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.