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.
- The OECD’s OURdata Index helpfully tracks the ebbing away from being a leader to lagging behind in just six years. ↩︎
- 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. ↩︎