Lou Downe: “Our government was not designed for the internet”

Lou Downe is the Director of Design and and Service Standards for the UK government, based at Government Digital Service. GDS has been a pioneer for digital teams in government, and in fact served as the model that the USDS was based upon. At Code for America Summit, Lou spoke to us about how far GDS has come, how far it still has to go, and key learning that extends far beyond the borders of the United Kingdom.
“We need to fundamentally rethink the way that we deal with change.”
In the UK, the government provides more than 10,000 services across 25 different departments, with 500,000 civil servants working to get these services to the public. But these services, and the government that provides them, were not designed in or for the digital age. Twenty percent of the UK’s GDP is spent on public services, and 60 percent of the cost of those services is spent just on phone calls and casework. Bad public service design is the biggest unnecessary cost to the country’s taxpayers, and simply plugging in new technology won’t make it better.
So when GDS was created seven years ago, it wasn’t tasked with modernizing tech but fundamentally rethinking the way that government services are designed and delivered to the public. They do the hard work to make services simple, and to provide critical infrastructure for the government. At the outset, the strategy was delivery. Now, the strategy is is scale and sustainability — that means helping the government change in a sustainable way. When it comes to public services, meaningful transformation is not about the ability of one team to merely design and deliver a service, but the ability of an entire organization to deliver, maintain, and adapt that service over time.
“If you’re not planning for your own obsolescence then you’re not doing it right.”
Lou also shared key lessons in how digital service teams should look to the future and plan for their own obsolescence, regardless of what country they are operating in. Most countries share a core list of services, and there is quite a lot to be learned from one another. To hear more about these lessons and the work that GDS is doing, watch Lou’s presentation in full below.

