Better Digital Government: Obstacles and Vision

BETTER DIGITAL GOVERNMENT: OBSTACLES AND VISION Discussion paper This short document seeks to lay out a vision and principles for the UK’s digital government work. It is a draft by the Commission for Smart Government spanning our Technology and Data workstreams, and is intended to elicit feedback and input from the range of stakeholders inside and outside of government. It is deliberately an opera aperta, a work in progress.

This document was developed by the following group of Commissioners leading on the Commission's Technology and Data workstreams: Daniel Korski, Husayn Kassai, Phaedra Chrousos, Jacky Wright, Verity Harding and Mark Rowley

October 2020

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THE COMMISSION FOR SMART GOVERNMENT The Commission for Smart Government is an independent initiative to consider how to make public administration more effective. The Commission is a project of GovernUp, which is an independent, non-party research initiative that offers evidenced-based solutions for all political parties to adopt. This is the first of a series of discussion documents that will address the 12 areas of focus covered by the Commission. The 12 workstreams are: Assessment

What have been the standout successes and failures of recent public administrations, and what can we learn from them?

Best Practice

What are the examples of best practice in the UK and around the world from which we can learn?

Talent & Competence

How do we equip civil servants with better skills, recruit and remunerate to attract the best and incentivise success, and share knowledge?

Project Management

How do we ensure officials have sufficient commercial and project management experience to commission and manage big projects successfully?

How do we ensure stronger financial management, strip out cost and drive efficiency?

Finance Structures Devolution Accountability

How should we improve the current Whitehall structure, with its small yet overlapping centre and siloed departments, to make decision-making more effective and less bureaucratic?

To what extent should we devolve more power and decision-making to local bodies, and how can this be achieved while maintaining a proper role for the UK Government?

How can we make the system, including ministers and civil servants, as well as agencies, regulators and arms-length bodies, more accountable?

Technology

How can we deploy technology more effectively and rapidly to improve public services?

Data

How can we ensure that decisions are evidence-based and informed by data?

Ministers

How can we make ministers and advisers more effective in their jobs?

Appointments

How can we ensure that the appointments system attracts the best and aligns with the Government’s priorities?

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COMMISSIONERS Michael Bichard

Deborah Cadman Camilla Cavendish Suma Chakrabarti

Ian Cheshire Phaedra Chrousos Chris Deverell Simone Finn Jayne-Ann Gadhia Martin Gilbert Verity Harding Nick Herbert Margaret Hodge Husayn Kassai Daniel Korski Paul Marshall John Nash Mark Rowley Gisela Stuart Jacky Wright

Lord Bichard KCB is a crossbench peer in the House of Lords and chair of the National Audit Office. He was formerly Permanent Secretary at the Department for Education and the first Director of the Institute for Government.

Deborah Cadman OBE is Chief Executive of the West Midlands Combined Authority.

Baroness Cavendish of Little Venice is a former Head of the Number 10 Policy Unit.

Sir Suma Chakrabarti KCB was until recently the President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. He was formerly Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Justice and the Department for International Development.

Sir Ian Cheshire is the Chairman of Barclays UK plc. He was formerly the Government Lead Non-Executive Director.

Phaedra Chrousos is the Chief Strategy Officer for Libra Group and a former commissioner for the US Technology and Transformation Service.

General Sir Chris Deverell KCB MBE is the former Commander of UK Joint Forces Command.

Baroness Finn is a Non-Executive Director at the Cabinet Office and a former government adviser on civil service reform.

Dame Jayne-Anne Gadhia DBE FRSE is a businesswoman and the founder and Executive Chair of the start-up Snoop.

Martin Gilbert is the Chairman of Revolut and the co-founder and former CEO of Aberdeen Asset Management.

Verity Harding is a Visiting Fellow at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, Cambridge University, where she is on secondment from her role as Global Head of Policy and Partnerships at DeepMind.

Lord Herbert of South Downs CBE PC (Chair) is a former Conservative minister.

Rt Hon Dame Margaret Hodge DBE MP is a Labour Member of Parliament, a former minister, and the former Chair of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee.

Husayn Kassai is the co-founder and CEO of Onfido.

Daniel Korski is the co-founder and CEO of PUBLIC and a former Deputy Head of the Number 10 Policy Unit.

Sir Paul Marshall is Chair and Chief Investment Officer of Marshall Wace LLP and a former Lead Non-Executive Director at the Department for Education.

Lord Nash is a businessman and Government Lead Non-Executive Director. He is a former minister.

Sir Mark Rowley QPM is a former Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston PC is Lead Non-Executive Director at the Cabinet Office and a former Labour MP and minister.

Jacky Wright is the Chief Digital Officer for Microsoft US.

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Contents

A record of success.......................................................................................................... 5 Changing demands........................................................................................................... 5 Back-office let down......................................................................................................... 8 Vision and principles...................................................................................................... 10 Blockages to change....................................................................................................... 12

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A record of success The UK’s history of digital innovation, from the earliest days of computing to the development of the World Wide Web, is profound. Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, Kathleen Booth, Steve Shirley, Tim Berners-Lee - the history of modern computing can hardly be written without reference to the names of many great British inventors, entrepreneurs, institutions and teams.

Today, this history translates into a world-leading digital economy. It has also translated into many digitally-powered public services. The UK started digitising public services in earnest in the 1990s, but arguably took the most important steps in the 2010s. The creation of GDS, Gov.UK, GovNotify, the Service Standard - to name but a few innovations - were for many years global exemplars. The Government’s commitment to open working - sharing code and working with others - have been widely admired and copied. There is a reason many government websites across the world look a bit like the UK Government website. As Martha Lane Fox, who conceived of the Government Digital Service (GDS), said: the organisation was in a “go fast” mode in its early years in order to show departments “what's possible”.1 Away from the centre, digital change moved post-haste: the NHS’s app store; Scotland’s CivTech programme; West Midlands police transformation; the use of road sensors by Highways England.

Councils like Camden have set up personal accounts for residents and businesses to pay their taxes; indeed, many local councils have now adopted a Local Digital Declaration to upgrade their digital offering. The NHS’s 111 services and Universal Credit have also stood the ongoing COVID-19 test, delivering excellent, digitally-enabled critical services. Examples abound across the public sector, showcasing how digital transformation has moved to the core of service delivery for almost every governmental agency, body or department. Funds for digital services have also steadily increased since 2010.

Changing demands But over these last 10 years, both technology and citizen expectations have changed in profound ways. In 2010, robotic process automation was seen as the cutting edge of innovation in public services; today, Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence can perform functions that go far beyond what was - or indeed is currently being - contemplated. What was cutting edge before, is no longer adequate. What was acceptable before, is more contentious today.

1 ‘Martha Lane Fox: GDS viewed with suspicion by civil servants’, Matt Foster and Seb Whale, PublicTechnology.net, 20 May 2016 The Commission for Smart Government is powered by GovernUp, an initiative of The Project for Modern Democracy, a company limited by guarantee no. 8472163 and a registered charity in England and Wales no. 1154924. Privacy Notice.

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There remains, for example, concern about government use of personal data. After this summer’s A-Level results, there is also new awareness amongst the wider population about the problems with algorithmic decision-making. But at the same time, citizens want the services they deal with to be as easy and user-friendly as Amazon, Deliveroo and Google. As the founders of GDS have noted: “Organisations that grew up on the web have changed our attitude to the services we rely on every day. We expect them to work, be simple, cheap or free.”2 Or as Liam Maxwell, the Government’s former CTO, put it: “Users need services that are genuinely agile and responsive to changing needs”3.

Citizens also understandably want less bureaucracy and complication when engaging with the Government online. HMRC, NHS, Home Office and many other departments require separate ID and separate log-ins. People are being made to start from the beginning when they engage different parts of government - there are over 200 transactional services on GOV.UK. All of them collect data, and over 100 have some kind of an account. Few of them talk to each other.

If Google asked customers to set up a new account each time they wanted to buy a new product - each time providing their personal data - this would rightly be seen as poor service.

And yet it is synonymous with how the Government provides public services today. This is not a surprise. Government evolved before the internet, “creating a series of largely stand-alone organisational silos without any ‘shared plumbing’ – or digital infrastructure – to support functions and services common to all.”4 But what was acceptable then is not anymore.

The UK is particularly bad at pre-filling forms for citizens with data that is already known to the public administration. In Europe only three countries are seen as worse: Montenegro, Switzerland and Romania. Greece used to be worse but has improved in the last few years to surpass the UK in the league table. 5 Many services cannot be done completely online and applications routinely demand hard copies of supporting documentation to be printed and signed; many online forms are still very complex and written in hard-to-understand bureaucratic language, much as the paper versions they are meant to replace. The contrast to the Nordic and Baltic countries is stark. 6 In Sweden 2 Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery, Andrew Greenway, Ben Terrett, Mike Bracken, Tom Loosemore, London Publishing Partnership, 2018, London

3 ‘Rebalancing technology across government’, Liam Maxwell, 21 May 2013, https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/05/21/rebalancing-techacross-gov/ 4 ‘Real digital modernisation – a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the new UK government’ Mark Thompson, Computer Weekly, 21 January 2020 5 ‘Digital Public Services: Europe's Digital Progress Report’ 2017 6 eGovernment Benchmark 2020 Insight Report, European Commission, 23 September 2020 The Commission for Smart Government is powered by GovernUp, an initiative of The Project for Modern Democracy, a company limited by guarantee no. 8472163 and a registered charity in England and Wales no. 1154924. Privacy Notice.

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for example, the Swedish Board of Agriculture and Swedish Customs offer a single window solution for applying to export refunds and declaring exports. Two agencies are responsible for the work but a single point of entry integrated with the back-office processes of both agencies offer citizens a seamless experience.

Estonia’s Chief Information Officer Siim Sikutt lays out the philosophy that has steered his and other Nordic and Baltic countries’ digital work: “We have the aim that whatever happens in life, there should be one interaction, regardless of the different government agencies involved.”7 Estonia and Finland have even developed a joint data exchange platform to allow databases in both countries to interface, assist with cross-border services, and make e-services accessible to both Estonian and Finnish citizens.

Meanwhile, in the UK many government websites still fail and the message that you will often get is “HTTP Error 404. The requested resource is not found”. That is hardly a reassuring message - but not a unique one; up to 60 per cent of the cost of public services is “spent on service failure.”8 While other governments like Estonia and Denmark have gone far to help government bodies predict problems in order to tailor proactive interactions, the U.K. experience is still limited.

Data is still not sufficiently open; the UK was recently given a below average rating of 60 per cent compared with 30 other European countries. 9 In that light, the commitment in the Government’s new National Data Strategy to “undertake an ambitious and radical transformation of its own approach”, is very welcome - but there is still a long road ahead.

The standard of digital services also varies greatly across the country; if you live in the London borough of Camden you can access most services online; in Coventry it is only around 35 per cent. Argyll & Bute, Moray, Orkney and the Shetland Islands have some of the slowest broadband in the UK, meaning that access to public services are more difficult.

The UK also lags behind in offering key enablers for digital services such as a government-issued document for online identification and authentication 10; base registries to automatically validate or retrieve data related to individuals or businesses; and digital post services that allow people to receive government communications digitally - something that Denmark introduced nineteen years ago. A single account or even a government-issued ID does not of itself provide cross-government interoperability. As technologist-cum-scholar Richard 7 ‘CIO Interview: Siim Sikkut, Estonian government CIO’, ComputerWeekly, Karl Flinders, 14 February 2020 8 Good Services: Decoding the Mystery of What Makes a Good Service, Louise Downe, BIS Publishers, 3 March 2020, London 9 ‘Open Data Maturity Report 2019’, Marit Blank, Capgemini Invent/European Data Portal, December 2019 10 ‘Digital Identity: The Missing Piece of the Government’s Exit Strategy’, Andrew Bennet, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, 9 June 2020 The Commission for Smart Government is powered by GovernUp, an initiative of The Project for Modern Democracy, a company limited by guarantee no. 8472163 and a registered charity in England and Wales no. 1154924. Privacy Notice.

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Pope says: “that comes from a combination of standards, common data exchange systems and data infrastructure.”11 But it is also hard to imagine an easier-to-use system without some kind of ID and a single account.

Back-office let down In addition to these problems with citizen-facing aspects of digital services the Government is lagging behind in how it uses technology to transform internal processes - to better operate the system of government. The Government introduced its ‘Cloud First’ policy back in 2013, but progress to date has been a mixed bag, and many departments and agencies are still in early stages of adoption. A study from 2018 showed that only 30 per cent of NHS trusts had adopted any level of public cloud, while the figure for central Government was 61 per cent. 12 The story is better in local government, where adoption of cloud storage stood at 62 per cent that year too, up from 52 per cent in 2016.13 But that is still too low.

The Government still does not buy digital products and services sufficiently well, having allowed itself to be captured by a small number of legacy providers who in many cases dictate the terms of the market, squeezing out smaller and more innovative firms. 14 Many great initiatives have been rolled out, perhaps the best known being the G Cloud procurement portal and the lesser-known Sparks framework. Yet there is clearly a long way to go. The primary care IT market, for example, is dominated by two companies and the standards expected of this market by the NHS seems tailor-made for these two dominant suppliers rather than the promotion of a dynamic market open to new innovative competitors.

An analysis of 2,000 IT and software contracts of 42 police forces, shows that 67 per cent of contract spend goes to the top 10 suppliers, while 79 per cent goes to the top 20 suppliers. In fact, in a sample of contracts, over 27 per cent of spend went to a single supplier.15 Tanya Filer of Cambridge University argues that “Governments around the world recognise an urgent need to move away from expensive, bloated IT contracts, and to serve citizens with greater efficiency and accountability.16 But there is still a code-shaped gap between recognition and action.

11 Correspondence with the Commision, 15 October 2020 12 ‘Cloud Adoption in the U.K. Public Sector is Not Matching the Government’s Cloud First Policy’, White Paper, Solarwinds, 2018 13 ‘The cloud community: adoption of the cloud in local government’, Sharon Hobson, 30 May 2019, PublicTechnology.net

14 ‘Buying into the future: How to Deliver Innovation Through Public Procurement’, Johnny Hugill and Ramraj Puvinathan, PUBLIC, 1 August 2019 15 ‘PoliceTech Pioneers: How new technology startups are set to transform policing’, Blair Gibbs and Johnny Hugill, PUBLIC, 2018 16 ‘Thinking about GovTech: A brief guide for policymakers’, Tanya Filer, Bennett Institute for Public Policy, 2019 The Commission for Smart Government is powered by GovernUp, an initiative of The Project for Modern Democracy, a company limited by guarantee no. 8472163 and a registered charity in England and Wales no. 1154924. Privacy Notice.

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This has been shown most recently in the Government’s reliance on large IT consultants to deliver Test and Trace, its willingness to continue to buy large systems, such as HMRC’s five-year £169m contract with Fujitsu for its VME platform, but also in the NHS’s stated interest in buying a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution for the whole of the NHS - a project of monstrous complexity with real financial, operational and competitive risks.17 Progress is also needed in the requirements placed on contractors. Application programming interfaces (APIs) are rarely open and are not mandated in public contracts despite this being at the heart of Martha Lane Fox’s recommendations that helped create GDS in 2011. That means it is hard for organisations, appropriately accredited, for example to call on secondary care APIs which would allow GPs to receive health record updates from doctors, oncologists and hospital surgeons and hospitals to receive updates about patients from GPs - something that is common in most other European countries.

Questions about what digital products the government should buy, what it should build itself and who owns any commercial upside and intellectual property (IP) from government-run digital projects also remain largely unanswered. Indeed, different departments often have different ways of dealing with these questions; sometimes different parts of the NHS will even demand different things.

Too often digital tools in government are simply overlain a pre-digital process or service rather than services being re-thought anew with the digital possibilities in mind. In the private sector, digital is no longer an add-on or a new channel but a toolbox and mindset to rethink services; in government it often remains just a channel. Part of the problem is the low levels of “TQ” - technical intelligence - across government. Too few people, especially at senior and middle levels, do not know enough about technology, its benefits and its problems.

Another key problem is that there are currently no Government-issued metrics to measure the progress of government digitisation - something the Government itself admitted would be useful in response to a recent House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee inquiry.18 Whether metrics should be specific, for example departmental savings or services digitised or broad, such as the overall reduction in total administrative burdens, is secondary.19 Today nothing exists.

17 See the tender here: https://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:486717-2020:TEXT:EN:HTML&src=0 18 Government Response to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee report, Digital Government, 30 September 2019.

19 ‘The UK’s digital strategy should be the wholesale elimination of administrative burden’, Richard Pope, 25 June 2020 https://richardpope.org/blog/2020/06/25/the-elimination-of-administrative-burden/ The Commission for Smart Government is powered by GovernUp, an initiative of The Project for Modern Democracy, a company limited by guarantee no. 8472163 and a registered charity in England and Wales no. 1154924. Privacy Notice.

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Finally, there is a real risk that trust in Government online services will decrease. A Chief Data Officer was meant to have been appointed “by 2020” but hasn't been. 20 High-profile controversies - like the use of an algorithm to grade A-levels or the NHS’ Test-and-Trace app risk clouding government successes such as the HMRC COVID-19 work. For the SelfEmployment Income Support Scheme, HMRC rapidly designed and delivered a scheme to accurately determine the eligibility status of the entire self-employed population. The process included rapid ingestion of multiple and frequent complex data sources, the modelling of eligibility and the generation of outputs to feed the contact strategy; the live digital service; and the internal user interface. It all worked brilliantly. But when digital services work, nobody pays attention; when they fail to live up to expectations, everyone notices.

In the coming period, the Government must reboot its digital efforts, ensuring that the new technologies available are used smartly to improve public services and as such help to prepare the UK for the post-Brexit, post COVID-19 future. The OECD rated the UK the second best in its 2019 Digital Government Index 21, only after South Korea. But the United Nations ranked the UK only 7th in its survey of all countries’ digital efforts, down from 4th in 2018 and 3rd in 2012.22 The conclusion: the UK is coming from a great place but COVID-19 has further showcased the limits of public digitisation and underscored the importance of improvement. As the Government's National Data Strategy says, “we have a duty to do more.” We agree.

Vision and principles The first step is, in a sense, to take a step back - and to re-found the government’s digital efforts in a number of key principles, to articulate what the purpose of digitising public services is.

We think digital services should be guided by a number of key principles.

We need digitisation to both deliver the rapid transformation of public services that citizens have witnessed in the private sector when it comes to quality/cost/accessibility and also strengthen the social contract between government and its electorate - a greater and more difficult goal than faced by the private sector.

20 Ibid 21 OECD Digital Government Index: 2019, OECD Policy Papers on Public Governance No. 3, Barbara Ubaldi, Felipe GonzálezZapata & Mariane Piccinin Barbieri, October 2020 22 United Nations eGovernment surveys, 2020, 2018 and 2012, https://www.un.org/development/desa/publications/publication/2020-united-nations-e-government-survey The Commission for Smart Government is powered by GovernUp, an initiative of The Project for Modern Democracy, a company limited by guarantee no. 8472163 and a registered charity in England and Wales no. 1154924. Privacy Notice.

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Services need to strengthen popular faith in the UK’s democratic institutions, increase trust in government and reinforce the contract between the state and citizens.

This might sound grandiose, but the digitisation of public services is not just a practical step, a tool, the application of which is neutral. Digitised services can have a negative impact on the way people perceive governments; ideally, however, the digitisation of services should strive to deliver a positive effect not simply on the issue at hand, be it tax records or vehicle licences, but more broadly, in terms of trust in government and strengthening of society.

As technology gathers pace and more tasks can be automated and more algorithmic decisionmaking becomes possible, this becomes even more important.

The medical profession is guided by the Hippocratic Oath: “Do no harm”. The digitisation of public services might consider its own lodestar. The Government needs to think about how the service or product being developed and introduced will not just solve a problem, will not just avoid doing harm, but actually will help those in greatest need and strengthen society more broadly.

Guided by this overarching principle, digital services should follow a number of additional tenets, including: ● ● ● ● ●

Designing for users’ privacy, technical security, and data integrity; Focusing relentlessly on the users’ need and feedback; Adopting a ‘test and learn’ approach to digital services; Setting clear and open targets for success; Working in the open, ideally auditably and under clear governance arrangements.

This list should not come as a surprise to anyone. For digital work inside government is already meant to follow these or very similar principles. GOV.UK has lots of guidance on building and maintaining digital services, including the Service Manual, Design Principles, the Technology Code of Practice and the Digital Service Standard. The NHS Digital Service Manual talks of the need to “Put people at the heart of everything you do.” Most government departments now refer back to GDS standards and have eliminated stand-alone guidance.

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Blockages to change However, the question is: if these principles are well known, why does the government still fail in the ways that it does? We think a number of key barriers obstruct adherence to these principles and so undermine delivery, including: ● Inadequate leadership and decisions both at political and officials levels which over the last few years have downgraded the importance of digital government; ● Poor governance, which means a lack of clarity about responsibilities for digitally-enabled services and few if any avenues for redress (by citizens) when things go wrong; ● An outdated procurement system and a commercial function which is out of sync with digital innovation, helping to lock in over-priced incumbent venders or creating fake markets that drive price up and delivery down; ● Limited willingness to genuinely engage citizens and stakeholders in the development of new systems, in contrast to the user obsession of Amazon, Google and Apple; ● A structure of public expenditure, overseen by HMT, which restricts the transfer of planned capital expenditure for digital technology to operating spend and fails to account for the cost of legacy IT systems and contracts, thus for example limiting the migration to cloud architecture, critical to the delivery of modern services; ● Low levels of digital skills at all levels of public administration, from Ministers and Permanent Secretaries to middle and junior officials, and limited access to high-quality training; ● An organisational culture which inadequately balances risk and innovation, ensuring that short-term risks are overpriced and long-term risks (especially of the lack of innovation) are underpriced; and ● A legacy of technical debt and an unwillingness to make difficult and costly choices to upgrade key systems from Home Office through Ministry of Justice to the NHS; These obstacles are not necessarily all present all the time in every department and agency.

There has been real progress to overcome many of these in different parts of government and ambitious plans are afoot for further reform. But it is hard to think of parts of the U.K. administration - whether central, devolved, local or arms-length - which is not held back by one or several of these obstacles. Overcoming these will therefore be critical to ensuring that technology can improve public services across the U.K. A lot of work is already being done to address many of these obstacles but it is clear a concerted effort is required.

The Commission for Smarter Government is eliciting feedback on the ideas and analysis set out in this document. We then intend to incorporate your feedback and offer specific The Commission for Smart Government is powered by GovernUp, an initiative of The Project for Modern Democracy, a company limited by guarantee no. 8472163 and a registered charity in England and Wales no. 1154924. Privacy Notice.

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recommendations for change. Please share any feedback, comments or suggestions to commission@governsmarter.org

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