Labour’s first digital government strategy: Is it déjà vu or something new?

A flurry of announcements

A flurry of tech announcements had built anticipation for the launch. Last week, prime minister Keir Starmer unveiled his AI action plan, putting artificial intelligence at the heart of economic growth and public service delivery.

Earlier in launch week, DSIT revealed a report by consultants at Bain & Company that analysed the ills of digital government in great detail and clarity – highlighting £45bn of lost productivity through old, inefficient or just plain rubbish IT systems, processes and procedures.

And the day before Kyle’s set-piece launch, hosted in the Whitechapel headquarters of the Government Digital Service (GDS), DSIT added an expansion of GDS’s remit and a first look at the Gov.uk app and digital wallet, including a new digital driving licence that can be used for identity and age verification on a smartphone.

As guests gathered for Kyle’s speech, one difference straight away was the level of interest from the mainstream and political media – Computer Weekly can attest how unusual it is for the likes of Sky News, the Independent, Press Association, The Times, the Financial Times and Politics Home to show up for a press conference about digital government. Even The Sun was there. Times have changed in technology.

When Kyle initially described the plan as aiming to “transform the relationship between citizen and state” it didn’t bode well. That exact phrase was used by former Cabinet Office minister Ben Gummer to launch his 2017 strategy.

But the opportunity for Computer Weekly to put the big question to a secretary of state for technology was certainly novel. So, according to Peter Kyle, what’s going to be different this time?

Learning from experience

Dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, joking about turning up to a meeting of tech founders dressed the same way alongside a suit-wearing Starmer, Kyle was keen to put clear air between the Labour digital strategy and what went before.

“Quite simply, I’ve been learning from those experiences. I’ve gone to [former GDS chief] Mike Bracken and sat with him and learned from him. We’ve had Martha on tap. That 2010 drive from GDS was inspirational. They did deliver changes to government – and then it just stopped, it petered out, the political drive behind it disappeared. That has changed,” he said.

“I learned in opposition to go back and understand what the barriers to delivery have been and where things have gone wrong. When we came into power, we had a programme of government, we had a whole series of implementation plans ready to go. And a lot of the work you see today wasn’t part of the implementation plans, but when I got a sense of the scale of what the capacity was, what can be created, then we started at it.”

“I learned in opposition to go back and understand what the barriers to delivery have been and where things have gone wrong. When we came into power, we had a series of implementation plans ready to go”

Peter Kyle, secretary of state for technology

It’s certainly true that few of Kyle’s predecessors with ministerial oversight of digital government would have taken the time to listen to techies first. The Tory minister who launched the 2022 strategy cheerfully jumped on stage, admitted she knew nothing about technology, and proceeded to insult Birmingham and Blackpool. It’s fair to say Kyle was different on that, too.

“I’ve been working the phone, because this is what Keir demanded of me,” he continued.

“So, where there are barriers, I’ve been speaking [for example] to government lawyers because there are legal issues. When it came to the digital driving licence, I was told it couldn’t happen in five years in one Parliament. But when you start working the phone, and you have very strong relationships around the Cabinet table that all formed in opposition and have carried on into government, we – as secretaries of state – are talking an awful lot about this.

“Keir has been absolutely steadfast in demanding openness to the possibilities that the digital centre of government is making available. I can’t do this to government departments. I can only do it in partnership. We just battered away at all of those different things.”

Snubbed noses

Kyle’s observation that he can’t force his strategy onto other departments is notable – one of the frequent failings of previous plans came when big digital teams such as HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) basically snubbed their noses at GDS and did their own thing. Whether deliberate or not, the presence of DWP secretary of state Liz Kendall in the front row of the launch event sent a strong signal that those old enmities will no longer be tolerated.

Kyle highlighted how Kendall sees a “jobcentre in people’s pockets” as one of the opportunities of the Gov.uk app. And for Kyle, that app in itself is a sign of how things have changed.

“The other big difference, which I’m sure people have noticed, is I’ve pre-announced a whole set of very specific products and services – government has never done that before,” he said.

“It [typically] says in general terms, we’re going to transform, we’re going to deliver – it doesn’t actually give a preview of what the product is going to look like and give a date for which it will land. Again, learning from the tech sector so that we reflect and respond.

“Why is it we [used to have] all these amazing things that are in train and then either it sort of drips out, or it gets out in the wrong place or we wait until everything’s so battened down and over-tested before it’s released and nobody notices. Why can’t we just be honest with the public about what we’re doing behind the scenes? I thought everyone would be going, ‘No, no, no, don’t do it’. Nobody held me back from doing this.”

Not everybody is happy with this approach. Computer Weekly has heard from leaders in the digital identity sector, many of whom are furious that the government has announced a product for age verification on a mobile phone through the digital driving licence. Kyle demonstrated prototypes of using this for online shopping – functionality that many firms have been encouraged by DSIT to develop at great cost, and to certify against new government standards for digital IDs.

When asked about this potential conflict, a government official read out a pre-prepared statement – suggesting DSIT was aware of the likely reaction from the private sector – which basically said, “We’re exploring all the options”. More controversy could yet emerge.

Core problems

But the success or failure of past digital government strategies has rarely been down to the technologies in place, or the political intent, or the amount of money available. The core problems have come in the way Whitehall works – or, more specifically, the way policymaking is conducted and the way technology budgets are spent.

Critics have long pointed out the lack of digital expertise involved when policies are being discussed, and how tech teams typically end up presented with a fait accompli – here’s the policy, can you build us some digital stuff?

Politicians and officials often have little idea of how technology could create alternative ways of designing and delivering better policy outcomes

As digital government experts Jerry Fishenden and Cassian Young wrote in a recent article for Computer Weekly, the process of deciding policy runs completely counter to the ways that digital approaches can improve those policies.

“Government’s linear approach to policymaking inevitably locks in questionable assumptions and constraints long before policy ever makes contact with the real world. It’s an approach that generates huge missed opportunities – generalist politicians and officials often have little idea of how technology could create alternative ways of designing and delivering better policy outcomes,” they wrote.

Here, DSIT officials have been looking at international best practices to see how other governments have dealt with similar challenges, and are taking particular interest in Denmark’s approach of “digital-ready legislation”.

In Denmark, policymakers are told to acknowledge “a need for increased awareness of whether the legislation can be managed digitally and on whether the implementation impacts have been clarified sufficiently”. In effect, it requires civil servants to tell politicians when their desired policies could end up costing more money or introduce greater risk if they do not consider the digital implications up front.

DSIT officials cited DWP and the Ministry of Justice as departments keen to pilot a new approach based on learning from Denmark’s example.

Non-agile spending

The way government spending and budgeting works is another area anathema to the agile approach that digital enables and requires. HM Treasury expects projects to have a fixed cost and timescale up front, with agreed benefits and timescales. Spending is classified as either “resource expenditure” for ongoing costs, or “capital expenditure” for investments. In a digital world of prototypes and “test and learn”, of beta versions and continuous improvements, it’s a round, digital peg being forced into a square, bureaucratic hole.

Both these issues were highlighted in the study commissioned by DSIT from consultants at Bain & Company into the state of digital government. The report is a thorough, open and honest read that acknowledges the failings that have led to multiple incomplete or failed strategies over the years.

“Funding models do not reflect modern digital practice,” it said. “Existing governance and controls processes are not seen as well suited to digital programmes as they prioritise predictable returns over longer-term resilience and continuous improvement, and do not allow for the flexible nature of digital delivery.”

Feryal Clark, minister for AI and digital government in DSIT, told Computer Weekly this is going to change.

“We’re changing how we procure and make the case for digital investment because currently you spend 18 months to two years building a business case to convince the Treasury to be able to invest, and by the time you go out to market, what’s in there is too old and you can’t change it because of all the checks and balances,” she said.

“The way we procure is not agile, it’s not quick. And so we are completely overhauling that as well.”

Ministerial support

DSIT announced that the Treasury will “experiment” with a new approach that reflects the realities of digital delivery. DSIT officials said the Treasury has agreed to “small-scale” trials of new funding models in “a few departments”. Anyone with past experience of persuading the Treasury to try new, agile spending models might suspect such cautious language reflects the fact that Treasury mandarins remain less than keen.

Nonetheless, Kyle has another ministerial supporter in chief secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones – a former technology lawyer who worked for BT, and known to be a big digital advocate.

Jones, Kyle and Pat McFadden – minister for intergovernmental relations and seen as Starmer’s “fixer” and right-hand man – form a new “interministerial group” that oversees governance for digital services. When Labour came into power, this group issued a moratorium on all major government spending projects worth over £1m in the digital area, to “get a grip” – in Kyle’s words – on digital transformation across government.

McFadden has already announced a £100m fund to deploy “test and learn” approaches across the country. Jones, it appears, will be responsible for getting a grip on the Treasury’s objections.

Generative AI

Another historic barrier to digital progress has been data sharing, and here, too, Labour envisages changes, promising to mandate the publication of application programming interfaces (APIs) for digital systems – ironically, an idea first mooted by Lane Fox in her 2010 review.

Exposing APIs will also help another plank of the new DSIT approach – the use of generative AI (GenAI) to support the work of civil servants. As part of DSIT’s reorganisation of digital delivery, GDS has absorbed what was Number 10’s AI incubator team, a group of young and eager AI experts primarily recruited from outside the civil service to identify opportunities where GenAI could improve productivity.

The AI team has so far identified 57 potential applications for GenAI, of which 11 have reached prototype stage, with several being put into active use as part of a set of tools labelled “Humphrey” after the character from the BBC comedy Yes, Minister.

Online wags have already asked whether this means the GenAI apps will be supercilious, arrogant and think they know better than everyone, in line with the fictional Sir Humphrey Appleby they are named after. But the developers of the apps are far more evangelical. Since their move into DSIT, they have already been asked to focus on how GenAI can improve citizen experience as well as cutting costs within the civil service.

GenAI tools being introduced focus on summarising large bodies of information, such as public consultations, Hansard records of Parliamentary debates, and ministerial meetings – the sort of “low-hanging fruit” that private sector digital leaders would say are a sensible place to start.

There are changes outside of Whitehall too. In the past, central government has largely declined to work with local authorities on digital transformation – previous iterations of GDS were expressly told not to engage with local government. The new plans involve reaching out to councils, to the extent that the Mayor of London’s chief digital officer, Theo Blackwell, has been seconded into GDS to work on engagement with councils.

A £45bn prize

The prize on offer for Kyle and the Labour government is the £45bn estimated savings that could be made through increased productivity if they get their digital strategy right. It’s clear that Kyle knows things not only need to be different, but need to be seen to be different.

“I could not have done any of the announcements I did today if digital services were constructed in the way they were when I came in as secretary of state,” he said.

“It is just a better way of doing government and that is part of the change that people have experienced and should be now noticing the difference of, in the change of government.”

So, is he right? Is this time different?

Labour has taken the time to learn the lessons of the past. Its plans hit most of the buttons that critics would have hoped to be addressed. The intent, the enthusiasm, the detail of the strategy suggests that things are changing for the better.

But only when – if – this digital government strategy genuinely delivers on its promises, can it be said to be truly different.