My response to the Parliamentary Science and Tech Committee consultation on the new GDS

39 min readMar 7, 2025

If you’re a subscriber and a real glutton for punishment you can read my excessively long response to this consultation below. I wish I had the time and energy to turn it into the dozen or so well crafted much shorter blog posts it deserves to be.

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Introduction

This is an individual response to the UK Parliament’s Science, Innovation and Technology Committee consultation on the new digital centre of government. It builds on feedback from the and to supply constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement on the form and future work of the reorganised Government Digital Service (GDS).

I have been impressed by the range of individuals and organisations I respect who have been consulted as part of the process of producing the Blueprint. This has included Public Digital, Theo Blackwell, Richard Pope and the members of the Advisory Board. I would particularly like to single out Mr Pope and his seminal book , which I hope will be a significant basis for future work by GDS.

I was also pleased to see the Review addressing head-on very long-standing issues, such as siloed working, civil service vs. private sector remuneration and the strong tendency for government organisations to implement services based on .

About me

My name is David Durant. I am a former professional software developer, business analyst, delivery manager and change management specialist, with a long career in the public, private and charity sectors. From 2013 to 2017, I worked for the Government Digital Service during the time of Mike Bracken and Francis Maude. I am very proud to have contributed in a small way to those early revolutionary times. I’m a long-time commentator on the use of digital in government, contributing to reports such as the Parliamentary Digital Democracy Commission and publishing on my own blog. I am one of the founders of and a long-time committee member for .

A brief note on exclusions from this document

I do not intend to address the development or use of artificial intelligence by the government in this document, as it is not my area of expertise. I suggest the Committee listens to expert testimony from the likes of Jeni Tennison and Rachel Coldicutt on such matters. Nevertheless, while AI can be extremely powerful in certain limited and well defined circumstances, I hope the government does not significantly over-invest in insufficiently developed systems for “fear of missing out”. Examples of “failing fast”, such as the recent GOV.UK Chatbot experiment and , are welcome learning experiences.

While much motivated to do so, I will also not be writing about the potential digital components related to broad citizen participation, as outlined in the first-rate . I believe this is something that should have its own Parliamentary Committee consultation, in conjunction with GDS, as a way to introduce a parallel workstream of new developments that could radically revitalise our democracy. I have written previously about this here.

I will also not be discussing the major impact and very significant boost in international reputation the government could engender by creating and supporting an international “policy evidence base” and related discussion forums, as I have written about here.

Finally, I will not be going into detail about the ways this specific call for evidence could, instead of being a one-off event with a large post-deadline overhead, be an ongoing discussion between the Committee, GDS, business, civil society and interested individuals, via one of the many secure online discussion platforms currently available that are specifically designed for such a purpose. I would particularly like to highlight and as examples of this. I hope the Committee will consider a trial of such a platform for a future discussion.

Summary and proposed actions

As the consultation call for evidence stipulates that responses over 3,000 words should include a summary, I shall provide that here, along with a set of suggested actions for GDS, which are expanded in the full text below.

In general, I consider both the State of Digital Government Review 2025 and A Blueprint for Modern Digital Government to be excellent documents with many thoughtful plans to address the lack of progress and, in some cases, backsliding in government digital transformation in recent years.

That said, there are specific gaps I would like to highlight, particularly in the areas of cross-government collaboration and open working, that I hope can be addressed in the forthcoming Government Digital & AI Roadmap, to be released this summer.

These are my suggested actions for the Committee to pass on to GDS above and beyond the excellent commitment already made in the Blueprint. Many of these are expanded below.

Commit to annually producing a document similar to the State of Digital Government Review 2025 at the same time every year.
Create a new set of Digital Government Principles, similar to the and the , to be used as constitutional reference for future strategies, plans and discussions within and between government departments:
I have included a set of example principles in Appendix A but GDS should consult widely before finalising a set of their own.
Create two new SCS level roles to have coordination and oversight of and responsibility for the technical design and overall implementation of the entire government digital estate, namely the Government Chief Digital Architect and the Government Chief Data Architect. In both cases, their roles should be to own and enforce standards and provide final approval for related spend:
The Chief Digital Architect should oversee a centralised Government Digital Platform and ensure that all services based in government organisations connect to the new Digital Backbone, use the central Government as a Platform components and enable services to register for events triggered by other services.
The Chief Data Architect should oversee the new cross-government data exchange mechanism.
Work with appropriate organisations, such as the National Audit Office, to undertake thorough investigations of the following:
The user needs of a representative range of organisations in each of a number of related clusters, such as NHS secondary entitles, local councils, and police authorities, to see if their user needs for digital services are as broadly different, as is often claimed, or whether they could be met by building services in the centre, or a single jointly formed organisation for each cluster, rather than relying on the current significantly broken related market.
The positive impact of supporting the creation of local government based “Universal Basic Services”, as developed by Camden and Barking and Dagenham Councils / Demos. Publish best practice on how to build the kind of exemplary self-supporting community-based multi-impact services described in Radial Help by Hilary Cottam.
An audit of duplicated efforts of different government organisations funding their own large digital teams, service creation and support, digital infrastructure, training, etc, instead of collaborating on single cross-government shared resources for each area.
The likely highly significant impact of implementing the “once only” data rule mentioned in the Blueprint and generally the idea of “data normalisation” across government.
Update methods for design and implementation of digital services:
Focus on people with complex needs first. Supporting such individuals and families first will naturally deliver services that support those with simpler requirements.
Actively support and encourage teams from across government to contribute bug fixes, iterative improvements and whole new features to every part of every service created and maintained by GDS. This is currently already theoretically possible, but there are very limited resources to support it and, most importantly, it’s not actively encouraged. A significant communications effort should be made into organisational digital teams outside of the centre to strongly encourage them to feel like they have co-ownership of all of GDS’s services.
Build cross-cutting services around “life events”. Start by publishing an agreed initial list of such events on GOV.UK.
Proactively provide services whenever possible using data the government already holds. Strive to remove the need to apply or renew as much as possible in all services. Ask the Minister for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology to work with Cabinet colleagues to commit to making one benefit proactive by the end of Parliament.
Expand GOV.UK One Login to have a standard way for an individual or organisation to use the government’s digital services on behalf of someone else.
Improve published metrics:
Publically show progress against “administrative burden” by creating a number of on GOV.UK to demonstrate the current state of people with complex needs, who have to interact with multiple organisations and multiple people per organisation plus many forms. Show improvement via those numbers going down over time.
Work with the Treasury to define a way to measure the value of organisations making data / services available to other organisations.
Work with the Treasury to fund the required number of teams at GDS to create and maintain a suite of tools to support all civil servants in every government organisation:
A single government staff directory listing not just contact methods but histories of programmes and projects individuals have worked on, as well as their personal areas of interest. This should be used to facilitate information sharing, support and mentoring. For example, creating “buddy” connections between digital and policy specialists.
A single shared information repository that any civil servant can edit. For reference, see the , , and .
An “Introduction to 21st century ways of working” pack on GOV.UK to become part of the induction for every new civil servant, highlighting training in Agile, digital and other skills, cross-government communities and the cross-gov Slack.
A single innovation suggestion platform and related discussion forum to support suggestions and discussions at all-government, organisation, department and team levels.
Update the Government Service Standard:
To insist on the decoupling of data and services both technically and managerially and introduce a mandate for Data Stewards.
To publish on GOV.UK the service level agreements for each government-side stage for each digital service. Then, show those SLAs, and related progress against them, in users’ government accounts while progress is ongoing.
Improve transparency and open working:
Enable and encourage individual GDS teams to provide regular public updates, such as weeknotes and recordings of their show and tells, to communicate the status of what they are working on. Including, but not limited to, the GOV.UK App, Digital Wallet, Essential Shared Data Assets, the National Data Library and the proposed Digital Backbone.
Create pages on GOV.UK to explain the following new organisations and meetings: The Digital Commercial Centre of Excellence, The Digital Inter-Ministerial Group, The Technical Design Council, The Functional Leadership Group for Chief Digital and Information Officers and The Responsible Tech Advisory Panel.
Commit to proactively publishing the minutes of every SCS or Minister-led meeting organised by GDS that could potentially be FOIA’d. Starting with the groups listed above.
Publish recordings of all GDS all-hands meetings.
Recreate the excellent “This week at” short video format that was used in the early days of GDS for senior leaders and Ministers. Start by having the senior leadership of GDS model this behaviour.
Publish public RAG scores for whether government organisations publish mandatory data requirements to Parliament on time.
Update the Digital Marketplace and the Crown Commercial service digital systems to support email and RSS updates, filtered by area of interest (e.g. by organisation, value or geographic area).
Commit to at least five years of funding for cross-government community development and management, as this is often the first area defunded at spend reviews.
Provide a page on GOV.UK for every policy currently in development, including all research and how people can provide input
Have a page on GOV.UK for every service and a way to engage in constructive online communication regarding it.
Create a new version of the original GDS Performance Platform to encompass the varied new metrics announced in the Blueprint, such as administrative burden, and also metrics on the successful implementation of the Blueprint itself.
Strongly consider taking a principled stand of leaving X (formally Twitter) due to its ownership and significant degradation of quality and factual accuracy.

Answers to specific consultation questions

1. What benefits will a digital centre offer citizens?

Having a consistent, reliable and secure way to access government services online has proved a huge boost to citizens’ ability to access services quickly and easily, as well as saving a very significant amount of money. The creation of GOV.UK and related shared components, such as the , have delivered a uniform “look and feel” for the government that has notably increased user satisfaction and trust.

While GDS got off to an excellent start under Mike Bracken, Tom Loosemore, Liam Maxwell and Francis Maude, its achievements have slowed of late. I’m confident the Blueprint will provide a vital impetus in how digital services are delivered by government, as we move from the deliberate choice of almost exclusively “stateless” systems (where all information has to be entered by users every time) to “stateful” ones that remember previous information and actions and provide a “single account for government” via GOV.UK One Login.

Having a single government account and, eventually, a single Government Digital Platform, will enable users to see all their previous and planned transactions with the government in one place. They will also be able to interact with services that focus on their needs, while cutting across multiple government organisations. This will provide a major step-change in efficiency, while also providing considerable savings.

In addition, I was very pleased to see in the Blueprint that GDS will work across government in conjunction with the Policy Profession to ensure that all future legislation is “digital ready to reduce complexities in service delivery and improve efficiencies, drawing on .”

What benefits will a digital centre deliver to the UK economy?

The Blueprint highlights three noteworthy ways the work of GDS can boost the UK economy by reducing the amount of time spent and stress accrued for people while interacting with the government.

The first of these is by focusing specifically on the administrative burden of users. We’re used to seeing reports that measure the effort required by civil servants to undertake back-end processing of services but, to date, there has been little discussion of the cumulative administrative burden of the most vulnerable people with complex needs, those who tend to interact with government the most. , while give an indication of the issue.

The Blueprint says “parents need to apply for up to 15 services if their child qualifies for free school meals” and “some people have to interact with more than 40 different services across nine organisations when managing a long-term condition or disability.” I hope to see much more open discussion and highlighting of such examples.

The major way to address this is to provide services that are based around the needs of users, not government organisations. We’ve been doing this to some extent for a while now, thanks to compulsory reviews against the Government Service Standard, but only within the context of individual government organisations. The tightly coupled relationship between service provision and related data, plus the lack of data access beyond individual organisational firewalls, has meant that creating cross cutting services has, so far, been extremely difficult. This is why technically, legally and managerially decoupling data stores is a hugely important next step in improving government services.

We need to move rapidly to a situation where a user can perform a task based on their without needing to care how many, or which, government organisations support that transition. All interactions must be seamless within the single government account.

The most important thing in this regard in the Blueprint is that GDS will “co-develop a methodology for measuring the administrative burden including the ‘time tax’ government places on people, and track progress on reducing it, involving civil society groups in the design.” This will be a major game-changer if the full impact of dealing with all parts of the state is measured for hypothetical individuals and families with complex needs, as a way to highlight their current burden and track how it can be improved over time, by not just improvements in digital systems but also through future improvements in both legislation and policy.

The second item in the Blueprint that has immense potential to positively impact the UK economy is the introduction of proactive registration and updating of services. To quote: “It shouldn’t be a citizen’s job to work out what benefits it’s worth them applying for. Nor should it be a business owner’s job to remember what steps the government needs them to take when starting a new business.”

In a very large number of cases, the government already holds enough information to be able to either notify a person that they may wish to be added to a service and then fully or partly complete the application automatically with existing data, or just add them directly and inform them of the update.

I strongly suggest that the Committee asks the Minister for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology to name a specific benefit and a date by which the government will move it to fully automated enrolment, removing the need for any application mechanism.

To do this, not only will government services need to be able to access data in multiple organisations in a secure and fully traceable manner, but also — very importantly — services themselves will need to be able to register for notifications from other services and data stores describing how an individual person, family or business’ circumstances have changed.

Finally, the Blueprint states that “services will come with built-in timelines and status updates, so people always know where they stand and what happens next.” This should mean that, for every step in the processing of a service registration or update, users should be able to see, in their government digital account, what the status of the government side of the processing is, how much time has passed and whether the appropriate service level agreement is being met.

How effectively has the vision for a digital centre been communicated?

GDS has continued to be more transparent than most government organisations but is still significantly less committed to open working than when I worked there from 2013 to 2017. There have recently been a number of good blog posts, including , and . There is also a subscription mailing list that recently provided updates on , and . I was also impressed by the extent of the .

I am encouraged by the statement in the Blueprint that says, “Set an expectation that all central government departments publish their public-facing product roadmaps at least annually and talk about what services they’re working on and why. Encourage other public sector organisations to do the same.” Although, phrases similar to this have been used many times previously to little effect and no Permanent Secretary has ever been called to account for this lack of transparency at PACAC.

The overall volume of communication has steadily decreased over time and is tightly controlled through the Comms team, rather than trusting, enabling and encouraging individual teams to be able to communicate with the public without burdensome oversight. I look forward to seeing far more of this if the following statement from the Blueprint is carried forward into action: “Empower public servants to work in the open to improve our services and build public trust. This means giving hard-working teams credit for their achievements, while being open about the challenges and learning in public from each other and from the wider world.”

I’m looking forward to finding out more about the statement in the Blueprint that GDS will “continue to create a shared digital workplace where public servants can access and use the latest AI and productivity tools”. My primary hope for this is that there will be a significant expansion of the use of the online communication platform, not just in terms of access but via a significant promotion of the service to people outside the areas of digital transformation and IT, to make it a truly broad-based government discussion platform, bringing in people in roles from policy to operations across central and local government.

I regret to say that there are a number of specific areas where GDS, and the wider government digital community, could have been, and could still now be, more open in their working. Some of these include the following:

The development of the use of AI in DWP, which eventually led to stories in The Guardian () could have been undertaken much more in the open and with better engagement with AI-related civil society.
The is apparently in danger of being cancelled. When I spoke to a variety of members of the wider government digital transformation community about this, not a single person was aware it even existed.
The GOV.UK App mentioned as part of the “kickstarter tests” in the Blueprint has had very little public discussion of its capabilities or technology. I fear this may be because of the continued desire of Ministers and senior civil servants to use the “big announcement” model of communications, rather than a collaborative open development strategy.
There have been a number of instances where pages related to GDS products have been on GOV.UK for up to a year with little or no further public engagement to allow feedback or improvement suggestions. These include such things as the following:
We also know very little at this time about these items:
The Digital Backbone
The new Service Transformation Team
At this point, there are a number of proposed groups in the Blueprint about which nothing has been made publicly available. I hope more detail will be included in the Roadmap but that there will be opportunity for more transparency and discussion before then. Some of these include the following:
Digital Commercial Centre of Excellence
The Digital Inter-Ministerial Group
The Technical Design Council
The Functional Leadership Group for Chief Digital and Information Officers
The Responsible Tech Advisory Panel

Regarding these groups, it is my hope that the parties involved will consider that the minutes of their meetings could be accessed by freedom of information requests and therefore choose to proactively publish as much, potentially redacted, content from them as possible.

The kind of open working I would like to see GDS exemplify and encourage in all government teams and organisations includes the following:

Enabling and encouraging individual teams to produce public weeknotes and to put their on the internet (which should be easy if they are already delivering them to a remote audience).
Provide team or service related spaces on GOV.UK as places to display the excellent work that is often done, such as .
Do the same with organisation level all-hands meetings.
Open up excellent events like the to interested third parties outside of government, who may have much to contribute.
Bring back the very simple but exceptionally impressive , which were a major highlight of the early days at GDS. These were 5–10 minute long casual unscripted weekly videos from the members of the GDS senior leadership that publicly highlighted the momentum and struggles of the organisation.
This could be expanded to use the power of video to also include casual unscripted weekly updates from relevant Ministers and Permanent Secretaries.

As a quick aside, I have long advocated for a “RAG score” for departments who fail to publish their mandatory data provisions on time in machine readable formats. This has, quite rightly, been a long-time concern of organisations such as the Institute for Government, who have diligently collected and published evidence of organisations that consistently fail to complete their duties in that regard. Organisations that are consistently rated as “red” should have their Permanent Secretaries held to account at PACAC.

At this time, I would like to briefly take a moment to speak about the social media platform known as “X” (formally Twitter). Along with many others, I am saddened by the government’s continued use of this platform while its owner has demonstrated a wide range of toxic traits not only to the staff of that organisation but also via their role in the new American government. I strongly request that the Committee urge GDS to be the first example of a UK government organisation to leave X and instead work openly on equivalent social media platforms, such as Mastodon and especially Bluesky.

Finally, the Committee should take this opportunity to remind GDS of the high value of transparent working in not only producing higher quality services through early and regular interactions of interested parties with the actual developers of those systems, but also that working in the open in this way is a powerful tool for recruitment. I was personally motivated to join GDS partially by a combination of word of mouth recommendation and regular team-level blogging but I was especially convinced by the regular short video updates that showed not only the extent of the work being undertaken but also served as an excellent example of the culture of the kind of organisation I wanted to work for.

2. What should be the priorities for the digital centre of government?

I am broadly very pleased with the direction of GDS as outlined in the Blueprint and am looking forward to the publication of the Government Digital & AI Roadmap. However, there are some areas that could be significantly improved, primarily regarding the centralisation of digital service delivery and working in the open.

Are there any areas of the public sector that are particularly suited to or in need of digital transformation?

I have been very pleased to learn the CDO for London, Theo Blackwell, has been temporarily seconded to GDS to discuss how the revised digital centre, along with the stirling work being undertaken by MHCLG in Local Digital, can feed into the Government Digital & AI Roadmap. I very much hope the work he is doing will include a recommendation for user needs based local government that includes the kind of review I outline below in the section on procurement and have previously written about here.

I would also be extremely pleased if Mr Blackwell’s review could build on the excellent work undertaken by both Camden Council’s and the similar front-line delivery style introduced by Barking and Dagenham, as recorded in . Both of these reflect the first-class transformational thinking outlined in Hilary Cottam’s book and the ongoing work of . I truly believe that structuring future government services in a way that supports those kinds of hyperlocal community combined services will be the absolute best way to improve the lives of people in the UK with complex needs.

Has DSIT identified the right areas of public services with its initial five ‘kickstarter’ tests and products?

My views regarding the five “kickstarter” items are as follows:

“A beta GOV.UK App and GOV.UK Wallet”: I am broadly in favour of both these items. However, the App is merely a vehicle for other more substantial changes, such as cross-organisational services and a single unified task list / calendar / interaction record / document store, so it remains to be seen how successful it will be in gaining support for that across the major government organisations. The Wallet was announced as far back as last April but we have little information on how it will work. For example, if it will just store major credentials, such as driving license and passport, or whether it will be a full .
“Piloting improvements on how we can better manage a long-term health condition or disability”: This is an extremely nebulous statement that seems much more likely to be impacted by policy or legislative change than additional or updated digital services, so I shall remain open to seeing what is done here.
“Piloting GOV.UK Chat”: Personally, I was underwhelmed by this as it very much seemed like a technology looking for an example use rather than a genuine user need. It would definitely be advantageous if the Committee could ask GDS to publish both the usage statistics and user feedback from this pilot. In general, I would focus on enabling integration of government systems with existing private sector public facing systems, rather than spending resources for GDS to support their own.
“Launching a new AI accelerator upskilling programme”: I believe AI is very powerful in limited circumstances but my knowledge of the area is insufficient to be able to judge if this is the best way to efficiently introduce AI into the correct areas in government.
“Launching a new cross-government vulnerability scanning service”: As far as I am aware, this service has already existed for some time so I find this being included in a list of new items quite puzzling.

How should DSIT measure and evaluate the success of the digital centre?

It is worth highlighting that very little of this is new. It has previously been discussed extensively in other places, from Chris Chant’s “” to Mark Foden’s to Tom Loosemore and Richard Pope . Jerry Fishenden’s shows us that implementing these ideas is very hard.

This is recognised in the Review by the statement: “The public sector does not have consistent metrics of digital performance. Aggregate data about service quality, user experience, cost and risk exposure is not available without dedicated, periodic effort such as the production of this report.” I very much look forward to an improved version of the initially created by GDS and then mothballed in 2021. That system had limited metrics made available to the public and, even then, it was a very significant struggle to have teams responsible for large government digital systems provide those numbers to the centre. I hope there is a stronger commitment to cross-organisational collaboration and transparency now.

I do have hope for improvement and am impressed by GDS’s following public statements in the Blueprint to do the following (although the details of how would be appreciated):

Create an inventory of services to measure the progress of service modernisation and publish a version of this in the open.
Hold itself publicly accountable for the safety, security and quality of services, publishing performance and progress transparently and building in mechanisms to enable evaluation, audit and challenge.
Require departments to publish metrics at least annually on the outcomes they achieve, including service performance, value for money, resilience, digital inclusion and AI adoption.
Hold Secretaries of State accountable for their department’s performance against these measures, including through regular reviews with the Digital Inter-Ministerial Group.

And particularly:

Set out clear metrics for how we will drive and measure progress against the outcomes described in this document.

One vital additional measure the Committee should ask an organisation such as the National Audit Office to undertake is an estimated cost saving over time of moving the much more centralised provision of digital services I outline below in the section on “technological solutions”. I strongly believe that, by enabling software engineers working in every government organisation to collaborate to build a single system that can be used by any civil servant to quickly and easily build digital services, the government could save significant amounts of money by eliminating duplicate roles and digital infrastructure.

3. What lessons are there for DSIT as it establishes the digital centre?

Are there any case studies that the committee should consider as part of its inquiry?

There are no specific case studies I would like to recommend at this time. However, I do suggest the Committee spends as much time as possible speaking in person to members of the UK government digital transformation community by spending time at community events such as .

What lessons do previous and contemporary digital transformation initiatives offer for the digital centre?

The creation of GOV.UK was a great success. The original strategy of GDS to focus on “stateless” services was probably the best that could politically be achieved at the time. The major learnings from that period of rapid radical digital transformation were:

Major government organisations suffer significantly from lack of trust and “not invented here” syndrome, leading, for example, to multiple digital identity systems and the failure of GOV.UK Verify.
There are many reasons why it is difficult to share data between government organisations, as needed in real time. Some issues include the following:
Data and services being tightly coupled.
High levels of risk aversion, with many people whose job it is to keep data safe and very few data sharing advocates.
No standard secure, fully recorded “backbone” to exchange data on.
Organisations unwilling to share data due to knowledge of bad quality or incompleteness.
There have been massive amounts of duplication of both digital personnel and resources, such as cloud hosting, to say nothing of enormous amounts of expensive product development time wasted by allowing multiple government organisations to each create their own separate digital infrastructure, rather than channelling them to collaborate on a single government digital platform.

What can the UK learn from other countries’ efforts?

When this question is posed, the inevitable answer is usually Estonia with its and the legal mandate to only have to supply any piece of information to the government once. It is a very impressive system and something we should seek to emulate.

More recently, , the biometric identity system employed in India, has also been the subject of much discussion. Although, it should be noted that it’s very far from clear which organisation in the UK could become responsible for biometric identity, as our identity policy is currently spread across multiple organisations. With regard to this, I urge the Committee to reference the recent report by Rachel Coldicutt and Careful Industries.

In addition, I urge them to spend time becoming familiar with the Taiwanese (g0v) collection of digital systems and the incredible work that has been done there to facilitate citizen and state interaction to draft legislation, as well as build and improve digital services. In particular I very much urge the Committee to speak to , the first Taiwanese Minister of Digital Affairs, about how gov-zero has significantly improved the whole system of government in that country.

4. What assessment can be made of DSIT’s work on establishing the digital centre to date?

What technical and policy expertise does DSIT need to deliver the digital centre?

I believe GDS is already broadly staffed with both the technical and policy professionals needed to deliver a great digital strategy alongside their currently in-train products. What may be lacking is significant further technical roles if the decision is made to deliver more of the government’s, including local government’s, technology needs from the new digital centre — as I believe it should.

In terms of providing training, the high level training initiatives described in the Blueprint sound broadly promising. However, it remains to be seen if they will make up for the extremely bad previous decision to close the Government Digital Academy. This has, once again, meant that individual government organisations have had to step up and create their own digital training teams at a significant duplication of cost. For example, the Blueprint states that “The Driver Vehicle and Licensing Agency’s (DVLA) Centre of Digital Excellence has 15 programmes with academic qualifications, professional certifications and apprenticeships.” This is something that should be managed in the centre, scaled and made available to all civil servants, potentially via Civil Service Learning.

A further service for civil servants that could be offered would be cross-government mentor matching. This is a system that so obviously fulfills a need that a group of civil servants set up such a system in their own time in 2016, due to lack of support. However, such a system would rely in the first instance on the very basic existence of a fully cross-government person directory and learning record which, despite a number of attempts, is still yet to be realised.

Are the technological solutions required for the digital centre already used by the government and other public bodies? If not, are they available or in development?

While development of digital government services should always focus first on user needs, rather than specific kinds of technology, there are two areas where the Committee should ask GDS to pay special focus. One is related to data and the other to delivery of digital services.

I was very pleased to see the Blueprint include a reference stating GDS will “introduce a Digital Backbone: the integration, orchestration and instrumentation technology needed to share capabilities and build true end-to-end journeys, such as exposing, creating, processing and maintaining APIs across the public sector. We intend to open up the Backbone for industry to publish services and products for use across the public sector, providing a streamlined way to consume services from the market.”

Although there is much to be clarified with regard to this, and I hope there will be capacity for public discussion before the Roadmap is published in the summer, I believe this will be a very positive step forward — especially if it includes a standard way to enable secure, highly regulated, real-time fully logged live data exchange between different government organisations in a manner similar to that achieved by the Estonian X-Road system.

At this point, I would like to highlight what appears as a single line in the Blueprint in the Priority Reforms section, namely “Establish a ‘once only’ rule, so that if people have provided information to one service, it can be reused by others with appropriate safeguards.” If this is to be taken at face value, this is one of the most impactful statements in the entire document and will radically reshape the way data and technology work in the UK government. At the moment, we neither have, nor have ever had plans to have, a single cross-government central store for people-related data, such as name and address. To move to such a system would not only require a long-term mandate and plan for the procurement of new technology and evolution of existing systems, but would also necessarily require a discussion and decision as to which government organisation would be responsible for storing and maintaining that data.

One of the key steps towards achieving this would be to update the Government Service Standard to enforce a new rule that, in future, data storage is treated as strictly managerially and technically separate from the service(s) that collect it and use it. Each data store should make its content available on a standardised data-exchange backbone, such as the one I hope GDS is creating. In addition, each data store should have a and a list of government data stewards should be published on GOV.UK.

I would certainly support GDS moving in a direction of “data normalisation”, where there is a single place where each type of data is stored, but doing so across the government would require a huge multi-year effort. To achieve this, I believe GDS would need to create a new role of Government Chief Data Architect to oversee the project across all government organisations, with a mandate to report the status of this ongoing work back to the Committee every six months.

The other major piece of technology the Committee should ask GDS to investigate is the creation of what I refer to as the “Government Digital Platform”, based on a much expanded version of the current implementation of . It would also encompass the existing Government as a Platform (GaaP) components (GOV.UK Pay and GOV.UK Notify), as well as providing a number of additional ones as described by Richard Pope in Platformland (such as a single calendar, tasklist, interaction log, document store, etc). It is good that the Blueprint states that GDS will “mandate the publication of a standard set of APIs and events by public sector organisations. Starting with an expectation that every new service in central government departments will have an open API.” But I do not believe that goes nearly far enough. I have written in some detail about this idea previously.

As I have alluded to a number of times in this document, the current situation regarding delivery of digital services in government is one where individual government organisations staff their own digital teams, as well as procure and maintain their own digital infrastructure. This is partly due to issues with Treasury funding models, partly due to lack of trust / perception of risk / models of accountability and partly due to the current often inseparable nature of services and their related data. This has even spread to fractured, organisation specific, versions of things like and circumstances where government digital services are still building rather than being able to submit updates to GOV.UK One Login to make that service work for them.

I believe an enormous opportunity is being wasted for all government organisations to collaborate together to build and maintain a single system which, in turn, would be used to create and host digital government services — thereby enabling significant cost reductions due to decreased duplication, as well as better cyber security due to reducing the number of potentially attackable systems.

GDS systems and services, from the Design Manual, Design System, GOV.UK itself to the various GaaP components, do not have reliable procedures to process updates from outside GDS itself and therefore, despite publishing their source code openly as per the Service Standard, they do not enable and encourage that to happen. I strongly wish to see a complete reversal of this state to one where GDS maintains a roadmap of a single Government Digital Platform and an open feature list that it encourages engineering teams in other government organisations to implement in the order that fulfills their own prioritised needs of the system.

There are many things the Government Digital Platform could provide that no system, to my knowledge, exists to do today. These could include such things as the following:

Becoming over time a single central repository of user needs for digital services in government — building on the original GDS idea of the .
Updating GOV.UK One Login to support a standardised way for individuals and organisations to work on behalf of others. This is vital in areas like Lasting Power of Attorney but is also very frequently done in an unrecorded way — for example in local government services. See for more information.
Providing a drag-and-drop style interface for the building of simple information collection forms that will enable any civil servant to produce such a service in under a day. This would require the controlled access to required data stores being made available to the system.
A system to introduce easily managed of digital services to gather metrics on potential updates to services.
Built-in options to ask for impartial feedback on potential services updates — certainly from other users of the Government Digital Platform but also potentially from the public and civil society too.
Generated walk-throughs of every service to enable, through the use of AI, automatically created videos with voice-overs to show users how to use the service.
The investigation of the possibility of creating a single Government Case Management system to be used for less complex services that could potentially save the government many millions of pounds in not needing to pay licences for third party systems.

I’m sure many more advantages of such a system could be gathered during a thorough investigation of the idea and I very much encourage the Committee to ask GDS to open that discussion up to all interested parties.

How should DSIT and other public bodies leverage reforms to public procurement to deliver and operate the digital centre?

GDS highlights a number of issues related to this in the Digital Government Review section titled “The public sector does not have a co-ordinated digital sourcing strategy across organisations”. Despite plans for a Digital Commercial Centre of Excellence mentioned in the Blueprint, I firmly believe that the main issues in this area are related to organisational design rather than procurement competence.

I simply do not believe that each of the over 200 NHS secondary care entities, 300 local councils, 40 police authorities and numerous other similar groups can reasonably be expected to procure and manage their own digital systems. One of the main actions I would urge the Committee to look into would be to ask an organisation such as the National Audit Office to undertake (potentially via outsourcing) a number of based investigations into such organisational clusters, to see if their local-based needs are actually sufficiently different or if they could be largely served by digital services built and maintained by one organisation (which could be a new cooperative third party created by the members of the cluster). I believe that doing this would result in significant cost savings (a huge issue for the many local authorities on the verge of financial collapse), much more feedback-related updates to systems and far better integration with other government data and systems.

There will be push-back by some who will say that this will damage markets by offering such services to these clusters. My response is that these are currently captured markets with an extremely limited number of incumbents offering expensive and bad quality digital products with no motivation to improve or provide easy access to data or APIs (vital to integrate with the new government Digital Backbone).

Finally, there are a few simple but exceptionally powerful changes that could be made to the current government procurement systems to radically improve transparency.

Update the to allow anyone to be able to create an account and to receive either email notifications or tailored based on filters of their choice (e.g. above a certain value, for a particular government organisation, in a specific geographic area or where procurement rules have been waived).
Do the same thing for .
Commit to publishing all in the same manner that is currently done for .

5. What are the barriers to successfully establishing a digital centre of government?

The primary barriers to a successful digital centre of government have never been technical. Government digital services and the underlying systems needed to provide them are not especially complex. Instead, the major blockers are, and always have been, related to funding, risk, ownership, cross-organisational collaboration and access to data.

Regarding funding, I was pleased to see the Review highlighting that “many organisations find the funding governance process overly complex, time-consuming, and ineffective for digital and data initiatives. The application of existing Green Book processes drives up the costs of developing business cases as well as the time taken to secure approval. Therefore, it was very good to read in the Blueprint that GDS is working with the Treasury to “expand use of performance-based, outcomes-focused funding models that tie funding to metrics and accelerate the shift from ‘boom and bust’ transformation programmes to continuous funding of persistent, multidisciplinary product teams”, as well as “launch tailored funding models for digital products and services, legacy remediation and risk reduction, and staged, agile funding that better enables exploratory work with new technologies.”

I would also urge the Committee to ask GDS to investigate ways that one government organisation providing data or other digital services to others can be recorded in a way that shows value to the Treasury. At the moment, one of the barriers for government organisations to support each other is the lack of any way to materially justify this as an important justifiable cost to the Treasury when writing business cases.

There also needs to be a public discussion to reach an understanding of accountability for services that span multiple existing government organisations. If we are to build services based on the needs of users, for example around “life events”, such as starting a business, retiring or having a child, there will need to be a standardised governance mechanism for such services that is stable, efficient and acceptable to both the Treasury and PACAC.

How can DSIT address these barriers?

DSIT can address these barriers in three ways.

Firstly, by working closely with senior leaders in the major government organisations to collaborate on ways to address the issues. From the Blueprint, I see a number of such connectivity points are going to be put in place but their details are not yet public. I hope there is more information in the upcoming Roadmap, including a commitment to proactively publish as much of the outputs of these meetings as possible.

Secondly, by creating and supporting communities of practice around roles and practices related to the most challenging areas. Unfortunately, the government has previously had a long habit of creating such communities and then abandoning them at the next spring review cycle.

Finally, they should have conversations about these blockers in the open as much as possible to allow feedback, constructive criticism and innovative suggestions from business, civil society and motivated individuals.

I was pleased to see that the Blueprint specifically highlighted the following changes that also help address these issues:

Require that all public sector organisations have a digital leader on their executive committee and a digital non-executive director on their board by 2026 at the latest and publish this information publicly.
Establish a dotted reporting line to the Government Chief Digital Officer (GCDO) for all CDIOs in central government, including input into recruitment decisions, coaching support and feedback on performance.
Raise the status of the GCDO role to Second Permanent Secretary-level.

What infrastructure and regulation is required to make the government “more digital”?

Using Tom Loosemore’s definition: “Digital government is the application of internet-era technologies, processes, culture, and business models to meet people’s evolving expectations”, it’s clear that the introduction of additional externally facing technology alone will not achieve this goal. Instead, it will require a major cultural shift at all levels of the civil service. I strongly feel that the main factor in this is how we can address the issues of both siloed working and continuous iterative improvement. In both cases, digital technology should be introduced as part of the standard ways of working for every civil servant, at every grade level, to enable them to collaborate broadly.

In addition, the committee welcomes submissions on the following points:

What impact will the Data (Use and Access) Bill have on efforts to establish DSIT as the digital centre of government?

This is not my area of expertise and I defer to groups like on this. That said, I do not believe the Bill refers to the data-related specifics I have mentioned above that I believe are necessary, such as mandating a technical and managerial division between services and data or providing a single backbone for secure and recorded cross-government data exchange. It’s possible, though, that legislation may not be needed for this and it can be implemented through internal policy and use of accreditation methods, such as the Government Service Standard.

How should the National Data Library proposed by the government be taken forward?

Again, this is not my area of specialty and . I am sure that providing data to non-government organisations will be important for the economy but I am personally much more interested in how it can be done between government organisations as a way to provide more efficient services for users.

How should the digital centre be delivered in a way that ensures equitable access to public services?

I believe GDS already has a clear focus on this but additional transparency during initial discussions and especially during development of services would allow civil society an opportunity to provide detailed feedback. I am also very pleased to see the recent publication of the first since 2014 — although I have not yet had time to read the full details.

I will highlight again the high importance of providing a single, well understood and promoted system to allow individuals and organisations to use government systems on behalf of others, with their permission, in a way that is simple, secure and fully recorded. This should be provided as part of GOV.UK One Login.

Conclusion

I am, in general, hopeful about the next stage of the evolution of the Government Digital Service, provided it continues to consult with appropriate experts and the wider digital transformation community. There is certainly work to be done in fixing funding and risk, reducing duplication, supporting collaboration and especially on open working, but things are definitely moving in the right direction.

I’d like to take the opportunity to close my response to this consultation with a few appropriate quotes from the digital transformation community thought leaders that I hope continue to inspire the people “”.

Ultimately, the obstacles to reform are political not practical — Daniel Chandler
What’s undeniable is that a myopic focus on incremental improvement of existing public services has trapped the UK in a local maxima. UK public services desperately need an injection of exponential boldness, as described in Richard Pope’s wonderful new book. — Tom Loosemore
If you add digital to a broken thing, you just get a digital broken thing — Yun-Chen Chien
Work in the open, think in the open, dream in the open — Jeni Tennison
Revolution not evolution — Martha Lane Fox
Be bold — Janet Hughes

Thank you for your time.

Appendix A : Example Government Digital Principles

First principle

We have a ceaseless focus on those holistic needs of the people of the UK that can be provided by the government:

We focus first on providing support to the least advantaged members of society, especially those with complex needs.
We review all new proposed Parliamentary legislation against a defined set of criteria related to digital delivery feasibility.
We design the Government Digital Platform around our user’s point of view with a major focus on reducing their administrative burden. This will often be focused on life events, spanning multiple government departments in a way that is seamless.
We support the right of all users of every government service to have their say about proposed changes to the service by allowing them to register for notifications of changes and providing feedback channels.
The Government Digital Platform will be fully event driven, meaning that services can register with each other for status changes of users, so people don’t have to inform multiple government organisations about their new situation.
We proactively provide services whenever possible using data we already hold. We strive to remove the need to apply or renew as much as possible.
In conjunction with the private and third party sectors, we provide and support the use of digital credentials as proof of eligibility and accreditation to facilitate secure, seamless access to services and entitlements for citizens.
We build the Government Digital Platform to be as accessible as possible to everyone in the UK.
The Government Digital Platform is designed to recognise, support and record when online services are accessed by individuals or groups working on behalf of the person or people who will receive value from the service.

Second principle

We provide support for people in the UK through a single Government Digital Platform:

The Government Digital Platform is overseen by two cross-government roles:
The Government Chief Digital Architect
The Government Chief Data Architect
The Government Digital Platform is supported by two key boards:
The Government Board of Departmental Chief Digital Officers
The Government Digital Platform External Oversight Board
The Government Digital Platform provides digital public infrastructure that supports a wide variety of services from high transaction national services to hyperlocal community groups with multiple complex needs.
The Government Digital Platform is purposefully stateful not stateless,
The Government Digital Platform exposes a smaller attack vector for cybersecurity based attacks than multiple existing platforms, thereby reducing the overall government exposure to cyber risk.
The Government Digital Platform is largely based on a single central “Service Building Service” and many connected task-specific components:
The Digital Center of Government will provide the following key components of the Government Digital Platform. Others may also be provided there or by any other government organisation:
The Service Building Service
Personal journal (logs of past actions and outcomes)
Personal task list (things to be done)
Personal Credential Store (stores credentials from government and third parties)
Payment
Notifications to citizens
Single calendar recording past and futures interactions with government
Stored documents, submitted and generated.
The Government Digital Platform will support third party providers of digital wallets, as well as the government’s own Personal Credential Store.
The Government Digital Platform’s Service Building Service supports the internal-side of services used by civil service staff.
The components that make up the Government Digital Platform will interact via internal notifications so that a change of status in one area will prompt related actions in other areas.
We actively support and encourage teams from across government to contribute bug fixes, iterative improvements and whole new features to every part of the Government Digital Platform.
A non-technical civil servant who has secured an appropriate data store in their department and has been given permission to represent their team can build the entire digital part of their service without assistance.
We support the use of the Government Digital Platform by people in the UK through a single national government identity platform — GOV.UK One Login:
Our identity platform supports logins from businesses, non-business organisations, agents and individuals acting on behalf of another (e.g. via Lasting Power of Attorney).
The Government Digital Platform supports reuse of data through the following two rules:
All digital data stores must be both technically and managerially separate from the services that supply them with data and interrogate them.
All digital data stores must be securely accessible on the Government Digital Platform’s Data Exchange System (data access, not data sharing).

Third principle

We do this by being One Civil Service working transparently in the open:

We support this by providing and promoting a comprehensive set of cross-government digital tools to support our staff. These are automatically supplied to all new civil servants. They include the following:
A single government staff directory listing programmes and projects people have worked on to facilitate information sharing, support and mentoring (for example creating “buddy” connections between digital and policy specialists).
A single shared information repository that any civil servant can edit (, , , , etc).
International wiki / chat — see my blog post.
Fully supporting , , etc, with their own pages on GOV.UK. Enable people outside of government to join on request.
A cross-government online chat system.
A single multi-layered innovation suggestion platform and related discussion forum.
We give every government software developer “commit access” on every non-security-specific software product and platform component in the Government Digital Platform (review still required).
We commit to proactively publishing the minutes of every SCS-led meeting organised by GDS that could potentially be FOIA’d.
We provide a page on GOV.UK for every policy currently in development, including all research and how people can provide input.
We have a page on GOV.UK for every service and a way to engage in constructive online communication regarding it.
We provide services to facilitate public deliberative discussions focused on the iterative improvement of policy and delivery of government services.
We encourage civil servants at all levels to talk openly about their work through official team blogs, videos and social media.
We host and promote a platform for stored research and related discussions as part of an international policy evidence ecosystem. Especially focusing on primary user research with real users of our services.

Desiderium Sciendi