorphising AI is obviously not the right thing to do, but thinking about an AI agent like a person might be. It’s the work of service design – figuring out how to best help someone achieve an outcome. When you design for people whose interfaces onto the service might not be directly through a browser but indirectly via their children or a support worker then that delegated experience also reflects something of the experience for those whose interface of choice is AI.
Indeed, over time, some people will experience a disappearing interface. Entire service journeys will be handled by agents. But right now, no UK government service is designed with that in mind. They’re designed, and as long as the Service Manual and the Service Standard exist, will continue to be designed, to lower the barriers to entry and include everyone. They’re rightly not locked behind an app layer or forcing you to authenticate before you get to the content you need. That safeguards the state as service-shaped, interoperable, and testable, paving the way for an AI-mediated future without excluding anyone today.
Whether or not it’s what Martha Lane Fox had in mind, this is really the embodiment of what it means for government to go wholesale. After creating the digital centre, fixing publishing, and fixing services, the final task was to build the state as a platform: a network of capabilities, not a stack of destinations. Open APIs, shared infrastructure, and services that can flow into the places people already are. Useful then but now essential in this potentially agentic world of ours.
So AI definitely has a role. But it’s a layer, not a solution. A reflection of good service design, not a replacement for it. And any AI-led experience must be one of many. Because for all those who talk to bots, there are plenty who need a human to sit with them on the sofa over a cup of tea.
This is where transformed government shines: services designed for everyone. And that discipline must extend to every channel, digital or physical, to keep the state inclusive. A state built for everyone doesn’t retreat behind an app icon, or vanish into AI. It shows up: for real lives, in real time, across real channels.
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.
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?
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. ↩︎
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.
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. ↩︎
This would have been immeasurably better if the colour scheme was still black and white ↩︎
Burnham has a theory of political power and is making deliberate moves to strengthen the centre. But it seems much clearer about where power should sit than about how the state beneath it should operate.
AI is already part of our mental health ecosystem, often through tools never designed as health services. The challenge is not whether people will use them, but how to govern what they find when formal support is unavailable or out of reach.
There are some jobs you leave because the evening has ended. The plates are cleared. The conversation has run its course. Someone is stacking chairs. It was good, perhaps even… Read more: When the first plates leave the pass
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