I didn’t think I would have anything more to write about GOV.UK on the High Street.
Then I wrote about A-level results day and why the interesting future for the GOV.UK app isn’t putting web search inside something you have to download but joining up what government knows and can do around the person whose results have just arrived.
Though as I thought about it, I wasn’t actually sure I wanted the result itself to arrive through the app. There’s something very tactile about going back into school and something very communal about receiving the results, and the mixture of support, solidarity and celebration that follows.
The administrative task is getting a result. The experience is something else.
I called the envelopes a feature, not a bug. Jeni Tennison picked up on that and started a conversation on Bluesky about ‘ritual and occasion-making’ in public services, and what we can lose. Seeing teenagers with envelopes made her think about community, peer support and shared experience. Other people in the thread talked about PhD submissions, health results, weddings, passports and driving licences. Peter Wells observed that apps have a tendency to smoosh profoundly different moments into the same notification-shaped container. And I liked Steve Messer’s suggestion that public services should honour the moment.
That returned me to this post, which I’d started after the local elections and then left sitting (and apparently then left sitting for some further months again!). If you previously read my exhaustingive series of posts you’re probably wondering how I could find anything more to say having already tried to worry away at the relationship between pockets, pavements and platforms. But two visits towards the end of my time at DWP, and something David Higham wrote after the local elections, had set me off on the same question.
David wrote about “the decline of the public realm and the retreat of the state as a visible force for good”. It resonated with me because it felt closer to a deeper problem than much of the post-election commentary earlier in the year.
It is inevitable that there were post-election arguments about the policy platform and its associated messaging. It also seems like there’s an almost identical narrative following any election: everything is rubbish, everyone knows everything is rubbish, and the only question is who gets to say “everything is rubbish” sufficiently well that they persuade people that their diagnosis of what’s rubbish is the one that matters (maybe this is how it has always been rather than any sort of modern malaise).
None of that is irrelevant. But I do think all of that sits above something more fundamental: what do people experience the state as? Is it present in their lives as anything tangible, useful and good? Can they meet it? Can they trust it? Can they ever, without irony, sing of its goodness?
Since then we’ve had a new Prime Minister and that former Mayor of Greater Manchester has given added energy to devolution with a promise of “good growth in every postcode“. There’s a lot of good in that. After all, as some wise people once concluded about leading digital government – don’t do everything yourself (you can’t).
But I do wonder whether devolution could repeat one of digital’s unintended and maybe unrealised consequences. Digital has made many services easier to use, and spared people from having to understand quite so much of the maze of government. But I wonder whether it has sometimes divorced the experience of a service from any sense of the government behind it. What if a more capable local state improves what happens in the place where you live while leaving Westminster, the Prime Minister and the national state still more distant, more abstract, and still struggling to recover public trust?
That’s not an argument against devolution. We live in spheres within spheres. Local labour markets are local, councils piece together things which Whitehall often separates, and neighbourhoods understand things the centre can’t possibly get close to. But I believe strongly (and have spent too much of my career working on that premise to conclude it’s no more than belief) that there are things the centre can guarantee and make common.
What we found when it came to reimagining a jobs and careers service wasn’t that different local labour markets need a fragmented local offer. It was that we could aspire to a national service capable of being more local and more personal, without ceasing to be something that everyone can expect. So I’m personally not sure devolution, for all its potential, is by itself an answer to a state-level trust gap. Better local delivery is good. So is designing for everyone to have a transformed experience.
I don’t want to go off on a tangent about devolution. But what follows is about the local, and the national, and about what happens in the space between them. And it concerns how we have lived through an enormous, worthwhile transformation in the arrival of digital but we haven’t always noticed what else was changing alongside it.
So David’s observation played to one of my priors – that in the UK, the internet era has accompanied the steady disappearance of our visible state. I quote-tweeted to say: I think “digital by default” has had wider negative consequences than the obvious issues of digital exclusion. Losing the footprint and tangible touch points of the state makes it more abstract, less available, less good. It is a mistake to focus on GOV.UK as an app and not on the High Street as well. I also included a link to the fifth part in my series about Pockets, Pavements and Platforms.
The preview card beneath that post pulled through a line from that earlier piece: trust is built in person, not just pixels. I had meant it as an argument for a physical future for GOV.UK: shared spaces, storefronts and platforms for place – somewhere to turn when the website was not enough.
And so that’s where this post starts, but where it’s going is to a pair of visits, one in London and one in Glasgow, I had the fortune to make shortly before I left DWP that left me thinking a physical future for GOV.UK is too small an idea.
The question is not only whether people have somewhere to go when the website fails. It’s whether there is somewhere to be: somewhere people can belong, and somewhere they can begin.
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