bmwelby's blog

Thoughts from the mind of Ben Welby

Tag: Digital Government (Page 1 of 2)

A cozy interior scene showcases a welcoming space with a wooden table, greenery, and artistic decor. Large open doors lead to a vibrant outdoor area filled with trees and people enjoying their time, including a dog. The text overlays the image: "Imagining a somewhere to be for people to belong, and to begin."

Imagining a somewhere to be: for people to belong, and to begin

October 26, 2026 / / 0 Comments

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.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record a lot of this is related to the decline of the public realm and the retreat of the state as a visible force for good. Tony Judt pointed out this danger in Ill Fares The Land. See also this piece I always come back to www.theguardian.com/commentisfre…

— David Higham (@oldtrotter.bsky.social) 2026-05-08T07:30:25.999Z

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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The infographic presents statistics related to trust issues in Britain. It states that 20% of people felt they had a say, which has increased to 34%. Meanwhile, administrative service satisfaction decreased from 74% to 65%. The headline highlights the complexity of Britain's trust problem, and there is a question prompting curiosity about what has changed and for whom. Design elements include upward and downward arrows indicating changes in statistics.

Britain’s trust problem isn’t what it once was

September 11, 2026 / / 1 Comment

Earlier this week I was having a conversation about data centres, AI, and the fairly febrile state of mind surrounding both of them at the moment.

There are sensible arguments to have about where data centres go, what they require and who benefits from them. There are even bigger arguments about what AI might do to work, to public services and to the institutions we rely on. But both also seem to have become lightning rods for a wider uncertainty about where all this is heading, who is in control of it, and whether the people making the decisions can be trusted to make them well.

And in the course of the conversation, my colleague Barbara asked whether I’d had a look at the most recent OECD work on public trust.

I hadn’t. Which was a surprise given that public trust is something I come back to quite often.

It’s central to the thinking I’ve done about data in government and whether people feel they have any meaningful say in policymaking. It turns up in apparently narrower questions, like rolling out CivWifi for all, and in much bigger ones about what sort of institutions are trusted enough to carry us through whatever AI does to the world of work.

And yet, despite that, I’d completely missed the fact that the OECD’s latest edition had come out. I hadn’t seen anyone give it much coverage either. Maybe it simply passed me by over the summer.

But I think back to the 2024 edition, which also seemed to pass without much comment, and I think public trust is hugely underweighted in the way we talk and think about the challenges facing the UK and elsewhere. If I’d been in any of the conversations about the missions (RIP?), I would have called rebuilding public trust one of them. Not because trust is an end in itself, or because everybody ought to agree with government, but because as we’ve seen, it’s hard to do very much that is difficult, disruptive or long term if large numbers of people start from the assumption that government is incompetent, dishonest, unfair, uninterested in them, or some combination of the four.

AI is already a trust question

Anyway, back to the trust survey. For the first time, the OECD asked people what they expect if government agencies use AI. The British results do not say that people are simply against it.

They are more uncertain than that. 39% are confident AI would produce more tailored services and 36% that it would reduce government costs. When the questions turn to protecting personal information, keeping humans in control of important decisions, transparency and fair treatment, confidence sits between 31% and 35%.

But on all six measures Britain is less positive than the OECD average.1

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A cozy living space features a wooden armchair with a small device resting on its seat. To the left, a dark bench contrasts the light-coloured chair. A lush indoor plant stands nearby, and a warm lamp casts soft lighting in the room. Text in the image reads: "Whatever is nearest. Whatever is open. Whatever replies."

Whatever is nearest. Whatever is open. Whatever replies.

July 19, 2026 / / 1 Comment

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.

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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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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 / / 5 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.

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Five things I think about GDS, CDDO and i.AI moving into DSIT

July 10, 2024 / / 8 Comments

If those acronyms mean nothing to you then this blog post is not for you. It’s written in response to the news that the Government Digital Service (GDS) and the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO), and the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (i.AI) are moving from the Cabinet Office to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) under the responsibility of Peter Kyle as the responsible minister.

At the OECD one of the things we would emphasise was the importance of a mandate and authority for providing leadership of digital government across the entire public sector. GDS was the poster child for this idea. Many countries have established their own Digital Government Units similarly located at the centre of government and operating in proximity to the country’s political leadership. In more than one country the digital function has been given even more prominence and made an extension of the President or the Prime Minister. This has been critical in ensuring that the agenda receives support at the highest levels and made a priority.

In the UK, GDS benefitted from Francis Maude as the Minister for Cabinet Office (MCO) with his leadership backing the wave of transformation through to 2015. Under his watch many of the things that established the culture for digital transformation bedded in. And then in 2015 there started a sequence of 12 MCOs in 9 years. Not many of them showed the same aptitude for leading digital transformation as Maude.

Along the way the clarity of responsibility for digital started to fray. Digital inclusion, some aspects of data, some parts of Artificial Intelligence, and some parts of digital identity moving over to what is now DSIT.

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Re: The oddness of the political moment

July 9, 2024 / / 4 Comments

At the start of June, James Plunkett wrote a piece called The oddness of the political moment. It is amazing just quite how quickly the atmosphere has changed since the election (I’d attribute a lot of how I feel myself to having prayed through Croydon and then for all 650 MPs in the last week) but the post remains very timely and insightful.

I left a couple of comments around accountability. One on the accountability of those elected to serve, and the other about GOV.UK and the policymaking process. David Durant said one needed to be a blog post, but I’ve done both.

1. Accountability of politicians

“…it seems increasingly clear we need people whose day job it is to care about the infrastructure that underpins accountability and the associated discourse…”

The oddness of the political moment, James Plunkett (07/06/2024)

When I decided to leave the OECD, a major factor was the stark disconnect between its stated mission of ‘better policies for better lives’ and the practical reality that means the organisation has to prioritise diplomatic niceties over accountability. I accept that my expectations are perhaps unreasonable. After all, the OECD isn’t an organisation designed, set up or mandated to provide accountability when a member mis-steps. However, you can’t have a ‘rules based international order’ if there’s no accountability against those rules.

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The OECD Framework for digital talent and skills in the public sector

April 22, 2021 / / 4 Comments

Too often, digital is treated as a specialist brick laid by others. But real transformation happens when digital becomes the mortar and binds teams, cultures, and missions together. This framework argues that while investment in digital, data and technology professions and leadership are essentials, the key to unlocking sustainable, whole of government transformation is making digital everyone’s business.

This framework emerged from work led by the OECD’s Digital Government and Data Unit. I had the privilege of co-authoring the paper alongside Lucia Chauvet, supported by the Working Party of Senior Digital Government Officials (E-Leaders) and its Thematic Group on Digital Talent and Skills. It builds on years of OECD collaboration in this space — drawing lessons from country reviews, global case studies, and shared experience from digital leaders across the world.

Since publication, the framework has been embedded in OECD Digital Government Reviews and country support work. It’s designed to be actionable — not just a diagnostic tool, but a map for reform.

One example: we used it as the basis for work with the Government of Tunisia, which led to a resource called Understanding Digital Government — a companion website (formerly at understanding-digital-government.com) in French and Arabic. We worked with Public Digital to design a set of training materials that would help public servants engage with and learn about the five digital government user skills. Sadly, that site is no longer live. I had always hoped we’d be able to translate those materials into every OECD language, but like many good ideas, that ambition outpaced our capacity.

We also used that Tunisian project as an opportunity to work with the School of Good Services to provide training to the most senior decision makers across the Tunisian local government sector.

Available as PDF

What’s the TL;DR?

Digital, data and technology are transforming how we live, and also how we work. This is as true in the public sector as anywhere else.

Governments that want to deliver in a digital world need more than just technical upgrades; they need capable, confident, and collaborative teams. That means:

  • Creating a working environment that encourages transformation,
  • Defining and nurturing the skills that matter,
  • And building the systems to attract, grow, and retain a digital-capable public workforce.

This paper presents the OECD’s framework for digital talent and skills, structured around those three imperatives, each grounded in real-world examples and practices from member and partner countries.

The Three Pillars of the Framework

Illustration featuring three key components of a digital government transformation strategy: 1. "Create an environment to encourage digital transformation" (green arrow), 2. "Skills to support digital government maturity" (centered in bold), and 3. "Establish and sustain a digital workforce" (orange arrow). Circular arrows indicate a cyclical or interconnected relationship among these components.

Pillar 1: Create an environment to encourage digital transformation

Governments need more than strategies — they need workplaces where digital ways of working can thrive. That means:

  • Digital leadership that’s visible, user-centred, and empowering;
  • Organisational structures that enable multidisciplinary work and reduce hierarchy;
  • A learning culture where experimentation is safe and valued;
  • Tools and ways of working that support agility and delivery.

Pillar 2: Skills to support digital government maturity

Skills aren’t just about technical roles. The framework identifies that countries need to be mindful about the foundational “21st century skills” needed across society for people to thrive in the digital era and then identifies four categories of capability that rest on top:

  • User skills — digital basics for every public servant
  • Socio-emotional skills — collaboration, adaptability, resilience
  • Professional skills — the know-how for delivering digital services
  • Leadership skills — the ability to model and enable transformation
Pyramid diagram illustrating the hierarchy of digital government skills. The top layer is labeled "Digital government leadership skills," followed by "Digital government professional skills" in red, "Digital government socio-emotional skills" in yellow, "Digital government user skills" in orange, and the base layer titled "21st century skills in society" in green.

Each of those areas covers the detail needed to achieve a long-lasting and sustainable transformation and is grounded on raised expectations for all members of society and providing them with levels of digital competency that mean they fully thrive in our Internet-enabled world.

This has implications for government. And a critical observation in the framework is that digital government should not solely be the preserve of those in the digital, data and technology professions. Central to the framework is an expectation that governments should pursue a new baseline expectation for public sector workers to acquire a grounding in five core skills:

  • Recognising the potential of digital for transformation1
  • Understanding users and their needs2
  • Collaborating openly for iterative delivery3
  • Trustworthy use of data and technology4
  • Data-driven government5

Pillar 3: Establish and maintain a digital workforce

It isn’t possible for governments to click their fingers and swap their existing workforce for a ‘digital’ one. And nor should they want to.

The answer to digital transformation is about having a workforce that is digital. There are important professions and career paths that need to be established but more importantly is creating an ongoing process that can enhance and equip everyone in the public sector to contribute to digital transformation.

This pillar focuses on how governments can:

  • Attract digital talent through flexible recruitment and employer branding;
  • Retain people by investing in culture, career progression, and equity;
  • Support growth through structured development, mentoring, and learning opportunities;
  • Build the systems to allocate skills effectively across teams and priorities.

The blurb

The rapid pace of technological advance and associated potential for the use of data have not only changed the way people live but also the way people work. This digital disruption hits all sectors, including the public sector, and this working paper emphasises pathways for developing a public sector workforce with the necessary skills to achieve successful digital transformation. It presents the OECD Framework for Digital Talent and Skills in the Public Sector, which highlights the need to create the right working environment, secure the right skills, and evolve the right workforce to support a progression from e-government to digital government.

Available as PDF

  1. When a public servant recognises the potential for digital transformation they:
    * identify, describe and analyse practical examples of digital transformation;
    * look at the status quo of existing processes and identify opportunities for digital transformation;
    * have a growing network of digital government practitioners to turn to for advice and challenge;
    * understand, and can challenge, whether new activity involving technology is consistent with wider strategic activity;
    * oversee and develop new digital, data or technology activity in ways that
    complement broader strategic activities
    * can ask relevant, informed, and challenging questions when they have oversight responsibility for digital, data and technology activity ↩︎
  2. When a public servant understands users and their needs they:
    * champion and explain the value of user research and participate as part of user research exercises;
    * can identify the users affected by their area of work, and define the user needs their work meets;
    * can identify where their work interacts with, receives from, or hands off, to another part of government and recognises the importance of an end to end understanding of the user’s journey;
    * recognise the different channels and modalities involved in the provision of a service and can map the user’s journey, including associated internal steps;
    * understand the importance of tackling the digital divide and the priority, roadmap and strategy for accessibility, national connectivity and increasing 21st century skills in society ↩︎
  3. When a public servant collaborates openly for iterative delivery they:
    * can explain the benefits of ‘working in the open’ and argue positively for an open by default approach
    * can implement participatory approaches to their area of work to genuinely include their users
    * understand the value of diverse, multi-disciplinary teams and expect to involve policy, delivery and operational colleagues to ensure a fully-rounded perspective on any given topic
    * can explain the benefits of an iterative approach to delivery
    * understand different phases of delivery (e.g., Discovery, Alpha, Beta, Live) and are clear about the benefits of researching, prototyping, testing and
    learning on an ongoing basis;
    * have an understanding of open source code and the community-based processes that support them
    * know where to find, and appraise, the suitability of common standards, components and patterns ↩︎
  4. When a public servant is trustworthy in their use of data and technology they:
    * understand their responsibilities in the workplace around information security and data handling or processing
    * are confident in terms of digital security and clear about password policies
    * understand the legal requirements on them as individuals in terms of their handling of data to protect the privacy of citizens
    * are comfortable considering the ethical dimensions associated with the use of digital technologies or data, including knowledge of any relevant instruments such as Good Practice Principles
    * understand the support and activities associated with maintaining a reliable service
    * ensure that contracts with third party suppliers are consistent with the digital government agenda ↩︎
  5. When a public servant knows about data-driven government they:
    * are aware of the individuals or organisations that are responsible for the data agenda
    * understand the priority, roadmap and strategy for taking the steps to establish a data-driven public sector
    * are familiar with the governance arrangements for access to and sharing of data
    * are confident in their legal and ethical obligations for the treatment of data
    * recognise opportunities for how interoperability, the Once Only Principle and access to transactional data can support the better design of services
    * adopt an empirical approach to the use of data for generating public value in terms of Anticipating and planning, Delivery, and Evaluation and Monitoring
    * understand the value of Open Government Data to government, and the wider ecosystem. ↩︎
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