Government is a concept almost too big for one word. When we talk about ‘the government’ we could mean the executive – the group of politicians in power today – or we could be talking about the much larger apparatus of state, all the things that keep the country ticking along, including the public services we use every day. While the party in power might feature heavily in the news cycle, there is strong evidence that the actual experience of using government services shapes people’s trust in public institutions far more.
In the last two decades, digital tech has transformed the way individuals interact with organisations. This began with the famously ‘disruptive’ startups that worked out how to serve customers what they want quicker, and often at lower cost, than larger, better-resourced competitors. With lumbering government departments providing an ever more stark contrast, and in the wake of an epic failure of a £10bn IT deployment, the UK created the Government Digital Service (GDS). The team started by replacing thousands of separate department websites with “GOV.UK”, a ‘single source of truth’, recognising that citizens don’t particularly care which department they need to interact with, they just need to get something done. To ensure consistency, usability and accessibility across government services, GDS created an award-winning Design System and style guide, while the Service Standard (against which all services are assessed before going live) sees that they are built and run effectively and cost-efficiently. Data reporting requirements embedded in the Standard mean service providers across the government can be held to account for the value they provide.
Today things are evolving further, as the vision of ‘Government as Platform’ comes to life. In this paradigm, components common to many services – such as payments, notifications and login – are managed and hosted centrally, because they are useful to many departments. This reduces overall costs, because providers only need to create unique parts of their service, but it requires changes to organisational design and budgeting habits of government to build and maintain this as enabling infrastructure. Luckily we now have a government willing to make this happen.
What this means is that we are moving to a future where 100% of our interactions with the state are conducted digitally. This is important, not least because an effective digital government is an enabler of economic growth. State-backed credentials enable private sector business, by allowing people to verify things like identity, ownership and competency easily. The GOV.UK wallet, to be launched later this year, will hold digital versions of Government-backed ID and other documents. By creating secure digital processes to verify these trusted credentials instantly, the government is unlocking innovation and reducing overheads for private enterprise as well as making life easier for itself. There is evidence that this kind of public digital infrastructure unlocks private sector growth from examples around the world - most famously in India and Estonia.
(In point of fact, Estonia achieved a fully digitised government a few months ago. The UK, though, has a 50x larger population, an economy almost 100x bigger, and a much older and more complex civil service. Estonia’s approach was also technically easier as it hangs off the backbone of a state ID system, which the UK does not have. Also it’s not a race, guys, calm down.)
By contrast with this positive progress, we now also see a cautionary tale playing out in the USA. There, a fragmented landscape of federal, state, and local government systems, each with its own inconsistent digital interfaces and processes, has created a public sector that often feels inefficient, slow, and difficult to navigate. Some of these paper-based, multi-step, circuitous processes could have been intentionally designed to frustrate their users. It’s easy to see how individual exasperation, and lack of political will or ability to change things for the better, translates into dissatisfaction with the democratic process. This dysfunction has been exploited by those on the right, fuelling an anti-government narrative that has led to DOGE torching critical digital infrastructure along with everything else. When people feel like the government doesn’t work for them, they are far more willing to cheer on those who promise to burn it all down.
The urgent purpose of implementing a digital government, then, is not just to provide high quality services that meet user needs. It’s not just to create a platform of modular components to unlock further efficiencies and enable wider adoption. Today, these are table-stakes. Services also need to be seen to be fair, responsive and efficient. They need to feel like they’re a good use of resources.
There’s a good argument here, which Richard Pope makes in Platformland, for public services not to be completely ‘seamless’. Seamless is useful if you want people to feel detached (Amazon, for example, doesn’t want you to think about the people who work in its fulfilment centres). In some public sector cases, instead of hiding all the hard work and complexity behind a Wizard of Oz style screen, you want the user to have some information or updates about the work being done on their behalf: this helps users empathise with the people doing that work - and vice versa. The goal here should be to elicit a sense of psychological ownership by citizens over our public services. Going further, we should consider how to design services to be actively participatory, and give users a voice in how the service is operates and evolves.
Digital services have become fundamental to the fabric of public life. But they need to be designed with intent. They should reveal the logic behind them, and make the system legible, not invisible. For citizens to feel trust in the system, they need to feel like the system understands them and works for them. If we get this right, we don’t just make better services – we build a stronger democracy, and a more stable and prosperous society.