Better Digital Government: Recommendations by p4md

BETTER DIGITAL GOVERNMENT: RECOMMENDATIONS Policy paper Following research and analysis across the Commission for Smart Government’s Technology and Data workstreams, this paper presents the Commission’s programme of recommendations on Better Digital Government. 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

January 2021

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. 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?

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.

COMMISSIONERS Michael Bichard

Deborah Cadman Camilla Cavendish Suma Chakrabarti

Ian Cheshire Phaedra Chrousos Chris Deverell Simone Finn Jayne-Anne 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 CBE 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.

Contents

Executive Summary...........................................................................................................5 Breaking down silos ...........................................................................................................7 Real world impact ........................................................................................................... 10 Priority action ................................................................................................................. 12 Wider change .................................................................................................................. 13 Governance .............................................................................................................................. 13 Targets and Commitments .................................................................................................... 14 Leadership ................................................................................................................................ 14 Spending and future planning ................................................................................................. 15 Controls .................................................................................................................................... 16 Procurement ............................................................................................................................ 17 Registries .................................................................................................................................. 18 Transparency and Participation ............................................................................................. 18 Skills .......................................................................................................................................... 19 Data........................................................................................................................................... 20 Digital Identity ......................................................................................................................... 20 Union-wide infrastructure ...................................................................................................... 21

Executive Summary Digitally, the UK Government has fallen behind. It used to be a digital powerhouse, but nine years after the creation of the Government Digital Service (GDS), it isn't any longer. The rolling IT problems that the NHS has encountered during the pandemic – from the NHS app to the problems during the vaccine roll-out – show that digital underperformance has serious consequences for the quality of critical services and can lead to increased popular disaffection with government and politics. Good digital government can underpin recovery and renewal, and project confidence and momentum at home and overseas. That is why matters have to change. In this paper, we propose nearly 60 recommendations for the UK Government to enact urgent improvements. In seeking reform, it is easy to focus on the external interface of government – websites and apps, for example. Or to be enthused (or frightened by) the application of Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence to public service. But the change required today is much more comprehensive; Whitehall needs a digital reboot. Public services need to become intrinsically digital. That requires government to move all services to the cloud by 2023, urgently reform procurement of digital products, introduce a digital ID for everyone and make key decisions-makers – ministers and officials alike – more digitally literate. In order to move decisively towards this change, we recommend that: •

Departmental silos are broken down by handing a number of departmentally-run services to cross-cutting Digital Task Forces who will have the remit to design and deliver the services anew and mandate the changes needed to legacy systems.

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A new National Digital Council is created on par with the National Security Council to elevate digital issues to the top of the Government’s agenda.

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A new Department of Digital, Innovation and Technology is established from the different digital, innovation and science competencies of BEIS, DCMS, and the Cabinet Office.

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An Office for Digital Effectiveness is set up, much like the Office for Budget Responsibility, to measure the effectiveness of digital programmes in the public sector.

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The role of Government Chief Digital Officer is urgently filled and empowered to lead transformation including across departments, doubling as the Prime Minister’s Chief Technology Adviser.

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Set up a Digital Ombudsman to allow citizens and businesses an independent complaint handling service for complaints about digital public services.

Our longer list of recommendations cover reforms to governance, targets, leadership, delivery capability, spending, budget controls, procurement systems, registries, transparency frameworks, skills policy, data, digital ID and devolution. This is an ambitious and broad agenda which will require sustained focus and investment. We have written recommendations for Ministers, MPs and officials and divided our recommendations into those that will bring the UK on par with other comparable countries (*); those that will pull the UK ahead (**); and those that will make the UK a global leader (***). As the UK prepares for the post-Brexit, post-COVID-19 world, implementing these recommendations will, we believe, help the Government address the twin challenges that have been exposed in the last couple of years: the importance of improving public services, especially outside of large conurbations like London, Manchester, Edinburgh or Cardiff; and the need to position the UK globally in a competitive world where countries like China and Russia will use digital innovation, including in their public services, to gain comparative advantage.

Breaking down silos Technology provides an opportunity to deliver the rapid transformation of public services that citizens have witnessed in the private sector. Even more importantly, digitisation of public services can help strengthen the social contract between government and the electorate and help reinforce popular faith in the UK’s democratic institutions. We have seen over the last year of the COVID-19 pandemic how critical it is for the Government to have the very best technology at its disposal, and what happens when it does not. Box 1: Principles for digital government In our discussion paper we laid out a number of principles that we believe should guide digital services, including the importance of: • • • • •

Designing services 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.

Nothing in government works if it does not rest on the twin foundations of values or principles and strategy – what do you believe and what will you do to translate your beliefs into real-world action. Digitising public services is not – or at least should not be – any different. We laid out in our initial discussion paper – Better Digital Government: Obstacles and Vision – the principles that we think should guide the next phase of the Government’s digital transformation (See Box 1). The aim of the following recommendations is to re-organise the work of government so that it can more easily adopt these guidelines and take advantage of the opportunities offered by digital innovation – rather than only adding digital solutions to the existing system, which is so often the norm. What does this actually mean in practice? A rich debate has taken place among the ‘digerati’ – technology experts – about the right elements of an internet-era system for government, galvanised by US investor Tim O'Reilly talking about ‘Government-as-a-Platform’ ten years ago and the steps taken by the British, Estonian and French governments to realise this vision. At the time, the key task was to identify the lessons that governments could take from the success of computer platforms, as they tried to harness the power of technology to remake themselves. 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.

Today, the task is to learn from the experience that governments have garnered in their attempts over the last ten years to transfer these lessons. Some things have worked – others, frankly, have not. We laid out in our first discussion paper some of the challenges that the UK Government still faces. At the same time, the state of the art has also evolved. What companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook did ten years ago has also changed while new companies like ZenDesk, Stripe, Alibaba, Spotify, SpaceX, Netflix have offered new lessons. To us this means we should create a digital system of government that allows a move from centralised control over all public programmes to facilitating services through inter-connected networks of government departments and agencies and non-governmental entities. A system that is much more flexible, able to fund and scale successful initiatives quickly and change when circumstances or priorities change. A system of government transformed from being the only and direct service provider to the generator of public value, whether directly or indirectly. This will allow the Government to take advantage of a key strength: the emergence of the UK as a global GovTech hub with thousands of fast-innovating companies seeking to transform all sorts of public services. Charities too are digitising fast to help deliver services - to the homeless, jobless or ill. But for these digitally-enabled entities to be able to provide real value they need to be able to more easily plug solutions into government systems. In practice, this means creating a setup built around new cloud-enabled architecture with multiple micro-services (e.g. checking entitlement, taking payments, issuing licences). Think of a supermarket that sees its retail shops and its website as different channels but has merged its distribution and warehouses, because customers no longer care where goods are frozen, lorries drive from or where staff are employed. A common infrastructure, digital and non-digital, underpins many of a supermarket's channels and services. (See Box 2). It also means a motivated, skilled, funded and well-led workforce – no system, however well-structured, can deliver without the right people given the right powers, tools, funds and mission to deliver. This is true of digital programmes as any other programme. People matter. Additionally, it means a better model of public-private cooperation. The most important technology transformations in our world have not been deliberately initiated by governments but have in the main happened to governments. From personal computing to the smartphone, the changes have largely been delivered by the private sector and harnessed by the public sector afterwards.

The next step in the digital revolution will be the same. Governments must therefore be much better at knowing what to buy (and not to build themselves) and how to create truly competitive markets. Governments must become comfortable with buying data from private services (in-line with agreed standards) rather than building their own systems to process the data they want. For example, why does DEFRA need to build a digital grants system? The department should set the data standards and a price for the data and someone will create a digital interface that meets farmers’ needs far better than DEFRA will ever be able to do. If what they get isn’t any good, other firms will build something better. This kind of competitive, user-focused improvement requires a different set up for public-private co-operation than what exists today. It will require innovation within commercial approaches; the Government cannot keep buying digital solutions in line with rules and processes set in the 1950s and expect to end-up with cutting-edge digital innovation. Box 2: What is needed for reform •

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• • •

A common cloud infrastructure: On-demand computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, which do not require direct active management by the user nor on-premise assets; Registries: canonical lists of information - land registry, electoral roll etc - that are secure, trusted and used as the ultimate source of truth by multiple public facing services (e.g. land records, patient records etc.); Open standards: critical systems for example Electronic Health Records, that can interoperate to securely exchange information with other systems in standard formats; Shared components: activities like receiving payments, or creating an online form are solved once, across all parts of government; Open APIs: pieces of publicly documented business functionality with clear interfaces built as microservices on a shared cloud infrastructure; Rules around use: the framework under which the different parts of the system operate together are clearly documented and auditable.

The key benefits of pursuing this agenda is that it will allow public services to become: • •

More flexible to change, different circumstances and shifting political priorities – such as focusing on climate change or levelling-up; Able to make much better use of data, through supporting the safe and interoperable use of data across government and beyond, while building trust that data is used responsibly;

10 •

• •

Free of unnecessary duplication of activities as departments and layers of government develop, build and deliver fewer of the same services and systems, instead focusing on what is unique to their domain; Able to involve 3rd party contributors in service delivery in a way that is complementary to public services and allows citizens to access the services in the way that best suits them; Cheaper to design, test, operate and continuously improve.

This is what internet-era companies can do so well. There is no reason why governments should not aspire to be able to do so too, in service of their citizens.

Real world impact How does this matter in the real world? The ultimate reason for creating this model of government is that people’s lives do not align perfectly with the organisation of government – and never will. Nor does a business or a charity. A company in Leeds may need to register with Companies House, engage with UKEF to receive export credits, apply for grants to Leeds City Region LEP, be inspected by West Yorkshire Joint Services, be audited by HMRC and register with the Education and Skills Funding Agency. The experience of the company - or a person - in dealing with these different parts of the state should be as easy as if it was dealing with a single, inter-connected organisation. This will allow third parties, whether commercial organisations, charities or even just individuals – whether entrepreneurs or developers – to build new, complementary applications and services. The state is no longer the only organisation or even always the best placed organisation to deliver all services or to offer add-ons to existing services. People may for example want to get their driver’s license via a third party e.g. a smartphone or banking app. Oftentimes GovTech startups can help deliver many services more effectively. Take the example of drug rehabilitation. The state plays various roles in drug treatment, from funding programmes to acute care. However, the support people require is not only the kind that the state offers; many other organisations and activities often have a role to play to help people overcome addiction – from sports activities and peer support to community work and education. At present, there is no system that ties these together, that easily ensures records are accessed by different parties and where third parties, for example a shelter, can – within the bounds of law, ethics and relevance – ensure that their contribution to a person’s rehabilitation

is part of, and calibrated to support, a broader effort. Most importantly, a more integrated system would help to empower the citizen to autonomously take charge of their own journey. That is what a new digitally-enabled system has to be able to deliver. This does not mean creating a new data silo about drug treatment users. An approach based on microservices and trusted and open governance means that it becomes possible to join data together for services as necessary, and to do so safely. Of course, shifting this kind of reform is always going to be easier for Tesco than Tees Valley Combined Authority, let alone the Department for Transport. It is difficult because of the size and complexity of the task – and so the many stakeholders, budgets, laws and regulations involved. It is difficult because of the inertia of the status quo and the weight of past experience, as well as constitutional and legal precedent. Plus, it is difficult because of the stakes: public services have more potential for harm if they go wrong, and the responsibility of a government to its citizens is greater than that of a business to its customers. There are legitimate concerns about privacy and indeed about the value of having too many different parties openly involved in programmes, rather than simply working alongside each other and ‘copy/pasting’ data about individuals or firms when they need to keep each other informed. For these reasons past efforts have not succeeded in delivering the required change and overcoming the problems. However, just because things are hard does not mean that they should not be done. Making the kind of shift we propose will allow the government to solve macro-level challenges and then implement locally – but in an integrated fashion, rather than addressing them multiple times in different parts of government or in different layers of government. It will provide the ability to be agile in the design and deployment of new services or tools and ease integration into existing services. Critically, it will allow the Government to adapt services fast when circumstances change. This change, however hard, is a much less radical change than the shifts in the past from the early adoption of computers in the NHS in the 1960s.

Priority action Shifting the whole structure of government to what we propose is not possible nor arguably desirable; our key recommendation is therefore to pilot the model by: 1. Taking responsibility for a select number of cross-cutting services out of their departmental framework and handed to Digital Task Forces, overseen by a Minister and with a Permanent Secretary-level official in charge supported by a high-calibre Chief Digital Officer, who will have the remit to design and deliver the service anew and mandate the changes needed to legacy systems to enable them (e.g. make changes of registers). This will require resources, power to change how departments are currently working, specialist recruitment, as well as a constant eye to ensuring central coherence. The idea is to build the kind of cloud-based government from the ground up, focused on the services that citizens, communities, businesses and other organisations need. *** 2. We propose that a new National Digital Council is created and co-chaired by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Secretary of State for Digital (see below) bringing all the relevant ministers and officials together, including the Chief Digital Officer, with a central secretariat function and the responsibility of ensuring that the different task forces develop interoperable approaches, use common standards and are supporting the creation of a coherent larger system. *** 3. We propose that a dedicated Digital Whitehall Fund is created by The Treasury in order to combine expenditure on the existing services that are being brought together by the Digital Task Force and any additional spend required to build interoperability. * Government should begin this effort with three priority areas, each one of which requires coordination across a range of services and organisations to deliver. We think the best areas to begin with are: i) Business support – whether for export, R&D, Companies House, tax payment etc; ii) Land and development – for housing, planning, demolition etc.; and iii) Early years support – requiring integration of ante-natal, midwifery, social services etc. In these areas, people, funding and infrastructure need to come under the Digital Task Forces with the remit to reimagine the service, using all the digital means possible, to deliver better, more user-focused services. Once developed and approved, the Task Forces should oversee the implementation and delivery of new services. The issue of how to ensure continuity of delivery as the shift takes place from old, departmentally-focused modes of operation to a new, digitallyenabled cross-cutting format will of course be critical. Once these three have shown progress and lessons have been learnt, a further list of areas should be dealt with similarly. 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.

Wider change The trial of this model has to be accompanied by a wider set of reforms that can help the Government at various layers to digitally reboot itself.

Governance A number of institutional innovations in central government, Parliament and for local government are critical: 4. Create out of DCMS a Department of Digital, Innovation and Technology (as they have in Denmark, South Korea, and Taiwan), marshalling the different digital, innovation and science programmes and competencies from BEIS, DCMS, and the Cabinet Office. (Create a smaller but separate Department of Culture and Sports). * 5. Create an Office of Digital Effectiveness (ODE) as a non-departmental public body, ideally UK-wide, learning from the experience with Office for Budget Responsibility, the Commission for Aid Effectiveness and the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, to measure the effectiveness (i.e. more than efficiency) of digital programmes in the public sector. The ODE should develop comprehensive ‘Digital Effectiveness Metrics’ to evaluate programmes and publish an annual ‘Legacy Scorecard’, ensuring that the cost of legacy systems across government and the pace of transformation are prioritised. *** 6. Support the formation of a Joint Digital Government Select Committee in the House of Commons and House of Lords in order to improve parliamentary scrutiny of digital government programmes. ** 7. Task the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation to make practical recommendations on auditing and certification of data usage and automated decision-making in public services. The aim should be to set new high-standards and build public trust. * 8. Create a clearer governance and institutional setup to support departments make ethical judgments about the application of machine learning to public services. *

Targets and Commitments Government should set a number of targets in order to drive the underlying change required and galvanize work across departments: 9. Announce an ‘only-once log-in’ rule for all public services – central, arms-length, NHS and local, police – which must be in place by end of 2021 at the latest across the UK. This can be achieved in a number of ways – for example, by implementing a single sign-on protocol. * 10. Unveil a ‘portability target’ by the end of 2021 after which all personal health information whether from primary, secondary, community or social care must be portable across the system allowing patients and physicians, with appropriate permissions and within clinical best practice, to access all relevant information on a patient. * 11. Task the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation to examine what an ‘expectation of prediction and automation’ would be under which citizens should expect that problems, for example health-related issues, that could have been predicted with available data about citizens held by the Government were predicted and under what conditions and in what contexts this kind of insight is inappropriate. If you start a business, you should be told about the grants you could be eligible for; if you apply for UC, you should automatically be registered for a travel card, etc. * 12. Identify and prioritise the creation of the missing cross-government platforms, such as data submission, accepting payments, hosting and data exchange. The focus should be on the potential for value creation and efficiency across government. *

Leadership No digital project across a large organisation can succeed without leadership vested in one individual who has a mandate to drive change in collaboration with others across government. 13. Empower the Chief Digital Officer of Government to lead change across departments in order to deliver the government’s digital plans. Powers should include user experience and the ability to merge, acquire and seed fund teams and platforms across Government. They should also be able to mandate API changes to legacy technology in circumstances where this can enable the redesign of upstream services. Critically, the person should also double as the Prime Minister’s Chief Technology Adviser, as in the US model. **

14. Urgently fill the job of Chief Data Officer to lead the government’s data work and implement the Data Strategy at pace. * 15. Ensure that every departmental Management Board must include a senior Chief Digital Officer, as is increasingly the custom in the private sector. ** 16. Explore financial or tax incentives to bring top digital talent into Government, for example an automatic exemption from the salary cap, grade structures or a two year nonrepeatable tax exemption for a stint in Government working on a critical digital programme, perhaps deferred for any two years of the employee’s choosing within the next ten years. Talented technologists are not sufficiently incentivised to join Government. ** 17. Create a Senior Digital Leadership Career path so that younger technologists can be helped into senior positions and departmental CDOs can have career options inside Government rather than only the option of rotating out after a one-job stint. ** 18. Institute a Digital Leadership Award that recognises leaders – digital or non-digital – across the public sector who have delivered or overseen successful digital programmes. There are currently too few ways to acknowledge successful projects. 19. Create a different operating model that breaks down the unique division inside Government between product development and service delivery so that there is continuous improvement of services, emulating the way the likes of Google, Twitter, Amazon organise their teams. ***

Spending and future planning Government needs to update the way that it accounts for and funds technology so that the real costs of inaction and the benefits of cloud-based services are clear. The prevailing view of investing in digital, data and tech as something that happened in 2015 is mistaken: 20. Identity and commit to a Digital Spending Target – a percentage of Government expenditure akin to the 2 per cent NATO defence expenditure target – in order to ensure that sufficient resources are dedicated to digitally-enabling services. *** 21. Run a specific Digital Spending Review alongside traditional SRs, given the speed of innovation within technology, looking at digital programmes only. Programmes should demonstrate their impact, as set out in the Government Service Design Manual. ***

22. While the Digital Task Forces work through priority cross-government services, each department or agency should develop a digitally-enabled concept of the future of the services that it – or a combination of departments – is responsible for. * 23. Create a three-stage Framework for Digital Expenditure that more easily allows seed funding, access to scale funds and larger allocations to run big programmes over several years in order to overcome the problems of funding programmes as they grow. * 24. Establish a Cloud-based Accounting Unit in the Treasury to support assessment of the benefits and costs of pay-per-use, subscription-based cloud services as compared to the purchase of hardware or the development of custom software. The unit should also include engineers and designers familiar with the trade-offs in such decisions. ** 25. Empower Accounting Officers to reallocate planned capital expenditure for digital technology to operating spend and move budgets from capital to revenue within the total spending allocation, given the problems investing in cloud architecture. ** 26. Require business cases to be written for the continuation of any departmental digitally-enabled programmes that are over two years old and have not yet delivered a public beta version of a service but ensure that cross-government platforms, once they have demonstrated a clear user-base and the creation of value, have funding and are able to maintain a team and continuously improve their platform for the longer-term. **

Controls Ensuring that digital spend and activities align with best practice means that the spend control system needs to be strengthened. 27. Prioritise the concept of ‘build controls’ (as opposed to just ‘spend controls’) which means that any department or agency that wishes to build its own technology or rely on consultants, has to have this approved centrally in order to avoid government building commodity technology or use scarce resources to compete with existing private offers. One way might be for the spend controls pipeline assessment criteria to be amended so that investments based on commercially-available software products (as identified through a process of market research) are rated more favourably by government agencies and pass more easily through GDS and Cabinet Office approval processes. *** 28. Create new digital powers for devolved Mayors – in regions like Manchester, West Midlands, Tees Valley, Liverpool, London, East England, Sheffield – to exercise control over 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.

all digital programmes above a certain cost and/or length by the local authorities in their area and to have a veto on all cross-area IT infrastructure decisions. ** 29. Create a cadre of independent Crown Technical Representatives akin to the ‘Crown Representative’ network, who should be digital experts (entrepreneurs, engineers, product managers etc.) who can be tasked with providing an independent perspective on digital programmes and ensure that assumptions are rigorously tested, specifications well developed and any decisions about ‘own’ build are robustly examined. **

Procurement Procurement of digital products and services needs to be improved to ensure that the public sector benefits most from private sector innovation. 30. Establish a Procurement Innovation Team in the Cabinet Office charged with driving greater levels of innovation and creativity in digital procurement so that there is a source of commercial knowledge and innovation to draw on. *** 31. Set a target to move all government services to the cloud by 2023 with departmental and individual rewards for early adoption and speedy progress. * 32. APIs should be mandated in all contracts with a data component where exposing the data is in the public interest. The requirement for open standards and APIs should be included in the contract, giving the Government the opportunity to ask for what they want, and for the provider to cost for development. The Government should be able to use the API for free for the life of the contract and the fee to provide the API by the 3rd party should be added to the contract. ** 33. Set a target for 10 per cent of technology spend to go to startups by 2022 and implement a new ‘suitable for startups’ tag on all procurement portals. ** 34. Task Treasury to cooperate with the Bank of England to develop a version of the HerfindahlHirschman Index to measure market concentration where Government is the main purchaser and task departments where the concentration reaches a threshold to form plans to make the market more competitive. ***

Registries Government relies on registries; the maintenance of separate systems and the inability of these to communicate properly, make it much harder for public policy to work. 35. Empower the Government’s new Chief Digital Officer to enforce governmentwide or at least interoperable registries, creating a deadline for priority action with DWP, HMRC and Home Office, who together oversee the lion’s share of personnel records. NHS is critical but should be in a second wave. ** 36. Review the range of legal definitions of official registries and responsibilities of registrars. Identify opportunities to set new high standards for the management of safe and effective registries in the digital age. ** 37. Publish centrally the types of data held in registers, down to the field level. This will enable teams elsewhere in Government to identify opportunities for reuse and innovation beyond. **

Transparency and Participation The more transparency there is, the greater confidence there is likely to be in the government’s programmes and the greater adherence and take-up in programmes, like vaccinations, that have a voluntary element: 38. Set up a Digital Ombudsman, potentially through amending the Parliamentary Commissioner Act 1967, to allow citizens and businesses an independent complaint handling service for complaints about digital public services that have not been resolved by the public administration. Ideally, the DO should be able to summarize findings with a view to supporting change or audits including by the NAO. The DO could be accountable to Parliament and the work scrutinised by the Digital Government Select Committee or the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee. *** 39. Publish the KPIs, codes and responsible Ministers and officials to every digital project over a certain cost. Make it possible for anyone to suggest changes, improvements in the code etc. Allow for public scrutiny and feedback. ** 40. Digital public services should publish their code in the open. They should also maintain public archives of how the design of services changed over time to allow better public scrutiny and engagement from other organisations and auditors. * 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.

41. Follow the example of Taiwan with collaborative decision-making and create an open method for policy development for digital programmes that allows a range of parties (citizens, businesses, charities) to contribute to the programme’s development. Such a UKx platform, modelled on the vTaiwan platform, could help the Government overcome many of the problems that have bedevilled programmes recently. * 42. Identify sectors, such as urban planning and international trade, that could benefit from publishing regulations as code, that is, taking the ‘rules’ or components of legislation – its logic, requirements and exemptions – and laying them out programmatically so that it can be parsed by a machine. *

Skills Greater digital skills are critical if the Government is to take advantage of new technologies and avoid the potential pitfalls: 43. Develop a clear Technical Intelligence - or TQ - framework of skills and knowledge expected of Ministers and officials at different levels and in different roles, covering technology literacy, digitisation, technical project oversight, digital business models and planning, and technical service delivery. * 44. Set up a Local TQ Fund to support the upskilling of mayors, councillors and officers in devolved, combined, regional and local bodies (i.e. Combined Authorities, local councils, LEPs, transport organisations etc.). * 45. Create a set of digital requirements for roles that oversee large digital programmes and a ‘pre-posting’ training offer for those who wish to take up the roles but do not have the requisite skills. ** 46. Institute a system of financial rewards, as the FCDO does for language competency, for officials to learn the required skills for their post or level or future roles. ** 47. Have the Digital Ministry, Cabinet Office, BEIS and the Department for Education create a comprehensive digital skilling agenda to create a pipeline of the future for Government employees, for example by funding Digital Government modules in engineering and politics degrees as well as a number of chairs of Digital Government at various universities. ***

Data The Government has taken steps in its new Data Strategy to make better use of data inside and outside of government but it will require real energy to reform current practices: 48. Agree a standard approach for the exchange and verification of data between parts of Government and with outside entities whether private or charitable. The UK needs a standard approach for the exchange of data between different parts of Government as well as other bodies, built on open standards. ** 49. Identify the top 10 datasets that should be maintained centrally for the benefit of the whole Government and appoint custodians to manage them. Priority should be given to datasets that support the government’s priority projects (e.g. Brexit, Levelling Up, climate change etc). ** 50. Establish a fund for shared data infrastructure projects across the public sector, both central, local, arms-length and NHS allowing joint bids that target improving data quality, filling data gaps, making data more representative, interoperability, linking, and data access in datasets. ** 51. Empower the Chief Data Officer to support the rapid location, procurement or generation of relevant data, as discovering data, particularly across organisational boundaries, is hard and limits what data is used in policymaking. ** 52. Create a Chief Data Officer Fund for the development of open source tools that support the collection, use and publication of data, as the Government needs better tools and services to support its handling of data, and in particular open source tools that can be used at low cost. **

Digital Identity A standard approach to digital identity is desperately needed in the UK to make access to public services easier: 53. Launch a programme to ensure that every citizen and resident in the UK has access to a high-quality digital identity to access digital services. This does not necessarily need to be a single identity – there may be legitimate reasons for people to use different identities in different contexts, such as business owners or healthcare, or for

different layers of government to issue identities – but they must interoperate as part of a single framework. * 54. Ensure a robust privacy set-up which allows individuals to control and protect their privacy, and understand how data about them is being used. ** 55. Commit to using a decentralised model i.e. no central database as well as modern encryption technologies, on-device biometric scans and other innovative technology, to ensure that all data stays on people’s devices.**

Union-wide infrastructure 56. Task the Joint Committee to develop options for Union-wide digital infrastructure, the areas to ensure similar standards and interoperable services and areas where devolved administration and central government can better corporate. *