Building the next generation of digital public services
The UK's plans for the digital transformation of public services have lost their way - making it even harder to engage with government digitally. Other countries are showing us there is a better solution
In 2020, the NHS ran a bus-stop poster campaign in England warning benefit claimants of a £100 fine for fraudulently claiming free dental care. It promoted an online questionnaire for people to manually verify if the exact mix of government benefits they were receiving entitled them to free dental care or not. This was information the government already held.
As of the end of 2023, it was taking up to two years for changes to be made to the Land Registry in England and Wales. Despite its digital back-office systems, many of those changes required a paper form to be completed.
If you want to prove that your child has a disability in the UK, you carry around a dog-eared bit of paper - an “award letter” for a disability benefit - to access disabled facilities. There are whole Facebook groups dedicated to discussing which amusement parks and visitor attractions will accept the letter and which will not.
It was estimated recently that nearly three million eligible families were not claiming Council Tax support, and five million households were missing out on nearly £2bn of support for water, energy and broadband bills. In addition, 1.3 million UK households were eligible for but did not take up Universal Credit, with £7.5bn going unclaimed each year. Those successfully claiming Universal Credit wanting to access things like free school meals are expected to print out a screenshot of their account.
Better use of technology and data could have all but eliminated these issues. But instead, these sorts of “administrative burdens” continue to have real effects - fragility in the housing market, families with less money, holes in teeth, cold and hungry children. Sadly, these are far from isolated incidents.
Why bother?
In the rush to digitise public services, there is little space to ask, why bother? If there is an answer, it is often financial - savings from automation, less duplication, the replacement of neglected systems or the closure of call centres. The aim of most digitisation programmes is the status quo, delivered more cheaply. This is not surprising. Government business cases are woven from such hopes. The resulting documents are catnip to Treasury officials. But efficiency is a trap.
Even where services are well designed, it is all too easy to make things simpler and cheaper for government, while services remain fundamentally the same for the public - or are even made worse.
Government officials have strong incentives to fund work that makes a service simpler for users, but only when the existing process is expensive
Richard Pope
That’s because the things that are expensive or complex for government departments are not necessarily the things that are expensive and complex for users.
Government officials have strong incentives to fund work that makes a service simpler for users, but only when the existing process is expensive. Services that reduce burdens for users but cost government money, such as digitising appeals processes or automating enrolment, are overlooked, as are burdens that exist between services, as the bus stop scare campaign illustrates. The result is that there are many problems that digital is never applied to.
Rather than seeing digital as a short-term cost-saving measure, the aspiration should be to share the benefits of automation with the public. Applied correctly, digital can reduce the burden on individuals, families and communities to close to zero in everything from buying a house, to claiming benefits, to accessing free childcare. The opportunities to do this are better today than they have ever been.
Design principles
In 2011, when we were designing the first version of Gov.uk at the Government Digital Service under the project name “alphagov”, we had a set of design principles pinned to a column in the middle of the office. Some of those principles stand up pretty well today - things like “Set clear expectations” and the reminder to design for context by being “Consistent, not uniform”. Others seem very dated, particularly “Google is the homepage” and “Every visit is a new user”. Those two principles made sense back in 2011 because:
web search was becoming the primary discovery mechanism for public services;
the back-office processes were generally digitised versions of paper processes; and
services did not have access to data about a user’s previous interactions.
Interactions with public services were active and transactional. Users had to actively identify what they needed to do, and then complete a form, be it on paper or digitally. The transaction was “done” when a licence was issued, an account updated or a letter posted.
So if you wanted to make things better for users in 2011 - as we wanted to with Gov.uk - more clearly written web pages, a consistent design system and the removal of superfluous questions from digital forms was a good place to start.
This was not unique to the public sector, either. Many commercial services were similarly optimised for web search and transactional interactions at that time.
Things are different now. Rather than being active and transactional, we are moving towards a future in which people’s interactions tend more towards passive and real time.
Passive and real-time
Passive interactions are already common in commercial services - spam filters in email; recommendations in streaming services; deliveries from online retailers being bundled together; a web browser that gives automatic suggestions for filling in contact details. Increasingly, it is the service that does the work, proactively anticipating a user’s needs.
Real-time interactions are also common. Cars are shown moving on a map in ride-sharing apps, and prices change based on demand. If you want to buy something online, you can see immediately if it’s out of stock. Making payments using a mobile wallet triggers an instant notification that the transaction has taken place.
Real-time, passive interactions are beginning to appear in public services too. More than eight million Ukrainians have used the country’s eAid service to access social security payments without having to fill in extensive forms. The service’s eligibility checks are done automatically, using data from across government.
In India, when a user updates the address on their Aadhaar identity credential, they are prompted to copy the change to their digital driving licence and to other credentials too. In Estonia, digital infrastructure for real-time financial reporting and invoicing between companies is being developed under the banner of “the real-time economy”. It aims to do away with the need for paper receipts and invoices when companies interact with each other or with the government, and even do so across borders.
Elimination of admin burden
For the first time, the systematic elimination of administrative burden across society is within reach. If we choose to follow this path, it will become the expectation that public services automate away as much faff and admin as possible.
Public services could and should work much harder for the public. But that won’t happen through the application of more design thinking or liberal sprinklings of artificial intelligence - at least, not alone. It won’t come through better “data sharing” either, which is akin to photocopying data. Or through digitising services as they exist today form by form, letter by letter.
It requires a proper investment in new types of publicly owned and publicly accountable digital infrastructure, operated for the good of the whole of the public sector and beyond. It also demands a new approach to the design of public services.
Resetting digital government - After years of trying to digitally transform the public sector, with varying degrees of success, could a change of government finally herald a new and better approach?
The public are engaged as consumers, not as part of a democratic society. Today, government is designed out of the way and public servants are placed at distance. Too much value is placed on Silicon Valley minimalism, in a way that misunderstands the nature of what makes public services public - in a democracy, understanding the way things are is a precondition for changing them.
Finally, it requires a change to the type of services that are created in the first place and where government claims a right to operate.
Displaced and atomised
Rather than saving us from bureaucracy, digital has displaced and atomised it. Communal experiences with public services, however mundane, have become millions of individual interactions. Government has been placed at a distance – harder to understand and less willing to account for itself when accessed through digital interfaces. Paper forms have become web forms and countless web pages explaining how to complete them. We wait for emails, rather than letters.
Despite the huge potential for technology and design to improve public services and enrich democracy – the things that got me excited when I stumbled across the emergent civic tech communities of the early 2000s and that eventually led me to working at the Government Digital Service – we have lost something along the way. It’s time to find it again.
Richard Pope is the author of Platformland - An anatomy of next-generation public services, published by LPP, a book about the design of public services and the digital infrastructure needed to support them - available here at Amazon. He was part of the founding team of the UK Government Digital Service and the first product manager for Gov.uk. He created many of the initial design concepts for both Gov.uk and the digital account for Universal Credit. He was a senior fellow at Harvard in 2018/19, researching and lecturing on government as a platform.
