Government is a concept almost too big for one word. When we talk about ‘the government’ we might be talking about the executive – the group of politicians in power today – or we could be talking about the much larger apparatus of state, all the things that keep the country ticking along, including the public services we use every day. While the party in power might feature heavily in the news cycle, evidence shows that the actual experience of using government services plays a major role in shaping people’s trust in the government as a whole.
In the last two decades, digital tech has transformed the way we all interact with each other, with companies and with the government. This is typified by those ‘disruptive’ startups who worked out how to give customers what they want quicker, cheaper and better than larger, better-resourced competitors (think Monzo and Revolut vs. Lloyds and Barclays). In the public sector, we’ve seen a lot of progress since 2010, when the epic failure of a £10bn IT deployment, prompted the creation of the Government Digital Service (GDS). GOV.UK is our single ‘front door’ for pretty much everything you need to do, because when you need to get something done, you no longer need to find out which obscure government agency runs it. The GDS Design System and a Service Standard make sure these processes actually make sense to the people who use them, that they’re accessible, consistent, efficient and cost-effective - and services must embed data reporting, so we can measure what value they provide and how well they’re working. Today ‘digital government’ is evolving further with ‘components’ managed centrally for things like login, payments and forms, helping to improve outcomes and reduce overall costs.
We are moving to a future where close to 100% of our interactions with the state are conducted digitally - which we like, because when it works it’s an enabler of economic growth. State-backed credentials (e.g. a driving licence) helps businesses (not just the government) verify things like identity, ownership and competency. When this happens easily, with less friction, it makes it easier and cheaper to do business. And it does work - as we’ve seen from examples around the world like India and Estonia.
(Fun fact: Estonia achieved a fully digitised government a few months ago. The UK is taking a little longer as it has the minor inconvenience of a 50x larger population, a 100x bigger economy, and a few centuries’ worth of legacy and complexity, whereas Estonia was effectively starting from scratch following its independence from the USSR.)
By contrast with this positive progress, the USA offers a cautionary tale. There, a fragmented landscape of federal, state, and local government systems, with inconsistent processes and poorly designed interfaces, makes it feel like public services can only ever be impossibly inefficient, slow, and difficult to use. Some of these processes - paper-based, duplicative, laborious - have been made deliberately bad for their users (remember when Intuit lobbied to prevent the simplification of the US tax system?). It’s easy to get exasperated at this situation, and the lack of political will or ability to change things for the better. Populism is very good at using this kind of frustration to question the need for due process and even democracy itself. The dysfunction of US government services has fuelled the anti-government narrative, and ultimately given us DOGE, which seems more concerned with destruction than genuine ‘efficiency’ - torching critical digital infrastructure along with everything else. When people feel like the government doesn’t work for them, they are happy to cheer on those who promise to burn it down.
For those of us working in and with public services, then, meeting the GDS service standard isn’t enough. Services also need to be seen to be fair, responsive and efficient. They need to feel like they’re a good use of resources.
In his book Platformland Richard Pope makes a persuasive case for public services not to be completely ‘seamless’. Seamless means you don’t think. Amazon benefits from seamlessness, so you don’t worry about the wellbeing of workers in its fulfilment centres. In some cases, though, you probably want the user to have some empathy for the work being done on their behalf. This helps generate a sense of psychological ownership by citizens over our public services. We should also design services to be actively participatory, giving users a voice in how the service works and how it evolves.
Digital services have become fundamental to the fabric of public life. They can be designed still better: they should reveal the logic behind them, and make ‘the system’ more legible, not invisible. For citizens to feel trust in the system, they need to feel like the system understands them and works for them. Events in the US and elsewhere show us, something as mundane as an effective tax return system plays its part in building trust in democracy, and a more stable and prosperous society.