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.
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.
- 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!? ↩︎
