Message for Feryal Clark MP regarding your new role in government

Dear Ms Clark,

Before I start, I believe your new ministerial remit may cover the CrowdStrike incident. If that is the case I hope it hasn’t been too stressful as an immediate introduction to government!

Shortly before the recent UK general election, the constituency borders in Enfield changed, moving my household into a different constituency. After reviewing your various roles in the shadow cabinet and researching your political views, I was very happy to vote for you and extremely pleased to see you re-elected. Not long after, I sent you a congratulatory letter with a copy of the daftly-named but excellent Demos paper “Only we can save the state”, as well as a copy of Radical Change by Hilary Cottam. I know you will be extremely busy in your new role, in addition to your responsibilities as a constituency MP, but I hope you will find time to read both at some point.

I have had a longstanding interest in the so-called “government digital” space that goes back to 2009 via Rewired State and has led me to move from a technical career in the private sector to undertaking a number of digital-focused roles in the public sector, including five years with the Government Digital Service from 2013 to 2017. I was also mentioned several times in the final report of the Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy.

Imagine my very pleasant surprise then, in recently discovering that your new role in government is as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for AI and Digital Government. It is excellent news for me that my constituency MP is now responsible for the area of government that I’m most interested in discussing.

I spent some time thinking about what areas of digital government I could discuss in the rest of this blog post and what approach to take. Those that know me well, or have read any of the posts on my blog, know that I might have one or two opinions in this area!

I’ve decided to try and focus on one thing. Something, in fact, I’m sure that, as an experienced politician, you’re already very aware of.

The most important thing is which areas to focus on and whose opinions you listen to.

There are obviously a lot of people and organisations out there who will want to discuss so-called “government digital transformation” with you. Many of whom will be trying to sell you things. At the moment, this is highly likely to be related to the position of AI in the hype-cycle. Out of that crowd, these are the groups I strongly suggest listening to.

• Public Digital. PD was created by the original founders of GDS and is now an extremely highly regarded international transformation delivery agency. I don’t always agree with everything they do or say but they employ by far the group of people with the best real-world experience and understanding of implementing digital technology in government. It’s also where you can find Tom Loosemore, who came up with the best definition of “digital” in a government context : “Applying the culture, processes, operating models and technologies of the internet-era to respond to people’s raised expectations.”
• Connected by Data. CbD is the UK’s primary institution focused on the practical use of data in government, data ethics and, perhaps most importantly, AI. It was founded by Jeni Tennison (OBE ) and, as well as producing much excellent research of its own, seeks to convene a number of working groups to bring together the large and ever-increasing number of think-tanks and other opinion groups focused on data and AI to jointly agree on practical and ethical standards for those technologies in government and elsewhere.
• DXW. DXW is a relatively small, employee-owned, technology-focused service delivery company. I would particularly speak to DXW about issues related to the government’s Digital Marketplace. This was originally created to enable smaller companies, of which DXW is only one of many examples, to compete against the huge incumbent “system-integrator” firms, such as Capita or Fujitsu. Unfortunately, as time has moved on, the Marketplace has become much less supportive of the challenger organisations and the pre-GDS world of enormous multi-year contracts to giant corporations is starting to re-emerge. DXW can definitely help in understanding this situation. DXW also recently published this excellent blog post.
• Demos. Particularly in regard to the Collaborative Democracy Network where they are bringing together a significant number of organisations using technology to improve the democratic process in the UK. In addition, I strongly encourage you, or one of your staff, to read the new Demos Citizens’ White Paper which also focuses on building a more collaborative democracy.
• APolitical. APolitical is an international learning platform offering courses in 21st century skills, such as AI, to public servants for free.
• Promising Trouble. In particular for their important work on extending the meaning of digital inclusion.

In addition, I would also seek out these specific individuals:

• Tom Steinberg. After founding mySociety Tom has now moved on to creating Teaching Public Servants in the Digital Age which is an outstanding body that partners with over 50 universities to deliver courses on digital methods to public servants around the world.
• Ben Welby. Ben has previously worked at both GDS and as a policy analyst for digital government at the OECD. I’ve always greatly admired Ben’s no-nonsense attitude to use of technology in government. In particular, his recent thoughts on how, over the last ten years, we’ve really only replaced the old IT-teams in government with “digital”.
• Richard Pope. Richard is also ex-GDS and has also spent time at the Harvard Kennedy school focusing on digital in government. Richard is always excellent at synthesising the best work going on in the field at the moment.
• Donna Ward. Ms Ward is the Director of Strategic Policy at DfE and the head of Policy Lab, probably the most important group driving new ways of thinking about policy development and delivery inside the UK government.
• Chris Naylor. Mr Naylor is the ex-Chief Executive of Barking and Dagenham Council and author of the paper “Only we can save the state” that I posted to you previously. Hearing about his work there, and re-reading Radical Help by Hilary Cottam, has recently made me completely rethink how we should approach the use of technology in government.
• Jim Killock and Sam Smith. Jim, from the Open Rights Group and Sam, from Medconfidential, are the two people from the more digitally-sceptical end of civil society that I would definitely speak to. I’ve been a supporter of both organisations for some time and, like Public Digital, while I may not always agree with everything they say, they are both highly insightful people in this area and very much worth pro-actively consulting with.
• Audrey Tang. I can’t over-emphasise that there is one country in the world that has embraced the use of digital more impressively than any other, to not only deliver services but to radically change the way that the state communicates with its citizens. That country is Taiwan. The g0v (gov-zero) movement is truly inspiring and I strongly encourage you to speak to Ms Tang about it.

As well as reserving time to speak to the groups and people I’ve mentioned above, I would also encourage you to create a list of priority topics of discussion as part of your new AI and Digital Government role.

I would personally start with the following:

• Understanding the strategic roadmap for GOV.UK One Login. Since the early days of GDS, the government’s stated position has been to deliver almost all services as “stateless” (not remembering the user between visits), with Universal Credit being one of the notable exceptions. As One Login is deployed to more people, the conversation is now whether it will expand into a “government account”, such as is found in many other countries. Personally, I’ve always been a fan of that strategy but many very smart people disagree.
• Clarity about the direction of “digital ID” in the UK. While the government has already ruled out introducing digital ID, it is worth pointing out that many examples of this in fact already exist. We have our National Insurance ID, our NHS ID, potentially our UC ID, our Government Gateway ID for paying taxes — not to mention GOV.UK One Login and anything we may need to use with our local council. Instead of one single national digital ID, we instead have many — none of which are managed very well.
• Digital in local government. Local Digital, one of the few government digital units not recently moved to DSIT, has produced many good things but, given the extreme financial precarity of many local authorities, I believe stronger measures should be taken. I’ve documented my related thoughts in this blog post. Public Digital is taking an active lead in this area.
• What, if anything, we can do at this stage to restart “government as a platform” in the UK. Both Ben Welby (above) and I worked on this during our time at GDS. The concept of shared digital platforms goes back to at least this great 2013 Gubbins of Government video from Mark Foden. At this time, the only genuinely cross-cutting shared digital services in the UK are GOV.UK itself, GOV.UK Pay, GOV.UK Notify and GOV.UK One Login. Instead, each department has spent multiple millions building their own digital platforms for their own services with potentially massive duplication of spending.
• Creating joined-up digital services. Back in 2016, Tom Loosemore and Richard Pope (both above) spoke at the Code for America Summit. Part of their presentation was this demo of a joined-up digital service for starting a business that enabled the citizen to interact behind the scenes with multiple government departments in a way that, to them, seemed like a seamless single interaction with the government. We’re still nowhere near being able to do things like that today. It’s possible that GOV.UK Forms might be expanded to enable the building of such services but we are light years away from having the required attitudes in government departments to enable this. My thoughts on the potential evolution of GOV.UK Forms are detailed in this blog post.
• How we can improve the transparency of service delivery (whether using digital technology or not). The number of blog posts from government delivery teams has significantly decreased in recent years and the number of teams allowed to post their regular show-and-tells on YouTube or host their own Twitter accounts, without having to go through their Comms team, has dropped to zero. I’ve been impressed with how Labour ministers have been using video to communicate since coming into office. I now hope that they can expand that trust to enable their teams to do the same thing.

Before I conclude, a few final quick things. Someone in your team may wish to update your personal website to indicate that you’ve been re-elected and give some information about your new role in government. Your entry in Wikipedia hadn’t been updated since the election so I took it upon myself to do that.

Finally, my associates Gavin Freeguard (of Connected by Data) and Derek Alton (of APolitical) and I will shortly be starting an events series about government transformation focusing on innovative policy and examples of novel working service delivery. Once that’s up and running, we’d love for you to join us at one of the events.

David Durant