Overview of Recommendations

Estimated read time: 9 minutes

The UK’s journey towards digital government has been one of both remarkable achievements and significant challenges. Across this review, there’s been an exploration of the contextual factors influencing digital transformation, the policy levers available, the importance of digital talent, proactive service design, and the move towards a data-driven public sector.

Throughout, a consistent theme emerges: the need for cohesive leadership, cultural change, and an unwavering focus on user-centred approaches. The following is a restatement of the key recommendations from each chapter.

Chapter 1: Running digital government well

Digital government needs clear leadership and vision across all levels: Effective leadership remains the cornerstone of digital transformation. Ministers and civil service leaders must articulate a consistent and compelling vision for digital government, ensuring alignment across all tiers. This vision should provide clear goals and foster a shared sense of purpose. Political leadership, in particular, needs to demonstrate a long-term commitment, while ministerial teams in all departments should be equipped to act as enablers of this transformation.
Rebuild trust and capability at the centre: The central digital function must be revitalised, not as a controlling body but as a strategic enabler. It should set and enforce clear standards, provide guidance, and resolve systemic barriers. At the same time, departments must be empowered to innovate and take ownership of digital services tailored to their users’ needs. Striking this balance is critical to fostering trust between the centre and departments.
Legacy systems and approaches are still a problem: The government’s ability to deliver modern, user-centred services continues to be undermined by outdated systems, problematic contracts and fragmented practices. Addressing these foundational issues must remain a priority. The emphasis should be on interoperability, replacing legacy systems where necessary, and ensuring that data flows seamlessly across government to support effective decision-making.
Foster collaboration and reduce duplication: Departmental silos remain a significant obstacle, leading to unnecessary duplication and inefficiencies. A systematic approach to collaboration—both within and between departments—is essential. Identify the right model for a successor to the Digital Leaders network or cross-government Communities of Practice to share learning, support interoperable design, and build joint ownership of cross-departmental initiatives.
Simplify and modernise management tools: Adapt business case processes and financial mechanisms so that they do not prevent effective agile delivery and iterative development. Traditional, rigid frameworks must give way to more flexible and responsive methodologies that align with the dynamic nature of service delivery today.
Restore openness and transparency: Recommit to the principle of “Make Things Open, It Makes Them Better.” Create opportunities for people to work transparently and commit to greater transparency in procurement, service assessments, spend controls, performance data, lessons learned, and overall government performance. Openness not only drives improvement, it builds trust with the public.
Update regulations and standards: Invest in keeping resources like the Service Manual current, reflecting best practices, lessons learned, technological advancements and the impact of the Digital Strategy Missions. The guiding regulations and standards should enable innovation, not hinder it.

Chapter 2: A workforce for digital transformation

Cultivate supportive cultures: Encourage an environment where experimentation and learning are normalised, and where teams feel safe to propose innovative ideas. Recognise that trust and psychological safety are essential ingredients for sustained improvement. Leaders should publicly acknowledge that not every initiative will succeed immediately, and that learning from setbacks is part of building a genuinely digital state.
Equip everyone with digital skills: Move beyond the notion that digital capability resides only in specialised roles. Treat digital, data, and technology understanding as core competencies that underpin policy, operations, and service delivery. Provide continuous learning opportunities that adapt to changing technologies and user expectations, ensuring that all public servants can meaningfully engage with digital tools and data-driven insights.
Break down silos and foster collaboration: Enable genuine multi-disciplinary teamwork by addressing structural barriers that keep expertise isolated. Adapt governance, procurement, and funding models to support iterative delivery and ongoing user feedback. Ensure that “multi-disciplinary” means more than “multi-digital-disciplinary” and works closely with diverse professions—from policy and legal advisers, to frontline staff and commercial experts—so that services reflect the full range of skills and perspectives needed to meet user needs.
Invest in professional development and Communities of Practice: Restore and enhance dedicated programmes for learning, such as a reinvigorated Digital Academy or a more thoughtfully curated Government Campus. Offer opportunities for skill-building that go beyond traditional classroom settings. Commit to supporting Communities of Practice with dedicated leadership roles, modest budgets, and recognition of participation as a valued contribution to public service. This will help ensure that digital literacy, user-centred thinking, and collective problem-solving become ingrained rather than sporadic.
Engage political leaders in digital transformation: Support political leaders in developing a more profound understanding of digital government principles and methods. Stable leadership support—grounded in a long-term vision that spans electoral cycles—can help rebuild confidence and provide the conditions under which innovation can thrive. By equipping elected and appointed leaders with these insights, the government can align strategic priorities more closely with the practices and tools needed to deliver modern, user-focused services.
Reinforce an innovation mindset through incentives and accountability: Adjust performance metrics and procurement rules to reward adaptation, iteration, and user-centred outcomes rather than adherence to rigid, pre-defined plans. Recognise and celebrate incremental improvements, and show how learning from experimentation can lead to better results over time. This shift, supported by both political will and managerial determination, can re-establish the pioneering ethos that once characterised the UK’s digital journey.

Chapter 3: Designing and delivering public services

Reimagine the UK’s physical infrastructure for public services: Recognise the value of in-person services and integrate them with digital offerings. It’s essential to ensure services are accessible to all, regardless of digital capability. Explore creating “GOV.UK on the High Street” to blend access to digital services with human support for those who need it.
A new digital inclusion strategy, because digital services must include everyone: Digital government can and must deliver services which can be used by everyone, regardless of the constraints they face. This means actively and ceaselessly working to bridge digital divides and means revitalising the approach to digital inclusion, addressing the significant gap left since 2014. This strategy should cover investment in infrastructure, education, and support for those who are digitally excluded, ensuring that everyone, regardless of location or circumstance, can access and benefit from transformed services.
Reset the conversation about digital identity: A unified, cross-sectoral, trusted digital identity system is essential for seamless, proactive service delivery. The UK should coordinate efforts across government, the NHS, and the private sector to create a coherent solution that will work both online and offline, even if it requires resetting expectations and public discourse. This must ensure accessibility for all, including those with limited digital confidence, while rebuilding public trust in identity systems. Without this, fragmented approaches will continue to block progress on joined-up services. The value of effectively addressing digital identity will be significant, not just for public sector productivity or economic growth but for the opportunities it provides to offer truly proactive and personalised services to users.
Keep investing in common tools and shared services: Shared services should be the norm, not the exception. Extend the availability of common components across all tiers and elements of the public sector. Avoid duplication, learn from past failures, and focus on delivering value quickly and effectively, drawing on the established user research into the needs of teams, especially in the long tail.
Empower local innovation with central support: Local government delivers critical frontline services but lacks the digital resources of central departments. A structured support mechanism—whether that is found in an explicit entity called a Local Government Digital Service or another model—should provide shared tools, funding, and expertise, designed in collaboration with councils. This would enable local innovation while reducing duplication and inefficiencies across the sector.
Reform procurement: Procurement must regain the urgency of addressing rigid, monolithic contracts to enable more flexible, iterative delivery. Breaking down procurements into smaller, user-focused components will encourage innovation, competition, and better outcomes. Commercial frameworks should reward collaboration and open standards rather than locking services into outdated approaches. A smarter procurement strategy will ensure government gets better value and continuously improving digital services.

Chapter 4: Data and AI (work in progress)

Establish clear strategic leadership and vision for good use of data: Leaders must champion the transformative power of data and align efforts across government. Develop cohesive data strategies that inspire and enable effective action.
Revamp data infrastructure and architecture: The country’s data foundations are broken or absent. Invest boldly in infrastructure like the National Data Library to support data sharing and interoperability in order to enable innovation, efficiency and transformed outcomes.
Strengthen service performance reporting and transparency: A unified, open platform for service performance data would restore transparency and drive better decision-making. Consistently publishing usage, completion rates, and satisfaction scores will allow for more targeted improvements and build public trust. Departments should integrate meaningful, user-focused metrics into daily operations rather than treating reporting as a separate exercise. Clear, accessible data will empower teams to iterate effectively and deliver genuinely user-centred services.
Recommit to open government data: Open data drives better, clearer and cheaper decisions and builds trust. It should be a default, not an exception. Revitalise transparency initiatives to rebuild trust and foster citizen engagement.
Apply data effectively: Data can and should inform every stage of the policy and service delivery cycle. Use data proactively for anticipation, delivery, and evaluation, fostering a culture of continuous improvement based on evidence.
Prioritise ethics, privacy, transparency, and security and be uncompromising in the commitment to them, in order to build and maintain public trust. Data must be handled responsibly to earn the confidence of citizens.
Build tactical capacities: There is a need to democratise data competence, making it a fundamental skill for everyone. Recognise and recruit the necessary skills, and embed them through open practice and communities.