1.2 Running digital government well: analysis of the UK

Estimated read time: 26 minutes

Clear and unified vision

Political turbulence and its impact

Over the last decade the UK’s (digital) government efforts have been hindered by political instability and inconsistent leadership. The “political rollercoaster” of recent years—marked by frequent leadership changes and shifting priorities—has left many policy domains without a coherent vision. It has been chaotic and this has directly impacted digital government initiatives, causing the initial excitement and enthusiasm to dwindle.

Between 2010 and 2015, Francis Maude served as the Minister for the Cabinet Office (MCO), providing stability and a strong vision for digital transformation. Maude understood that digital transformation was a foundational opportunity to improve the quality and effectiveness of government, not just to enhance competence or save money, although these were important motivating factors. His tenure provided the stable foundation for the Government Digital Service (GDS) to flourish and become a global leader.

However, since then, a revolving door of leadership in the Cabinet Office has meant 12 ministers over nine years, as well as several changes of civil service leadership at different levels. The responsibility for digital has often fallen to junior ministers, with short tenures, leading to a lack of coherent vision and strategy. This has impacted not only ministerial priorities but also the roles of Civil Service leaders, creating challenges in sustaining reform. This fragmentation has caused a loss of momentum, diluting the bold ambitions that once set the UK apart on the global stage.

Strong governance structures

Evolution of Central Digital Authority

GDS was instrumental in propelling the UK’s digital government efforts following Martha Lane Fox’s call for a revolutionary approach to online citizen services. GDS started as a scrappy, agile team and grew into a significant force within the government, underpinned by seven founding principles:

• Digital by Default
• Putting Users First
• Learning from the Journey
• Building a Network of Trust
• Moving Barriers Aside
• Creating an Environment for Technology Leaders to Flourish
• Don’t do Everything Yourself (You Can’t)

The 7 GDS digital principles – Ben Terrett

With the benefit of hindsight we can see how elements of these principles were incredibly important and went on to be widely adopted values while others hint as some of the challenges and pitfalls that need to be recognised from the last decade and a half.

Living up to those principles meant finding a balance between humility of service and the disruptive force of leading change. For some, that balance was lost in the boldness, and brashness of an arrogant, confrontational GDS whose behaviours led to some bruising encounters and left a perception that the centralising control brought by GDS was unwelcome. Some of those scars persist today. And those criticisms need to be heard. 

Equally, the context in 2011, encapsulated by Chris Chant’s #unacceptable speech, required tough conversations and strident opinions. As someone who spent 2012-2018 at GDS I can understand the criticism but my experience was that the ethos and spirit inherent to those original 7 principles proudly displayed on the wall meant that collaborative, productive relationships, especially at practitioner level were the norm.

The period from 2015/16 reflected a response to those criticisms and wholesale changes to leadership both politically and organisationally. There were attempts to correct the perception of arrogance and operate with a more deliberate partnership mentality. That change towards being more facilitative and diplomatic arguably shifted the focus of delivery, which perhaps inevitably, if not necessarily, reduced cadence and scaled back ambitions. However, any sense of stalled momentum has to be seen in the context of the several destabilising factors of Brexit, frequent elections, COVID-19 and war in Europe.

The activity housed within GDS expanded over the years and by 2018 had created a set of overlapping functions which can briefly be summarised as:

• Standards setting and assurance: Acting as a central authority to control and assure what government was spending and doing when it came to digital and, increasingly, design.
• Service delivery: Developing GOV.UK and other common resources to meet the needs of internal government teams, as they meet the needs of the public.
• Operational Cabinet Office transformation: Absorbing the digital transformation operations of things like the Digital Marketplace which really belonged to the Cabinet Office and its subsidiary bodies.

Recognising these overlapping roles, a restructure made sense. GDS would focus on its service delivery function, Cabinet Office Digital (and its own sub-bodies) would take responsibility for their delivery responsibility to their users, and the newly created Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) would take on the standard setting and assurance function.

One of the things that I hoped might emerge from this restructure might have been a return to some of the original super-power of the momentum associated with GDS and its work – that of galvanising, inspirational and visionary leadership for how digital in government could reshape the experience of citizens and the functioning of the state. Perhaps it is unfair to all those working diligently and valliantly but I don’t find the restructure as having reinvigorated things in any of the three domains.

The CDDO became the responsible body for setting cross-government strategies, policies, and standards for digital, data, and technology leading to the creation and implementation of the most recent Digital Strategy as well as tools like the Data Maturity Assessment for Government, the Algorithmic Transparency Recording Standard, the Government Functional Standard for Digital and its complementary Digital Assessment Framework.

There is a sense that this new entity has not delivered on the promise of reinvigorating the challenge of accountability against such standards and the assurance of quality. Lots of process and governance, less visibility of the impact that it is having.

Anecdotally, it was a source of confusion that the Digital Government and Data Unit at the OECD was never engaged by CDDO, with the lines of communication remaining via GDS instead. As the interface between the Digital Government Units of the world and their Senior Digital Government Officials, this disconnect was confusing given CDDO was understood to have taken on the mantle of the “Digital Centre of Government”. It raises concerns about the effectiveness of this central digital authority to learn from international practices and by extension coordinate and lead across departments.

Moving the Centre of Digital in Government

Following the appointment of Peter Kyle as the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology the new government moved quickly to reset the machinery of digital government and to address some of the disconnect caused by certain responsibilities (for digital inclusion, some aspects of data, and some aspects of digital identity) moving from the Cabinet Office and into DCMS. Bringing GDS, CDDO, and the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (i.AI) into the same organisation as the rest of science, innovation and technology policy presents an opportunity to reimagine the central digital authority.

This could alleviate stresses caused by the previous model, where the “centre” was often seen as imposing rather than collaborating. But it raises questions about coordination and authority in this new structure. Will DSIT have the clout to drive cross-governmental digital transformation? Will it be held back by departmental silos and misaligned priorities? Will the move from the centre of government undermine the importance of digital transformation as a contributing element to broader and deeper public sector reform? Will having a Secretary of State to champion Digital create the perverse outcome of interest in shiny technology than the harder, underlying reform? Will the rest of Cabinet lose the need to build their own digital insight and capability because they can turn to Digital for the answer?

Whichever way this amalgamation proceeds, the need remains for government as a whole to be equipped to tackle the three elements that led to the restructure of GDS in the first place. In any future vision for the centre it is important to ensure that there is:

• A strong, visible, centre: Setting standards, inspiring organisations to meet them, understanding where that’s not happening, and doing everything possible to remove the barriers and anchors that are causing those challenges.
• Focused delivery at the centre, for the margins: Quietly responding to the needs of teams across the public sector (not just for central government), creating a habitat for them in which they can focus on their users with minimal distraction.
• Empowered departmental teams: Accountable departmental digital teams trusted to understand and meet the needs of their users, and equipped with the tools and resources they need to do so.

This is not an agenda for the design of the “Digital Centre” but a set of capabilities and needs that must be met across government as a system and a whole. In fact, there is a real risk to ‘re-energising’ the Centre that appearing to give Digital greater prominence may lose sight of the importance that digital transformation is not a brick in the wall of government, it’s the mortar that holds the whole thing together. And that makes it the responsibility of everyone, at every level, to understand and make their own.

Strategic planning and performance measurement

A coherent and comprehensive strategy is essential for aligning political vision with administrative execution. Such thinking is vital for the country as a whole but is needed within individual organisations and sectors to reflect their localised needs and challenges. 

The exercise of producing individual departmental strategies (by everyone except the then Department for Communities and Local Government) following the launch of GOV.UK in 2012, represents a significant overhead but one with arguably outsized value in recognising how the different elements of government co-exist in a coordinated manner. Such documents will exist internally but there was an important statement of intent in having them made public and for them to provide the recognition that no department is an island when it comes to digital transformation.

In 2022 the CDDO led the publication of the government’s most recent digital strategy, titled “Transforming for a Digital Future: 2022 to 2025 Roadmap for Digital and Data“. The strategy is structured around six critical missions and are each sponsored by a named civil servant. They are:

1. Transformed Public Services That Achieve the Right Outcomes
2. One Login for Government
3. Better Data to Power Decision Making
4. Efficient, Secure, and Sustainable Technology
5. Digital Skills at Scale
6. A System That Unlocks Digital Transformation

These missions are framed in such a way that they look beyond individual departmental and sectoral challenges in order to identify the foundational pillars that will underpin the wider transformation of the public sector at large.

Mission One: Transformed Public Services That Achieve the Right Outcomes

Mission One aims to make government services “great” by delivering the best user experience. The focus is on transforming the top 75 services based on usage, criticality, and potential impact.

It is encouraging to hear that the “Great” framework was rooted in quantifiable metrics for usability, compliance, and efficiency, aligning with the need to update regulations and standards. These defined thresholds should enforce management tools that support agile delivery and iterative development. 

But, what are they? What even are these top 75 services?

It is regrettable (I might go as far as to say unforgivable) that outside the occasional narrative update this commitment to Great Services sets no expectation for them to publish their performance publicly, or even for GDS to document with open data and visual aids any of the progress against this mission and the quality of the services against this apparent framework. There’s a blog post from May 2024 indicating that 21 of the 75 are now “Great” but there is no public information as to what, how or why that statement has been made. It is a far cry from the way in which the exemplar services were communicated (whether overall, or as a specific service), or the approach to the Performance Platform¹.

Mission Two: One Login for Government

Mission Two seeks to provide a single way for people to sign in and prove their identity when accessing government services online through GOV.UK One Login. This aims to replace more than 190 different ways to set up accounts on GOV.UK. 

GOV.UK One Login is the great hope for addressing the fragmented digital identity landscape. At least for the public sector.Well, in central government.

The eventual aspiration may be grander than that but as things stand, over three years on from its initial announcement, that is the public scope of GOV.UK One Login. According to a blog post from May 2024 4.4m people have now used it but there is no publicly visible performance dashboard to give any insights.

It is undeniable that public sector identity is fragmented and burdensome for users and government teams. However, the UK is an outlier in not embracing digital identity as a ubiquitous public good responding to the needs of both public and private sector users in a single solution. Moreover, with the focus on an online-only solution this strategic direction is not speaking to the needs for empowering people to be able to prove who they are in analogue environments as well (as seen in the debacle over voter ID).

There is a more detailed (but still too brief) discussion of digital identity and public trust in Chapter 3.

Mission Three: Better Data to Power Decision Making

Mission Three focuses on enabling departments to share and use data safely and securely for better public services and decision-making. Despite the work done to design the National Data Strategy in 2019 Chapter 4 (2 minutes to read) will discuss more fully the extent to which data must be a priority area of concern because the UK is increasingly comparing unfavourably against its international peers. On this it is encouraging to see the UK’s Chief Data Officer writing about the aspiration to activate data for national benefit and transformed public services.

Although the challenges of data for decision making are a downstream consequence of patchiness in data infrastructure and architecture, the new government’s stated desire to establish a National Data Library should be welcomed. It is also good to see this Mission recognising the importance of building data literacy for public servants.

Mission Four: Efficient, Secure, and Sustainable Technology

Mission Four focuses on modernising, securing, and enhancing the sustainability of government technology, emphasising the importance of replacing outdated legacy systems, responsibly embracing new technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), and ensuring that technology is sustainable in terms of energy use and environmental impact. 

This mission also reinforces a “Secure by Design” approach, which aims to embed cybersecurity into every stage of service delivery. The focus on cybersecurity is critical but it is unclear, from the public materials, how these activities interact with the Technology Code of Practice and the Government Service Standard.

The mission also touches on modernising systems, which is an essential component in removing one of the largest barriers to agility: outdated infrastructure. However, challenges remain in ensuring consistent adoption across all departments, as legacy systems are not uniformly distributed. Furthermore, while security is a priority, the strategy could more explicitly focus on environmental sustainability, ensuring technological progress doesn’t come at the expense of ecological responsibility. It is crucial to balance innovation with long-term sustainability goals, a point echoed in the Functional Standard’s emphasis on sustainability considerations throughout the technology life cycle.

Mission Five: Digital Skills at Scale

This mission seeks to attract and retain world-class talent, deepening the expertise of technologists, and upskilling senior leaders on digital and data essentials. What was once called the Digital, Data and Technology profession has now been renamed as the Government Digital and Data profession and has increased by 9,000 since October 2021. There is a further ambition to recruit 2,500 tech and digital roles through apprenticeships and talent programmes while upskilling 90% of senior civil servants in digital competencies by 2025.

However, the success of this mission will hinge on more than just recruitment numbers; the government must create an environment that empowers talent, integrates them into the wider public sector, and supports retention by fostering a culture that values continuous learning, innovation, and career development.

Moreover, with an ambition for “at least 6% of the overall workforce of the Civil Service [to] be members of the digital, data and technology profession” that leaves the vast majority of government outside the professions. The solution for transformation is not to simply amass a bigger pool of explicitly digital professionals but to equip all public servants with an understanding and baseline capability for digital transformation. In this respect the replacement activities for the Digital Academy must be effective in ensuring capability rises for all.

Mission Six: A System That Unlocks Digital Transformation

Mission Six sets out to build a government fit for the digital age by modernising outdated structures and processes. This includes embedding agile and product-centric ways of working across government, ensuring that legislation is fit for digital delivery, and allowing teams to adopt new solutions quickly. The aim is to shift established ideas about risk, value, and how digital projects are funded and delivered, creating a system that supports long-term, sustainable digital transformation.

This mission directly addresses the need for systemic change, which is vital to overcoming many of the institutional barriers that hinder digital transformation. The emphasis on agile and product-centric approaches is welcome and reinforces the need to simplify and modernise management tools, as discussed in this review and outlined in the Functional Standard.

However, the real challenge lies in securing broad buy-in across government. Achieving systematic change requires engagement from leadership at all levels, not just within the Government Digital and Data professions but across all departments. Without this buy-in, efforts to modernise structures and processes may be met with resistance, particularly from those wary of shifting risk and value perceptions in traditional project delivery models. 

Coordinated policy and resource management

Siloed Departments and Fragmented Leadership 

In early 2012 a dedicated network for digital leaders was created to help promote the digital agenda across government. A similar network focused on technology leaders was established the following year to help ensure government had access to the right technology. In 2017 the Technology and Digital Leaders Network was created as an amalgamation of the formal aspects of these networks and has met monthly since 2018.

These formal networks which convened the most senior leaders in government sat above additional broad based, communities of practice activity to encourage and establish a vision for a different way of working that included nominated ‘digital leaders’ who, in that period before the DDaT professions were established may not actually have had an explicitly digital or technology role. They were supported by various activities, including the high profile focal point of the annual SPRINT conference (which I don’t think has taken place since the pandemic with the last edition being in 2019).

The work of the civil service to remain coordinated and to work collectively and collaboratively is always to be encouraged. However, the fluctuating commitment from senior leaders due to political turbulence impacts strategic alignment and accountability across digital initiatives. Furthermore, departmental leaders often inherit visions from others and may lack enthusiasm and commitment to embrace those agendas compared to their own ideas and ambitions.

Indeed, digital transformation is more than the responsibility of digital departments or technology professionals, it has to be a collective endeavour. Effective leadership requires coordination among mission sponsors to ensure efforts contribute to overarching goals.

One of the great strengths of the Digital Leaders activities and the SPRINT conference appeared to be its efforts in engaging all leaders, and not just those directly involved in digital, data, or technology roles. The commitment of the strategy to a mission that upskills 90% of senior civil servants in digital competencies by 2025 is also to be welcomed. But leadership is not just about those who occupies those most visible and senior leadership positions, leadership happens throughout the hierarchy of the civil service.

Successful digital governments excel at coordinating policies across ministries and agencies, promoting resource sharing and best practices. In the UK, departments often work in isolation, leading to duplicated efforts and inconsistent policies. The loss of collaborative practices like those which supported the more broadly-based Digital Leaders network and cross-departmental communities of practice has further hindered coordination.

Financial Measures and Spend Controls

Financial controls and budgeting practices need to support, not hinder, digital transformation efforts. This is another area that is not explicitly recognised in the current digital strategy but would be expected to exist in helping to shape purchasing and drive improved outcomes. Mission Six’s ambition to build a system that unlocks digital transformation aligns with the need to simplify and modernise management tools. 

Traditional approaches to developing business cases are rigid and cumbersome, often ill-equipped to accommodate the iterative nature of digital projects. By embedding agile and product-centric ways of working across government, there’s potential to address some of the challenges with rigid business cases and slow agile adoption.

Many of the ideas associated with the GDS-era put into practice ideas that had become common in the technology industry and neatly captured by Eric Ries’ seminal work “The Lean Startup”. However, one aspect of this work has enjoyed less attention and focus in its translation into government – and that is Innovation Accounting. Many of the models that are used for understanding value and benefits remain characterised by historic understandings about return on investment and timeframes for delivery. Under the Government as a Platform programme the GDS economists began to develop a methodology for realising ‘Benefits in Agile’ but it is unclear whether those ideas found purchase more broadly (I am sure there was content in the Service Manual along these lines but I cannot find it).

Certainly the distinction between capital and revenue expenditures continues to create challenges in funding ongoing digital services. Operational service management often struggles with funding beyond fixed envelopes, impacting service continuity and improvement. Financial mechanisms are needed that recognise the unique nature of digital services—it can not be treated as a one-off capital expense but an ongoing investment. Funding models must support ongoing services and their ownership effectively

Financial controls are critical for supporting digital transformation. The UK’s Digital and Technology Spend Controls have evolved since their introduction in 2013. At that time they represented a powerful intervention designed to prevent wasteful spending and enforce standards. Over the last decade the controls have iterated with the most recent version, Version 6, being launched in 2024.

An important complementary tool was the development of the Technology Code of Practice which, by 2016, had been made a formal part of the Spend Controls process. For Version 5 in 2018, the “pipeline process” was first introduced to create a triage and risk-based model which empowered departments to manage smaller, less risky projects more independently while ensuring the centre focused on high-value or high-risk cases. However, this perhaps inevitably created inconsistencies with how individual departments applied the controls, often leading to different experiences and levels of autonomy depending on the department.

The most recent version of the Spend Controls model makes a couple of significant changes to the model. The first of these is to introduce a risk and importance framework that seeks to ensure high-risk and high-value cases get the attention that’s needed, while making the approval process for low-risk and low-value cases more efficient. This framework is automatically built into the user journey for those submitting their requests through a dedicated ‘Get approval to spend’ service. The second significant alteration is the idea of “Earned Autonomy”. The CDDO wants to ensure that internal teams are capable of independently approving low and medium risk spend wherever possible. Using the government functional standard for digital, the expectation is that where organisations have the necessary capacity they will have greater responsibility. This is anticipated to incentivise the development of organisational maturity and allow for CDDO to prioritise the expertise of the centre. 

Procurement mechanisms that support innovation and agility

Procurement processes significantly impact the government’s ability to innovate and collaborate with external partners but aside from noting that government’s scale might facilitate bulk procurement this topic is not given much focus in the strategy. Mission Six identifying the need to modernise processes recognises this question but only implicitly; given its importance it is an oversight not to give it greater prominence and recognition.

Despite being a central plank of the original transformation theory and progress in opening up the supply chain to small and medium enterprises (SMEs), challenges remain. Lengthy and complex procurement processes hinder the acquisition of necessary technologies and services. While large incumbent suppliers continue to play a significant role, some of the innovations designed to encourage opportunities for smaller, innovative companies in terms of procurement frameworks or wider support for incubating and supporting GovTech activity have been abandoned or gone backwards.

The Digital Marketplace aimed to simplify procurement and open opportunities to a broader range of suppliers. However, there is now less transparency in the frameworks and associated data on spending and performance. It is hard not to conclude that while it was theoretically correct to return full responsibility for the digital transformation of procurement to the Crown Commercial Service, the agenda has suffered from no longer having a function inside GDS focused on supporting this question. “Make Things Open, It Makes Them Better” wasn’t just a catchy slogan—it was a guiding principle that seems to be missing from the digital strategy.

Wider work on the Global Digital Marketplace and engagement with the OECD on The ICT Commissioning Playbook has dissipated with all the work that went into considering how to show leadership on a new paradigm for procurement, led by the UK not receiving the backing to move that resource off a Heroku instance that is no longer live. The new government has delayed a new piece of procurement legislation until 2025 and perhaps this will contain some cause for optimism.

Adaptive regulatory frameworks

The UK has historically excelled at establishing robust regulatory frameworks that underpin digital transformation, with its strong legal foundations covering Freedom of Information and Data Protection legislation. These frameworks ensure consistency, security, and public trust, but must evolve to maintain relevance and support innovation.

The UK’s regulatory landscape increasingly includes adaptive mechanisms to stimulate technological advancement. Tools like regulatory sandboxes are being used by the Financial Conduct Authority to enable safe, controlled experimentation with emerging technologies. However, the use of such tools in broader public-sector innovation has been inconsistent. Expanding these sandboxes and reducing administrative barriers across domains can encourage experimentation, offering public institutions a controlled environment to test innovations without the fear of premature regulatory constraints.

Balancing innovation with safeguarding citizen data remains a critical priority and is held up as important principles by the Technology Code of Practice and Secure by Design principles. The ongoing work and support of the National Cyber Security Centre (who recently celebrated their 8th birthday) has provided critical foundations for cybersecurity policy and activity across the country. Nevertheless, the public sector estate has a huge digital footprint and remains a juicy target for cyber crime and ransomware with several high profile attacks affecting organisations involved in local government, public transport, health care and research.

The UK’s regulatory frameworks have taken steps to integrate ethical considerations, particularly in areas like AI governance. The introduction of the Algorithmic Transparency Reporting Standard and its accompanying Toolkit are promising steps, seeking to ensure fairness and accountability in public-sector decision-making tools. Equally, the Data Ethics Framework is another important guiding resource for helping to equip and encourage ethical practices in the use and application of data. A unified ethical framework, aligned with public values and emphasising transparency, fairness, and accountability, is essential.

In these cases it may prove valuable to place such frameworks on a more statutory footing but that is not the case for everything. Resources such as the Service Manual and the Government Service Standard were revolutionary in their time, establishing benchmarks for user-centred, accessible service design that created behaviour change without the need for law-making. Yet, they do risk obsolescence without regular updates and visible enforcement mechanisms. The Service Manual found its strengths in reflecting professional communities drawn from across the DDaT Professions, and as a consequence, being a “living document” but in many ways this is no longer the case, raising questions about whether the Manual, and the Standard, continue to be relevant and accurate in response to developing wisdom or in the face of new and emerging challenges.

Transparency and accountability

Transparency and accountability are foundational principles in building public trust in digital government. While the UK has a history of pioneering initiatives in these areas, recent years have seen an erosion of key mechanisms, undermining confidence and reducing the effectiveness of oversight.

Historically, tools like the Performance Platform and the Service Manual exemplified transparency by providing actionable insights into government performance and best practices for service delivery. The Performance Platform offered real-time performance data for public services, enabling scrutiny and accountability, while the Service Manual served as a dynamic, evolving guide for user-centred digital transformation.

However, both tools have suffered from neglect. The Performance Platform has been retired, leaving a vacuum in performance visibility. Similarly, the Service Manual has not kept pace with developments, raising concerns about its relevance and accuracy in addressing emerging challenges. This decline represents a missed opportunity to maintain public engagement and ensure transparency in government operations.

The UK’s spend controls, introduced in 2013 by GDS, were initially powerful tools for enforcing standards and preventing waste. The original model had clear thresholds and a structured approval process but also limitations, leading to inconsistent oversight. Departments were required to engage regardless of internal maturity, which sometimes resulted in over-centralization. While earned autonomy aims to address this, it has diluted central accountability, creating governance gaps.

Similarly, tools such as the Digital Assessment Framework and the Algorithmic Transparency Recording Standard, introduced by the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO), aim to ensure quality and compliance. However, their visibility and enforcement remain limited, reducing their impact. Without robust accountability mechanisms, frameworks risk becoming procedural exercises rather than drivers of meaningful adherence to standards.

Governance fragmentation continues to undermine transparency and accountability. While the CDDO is tasked with leading cross-government strategies, it struggles to assert authority consistently. The disconnect with international bodies, such as the OECD’s Digital Government and Data Unit, further highlights missed opportunities for learning and collaboration.

The recent amalgamation of digital functions under the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology (DSIT) presents an opportunity to resolve some of these challenges. However, the success of this restructuring will depend on DSIT’s ability to balance collaboration with authoritative oversight and navigate departmental silos.

1. A fuller discussion of the pros, and cons, of the Performance Platform will be discussed in Chapter 4 (2 minutes to read) ↩︎