The Blueprint for Modern Digital Government sets an ambitious vision for the future of public services. Our plan is to create public services that are clear and easy to use for everyone.
The problems we see with public services at the moment
- Services are often hard to use because they are not designed around people's needs. Many services are designed without strong connections between policy and digital teams. This makes it harder for people to get the help they need — and harder for the government to deliver the outcomes the service was designed for.
- Some services are not fully available online. Many still rely on paper and manual processes, making them slower and harder to access. Some services can be accessed online, but have underlying processes that are manual. This makes it more difficult for staff to manage the process and makes it slower for people to get what they need.
- Some services do not work well together. People often need to use multiple services and when you combine this with the above, it results in a confusing, disconnected experience.
What the Service Transformation team are doing
The new Service Transformation team within the Government Digital Service (GDS) includes colleagues with extensive experience designing and building services, and solving complex policy problems. We are all passionate about making services better for everyone. As a team, we are primarily focusing on the following areas to:
- Make it simpler to interact with government
We’re working with organisations/other government department to understand how people use services from start to finish. We’re exploring how we can improve joinup between services to make it simpler for people to interact with government. - Improve service quality
We will refresh standards and guidance for teams designing and building public services, and will provide ways to check how well services are working. We’ll design clear, consistent metrics that teams can use to understand the health of their service. - Change the system
Change how services are funded in line with the recommendations in the Performance Review of Digital Spend we published with HM Treasury, and ensure legislation and policy is ‘digital ready’ so services are set up for success.
Focus on health, disability, and work
We're piloting a new way of connecting services that puts people (our users) first, rather than forcing them to navigate separate government systems.
In most cases, interacting with the government doesn’t begin and end with one service. People often need to use many services and interact with multiple organisations to get the help they need.
Teams across the public sector and in GDS have been working for a long time to make services joined up and proactive. Our aim is to share this best practice and increase focus on proactive, personalised services that meet people where they are.
We are focusing on helping people find or keep a job while managing long-term health conditions or disabilities.
Currently, 2.8 million people are economically inactive due to long term sickness, an increase of 675,000 compared to 2019. In many cases people are keen to return to work with the right support but find it difficult to access this support due to lack of awareness, and complicated application processes.
We found that people with a health condition or disability may need to use more than 40 services from 9 different organisations. These include things like:
- Getting to and from work, such as a Blue Badge or Disabled Bus Pass
- Financial support, like Personal Independence Payment or a Council Tax Reduction
- Healthcare services, like Talking Therapies or a service specific to their condition like diabetes prevention
Many of these services make it possible for people to work. During our research people told us that it is hard to find these services. They also said that services often ask for the same information many times.
Our goals are to:
- improve health and productivity outcomes by making it simpler for people to get the right support at the right time.
- reduce the administrative burden on people managing a disability or health condition.
We are testing new ideas to join up and transform this journey, working with colleagues in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), the NHS, and other organisations across the public sector.
We plan to test some short-term improvements this month, while we also work on bigger problems like sharing data and updating legacy systems. This will help us move towards personalised, proactive services that focus on the person.
We’re working in the open as much as we can, with show and tell sessions available to teams across government, and regular updates to teams working in this area.
We'll share what we're learning, and how small changes could make a big difference for people trying to get the support they need. We would love to hear your thoughts on how we could improve this work so please get in touch via health-work-research@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk.
4 comments
Comment by Martin Jordan posted on
This work of tying loose ends together so people can navigate public service is vital. Thanks for sharing this. Please provide further updates as the work progresses.
Comment by Karen Sanders posted on
This is really interesting and great to read. Anything that helps to support with equity for those with a disability is especially welcome. Often those with disabilities can miss out if they don't have those more educated or determined to search for, spend time on or fight for their entitlements so anything that brings equity to processes for them is fantastic to see. Well done.
Comment by john mortimer posted on
It is most interesting to see this evolution into a wider sphere.
What could help in this endeavour is to recognise that there are groups and disciplines that are already working in this area of redesigning services, and building collaborative working: whether that are multi-disciplinary teams, integrated services, or local hubs. In the UK public sector in particular, from its explorations about 20 years ago, these approaches are now well known,
It would boost your work in this regard if you are able to look at the concepts and design methods that they use, to see what might be helpful for GDS. These approaches have a foundation of complexity and systems thinking. The combination of the two allows for the multi-level and diverse nature of the service designs that deal with people with complex needs.
Groups that you might like to explore are those that follow what is known as Relational working. And Human Learning Systems is an open group of people that have been working this way, and have come together to highlight to others what this looks like. Our website is a rich resource of methods and also many case studies.
https://www.humanlearning.systems
Comment by Jamie Dixon posted on
It's really good to see that you are focussing on this area. I was astonsihed that our recent application for PIP still had to be done on paper. Anything you can do to make it easier will help a lot of people.
The Blue Badge renewal process, through my local authority, was a lot more difficult than the PIP process. It took months to resolve and was really stressful. Any improvements you could make there would also be welcome.