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.
- 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 ↩︎
- Explored in some detail in the OECD’s report on Digital Government in Chile – Improving Public Service Design and Delivery ↩︎
- 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 ↩︎
