bmwelby's blog

Thoughts from the mind of Ben Welby

Tag: GOV.UK (Page 1 of 2)

A street scene featuring a storefront with large windows. Inside, two people are seated at a table. A sign outside lists services such as "Benefits," "Housing," "Jobs and careers," "Money and tax," and "Family support." The storefront is adorned with a crown logo above the windows. Pedestrians walk by on the sidewalk.

Pocket, Pavement, Platform: Government in the App Store and on the High Street – Part 5

July 10, 2025 / / 4 Comments
This entry is part 5 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. I started by wondering about how far fitting government into our pockets offers real transformation. In the second post, the topic was the underlying plumbing that makes everything else possible. The third post was my take on AI agents and the implications of service-domain-less interactions. And you may have just come from reading about how we need to design for every doorway, and every channel.

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.

A street scene featuring a storefront with large windows. Inside, two people are seated at a table. A sign outside lists services such as "Benefits," "Housing," "Jobs and careers," "Money and tax," and "Family support." The storefront is adorned with the GOV.UK crown logo above the windows. Pedestrians walk by on the pavement.

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.

The centre that fades into the background

The very best things about digital government, anywhere in the world, come when the focus is not on performative initiatives and shiny technology, but on the team as the unit of delivery, and leaders doing everything to create environments that equip, support and resource them.

It never succeeds by commanding anything.

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.

Brand wrangling is the last thing we need when public trust is amongst the lowest in the OECD and the state is so understrength. The government is battered on every front and is struggling to tell a story about a vision for the country that people believe in or even tolerate. The OECD’s trust framework isn’t wrong – you build trust by your values: having integrity, demonstrating openness and being fair; and in your competency: by being reliable and responsive in the services you provide.

None of that is rocket science.

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.

  1. 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!? ↩︎

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 4

July 10, 2025 / / 4 Comments
This entry is part 4 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. I started by wondering about how far fitting government into our pockets offers real transformation. In the second post, the topic was the underlying plumbing that makes everything else possible. You might just have read my take on AI agents and the implications of service-domain-less interactions. And when you make it to the end then your reward is a piece that is all about Goths.

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 Working means 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-led plan 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.

In case you missed earlier parts, and ploughed on regardless to get here, you might want to catch up on Part 1 where I interrogated the appeal of “government in your pocket” and whether it is more valuable than simply being a good soundbite. Part 2 went beneath that surface: to the plumbing that makes service delivery possible. And Part 3 thought about the future (which isn’t too far from being the present): where our interfaces melt away altogether.

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 3

July 10, 2025 / / 4 Comments
This entry is part 3 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. I started by wondering about how far fitting government into our pockets offers real transformation. In the last post, the topic was the underlying plumbing that makes everything else possible. The next piece will argue for an omnichannel approach that designs for every doorway. And when you make it to the end then your reward is a piece that is all about Goths.

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.

You’ve made it past the half way point of my five part series. Next in Part 4, it’s all about the real world and exploring how public services must meet people where they are, not just through screens, but through every available entrance.

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 2 went beneath that surface: to the plumbing that makes service delivery possible. And in the last part we’ll talk about putting GOV.UK on the High Street.

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 / / 4 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 ↩︎

Re: The oddness of the political moment

July 9, 2024 / / 3 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.

Continue reading

Pride (In the name of GOV.UK)

December 23, 2014 / / 1 Comment

On Friday 19th December 2014 when the final agency switched on its pages we celebrated GOV.UK being ‘organisation complete’.

Three years ago one of the four things Baroness Lane Fox told government to do was ‘fix publishing‘. She recognised that hundreds of different publishing platforms could do a good job in isolation but required the public to understand the complexity of government and that approaching similar needs in bespoke ways was expensive and inefficient. It wasn’t the first time government had recognised the complexity of its web estate and we’ve stood on those broad shoulders to successfully replace over 600 websites with just the one.

That achievement is only really the end of the beginning but I’ve been reflecting on my highlights so far, in anticipation of what’s to come. I’ve got seven. Continue reading

Opportunity Knocks

May 16, 2012 / / 7 Comments

Momentous event number 1 – handing in my notice.

When opportunity first came knocking this wasn’t the plan – that was to take a career break and return to Hull City Council when the offer came to an end. But because the work has nothing to do with my day job and coincided with the busiest period in Hull’s BSF programme it caused headaches.

So despite my love for local government, and despite being conscious of how hard it might be to return, I’m walking away. I’m ditching the security of a contract with 16 months left to run and my ‘gold-plated’ pension. I’m leaving the relationships I’ve built over the last 3.5 years. I’m even choosing to spend part of every week in #thatLondon.

And I’m doing all of that for six months’ work. Risky? Cavalier? Unwise? Perhaps, but I think the opportunity is worth it.

You might have read my thoughts about the significance of the single government domain on those of us in local government (Alpha(Local)Gov, Government as a local platform?). They’re proof that blogging is worthwhile because they prompted an email and a phone call and an invitation to spend the day at the offices of the Government Digital Service with the team responsible for the business bit of GOV.UK (that which is currently handled by BusinessLink).

So three weeks ago I took a day off work and travelled south. I’d asked Louise Kidney (who has swapped localgov for GDS herself) what I should expect from her new colleagues. Nothing she’d said prepared me to finish the day using a wall as my canvas to present back work I’d been set a couple of hours to complete.

Prepared or not my scrawl did the trick and I start as a Business Analyst on May 28th.

Exciting.

Open data: of illusions and conjuring tricks

April 26, 2012 / / 2 Comments
This entry is part 3 of 6 in the series Open data: magic from the inside out?

This is part 3 in a series thinking about whether the magic of open data in local government might be found from the inside out. In part 1, I considered the phrase ‘open data’ and pointed to thoughts elsewhere and part 2 suggested we needed to start from inside our organisations. In today’s third part I’m thinking about those who make magic.

Of illusions and conjuring tricks

In the last post I said that thinking about open data needed to start with how it improves what we do within our organisations because then we might understand it, recognise the value people might add to it and therefore properly champion the concept of ‘open data’.

It’s all very well saying that but if the narrative about exposing public data is difficult then an internal conversation which talks about what data could do for us is perhaps going to be thwarted before it gets off the ground anyway.

Part of the issue is that without concrete examples conversations can tend far too often towards the technicalities. The most helpful conversations aren’t comparing SOAP and RESTful APIs or talking about integration, nor will they bring up open standards or this protocol or that data format with the layman. Phil Jewitt recently wrote a couple of blog posts (1, 2) about how those beyond the project team didn’t need to know about SCRUM they just needed to know what was necessary. The most helpful conversations have at their heart somebody enthusiastically committed to sharing the secret of what’s possible.

Arthur C Clarke’s third law of prediction says that

“any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” Continue reading

Government as a local platform?

February 3, 2012 / / 8 Comments
This entry is part 2 of 7 in the series Local government digital service

I’ve added this post and the first on Alpha(local)gov to my series on ‘Local Government Digital Service‘ because it’s a helpful piece, reflecting an additional perspective from before joining GDS.

Two years ago I researched and wrote a business case to replace our content management system (CMS). This was shortly after BCCDIY and I argued that we should explore the opportunity to coopt partner with Hull’s excellent local talent to build something in the open that encouraged challenge and invited contribution. I lost (“we don’t want to be leaders”) and we picked a safer option. It was approved but something killed the project after I’d moved on in the graduate scheme rotation.

The need hasn’t gone away and on Tuesday I was invited to a meeting to identify tangible benefits for replacing the current CMS that would justify spending some money. Happily there’s talk of open standards and open source so that whilst buying something off a shelf wasn’t out of the question it might not be the automatic choice it once was.

And then that evening GOV.UK‘s beta launched and it brought me back to a piece I’d written last May about the local implications of alpha.gov.uk. Continue reading

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