The way ahead for digital government under Austerity 2.0

Clayton Smith is a club executive at Zaizi and was previously deputy director for change and digital delivery at the Cabinet Office. He explains how lessons from the last round of austerity can help government departments advance digital public services despite constraints

Sir Tony Blair and Lord Hague recently made waves with a report that called for digital ID cards for all. Their big idea is that this will make it easier and more secure for people to access digital public services. Some will agree with the idea. As we’ve seen with national ID proposals over the years, many others will not.
    
What’s hard to disagree with is their belief that the future success of the UK requires a fundamental rethink that embraces the digital revolution. More ambitious thinking is needed across government and wider industry.
    
Which brings us to an interesting question. How is anyone going to achieve genuinely transformational aims under the new era of Austerity 2.0? And make sure the transformation is based on user needs? The Institute for Government, a non-partisan think-tank, recently said that arresting the decline of public services will require significant injections of cash that the current budget doesn’t provide. So where will that leave the development of digital services?
    
The answer is not a simple one. But it starts with thinking practically. In the short term, first we need to figure out what we can learn from the experience of digitising services under Austerity 1.0 that happened in the last decade. That means we need to redefine relationships between government departments and their consulting partners. We also need to define ways we can not only reduce costs through digitisation, but also deliver services that are both more sustainable and relevant to peoples’ needs. By doing so, we can provide better ROI so that more money can be redirected back into the innovation that will make a critical long-term difference.
    
Learning from the recent past, three key things need to happen to make sure we travel in the right direction.

Focus on users to influence policy
During the first round of austerity, we largely digitised the way people transact with government. The idea was to turn manual processes into digital ones and save costs. The business case was straightforward – based on the fact that it’s demonstrably cheaper to serve people online (where this was the right thing to do) than over the phone or in person.
    
This approach met the immediate cost-cutting need at the time. It was picking off low-hanging fruit. What it didn’t do was investigate whether the digital services that departments created could have solved deeper problems that have a bigger impact. For example, by understanding and making better use of data.  
    
Under Austerity 2.0 this approach needs to change. Government digital projects need to start with a key question. “Rather than simply saving costs through automation, are there changes we could make at a policy level that could help us deliver an effective, joined up, user-centred and data-driven service that solves bigger problems?”
    
An example: The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities recently completed a project that targets homelessness. To get to the root of the real problem, it asked local authorities and vulnerable tenants what they thought would make their life easier. This outcome-driven, user-centred research has led to the proposal of new legislation that will allow local authorities to share data across boundaries and track rogue landlords more easily.
    
In the short term, this will result in a digital service that will help to reduce the cost of tracing and monitoring landlords. But it will also help to tackle a root cause of homelessness that eats up health and social care budgets. That’s a big advance from the way things worked 10 years ago. It’s also a clear indicator of how digital service development can drive efficiencies that help manage the impact of budget cuts while serving our society in a more transformational way.

Invest in continual improvement
A key failing of digital projects during Austerity 1.0 was the lack of investment in services beyond launch. Little thought was given to continual improvement.
    
This is another thing that needs to change – not least because that lack of investment has proved to be a false saving. At the moment, government departments have to bear the cost of asking suppliers to rebuild a service when policies change. They would be in a better position if they had invested some of the cost savings they achieved into growing the internal capability needed to make those changes themselves.  
    
That’s what needs to happen from now on. For their part, IT and digital consultancies need to pass on their knowledge and upskill local government teams once a project is completed. That will make digital services much more sustainable in the long term.
    
Mariana Mazzucato, Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London, has recently discussed this issue in her new book, The Big Con. She argues that too many consultancies prevent the public sector from developing in-house capabilities by keeping knowledge to themselves. Their crime, in her eyes, is that they don’t provide government departments with the means to work independently of them. As she said in a recent article in the Financial Times, “a therapist who has their client in therapy forever obviously isn’t a very good therapist.” She makes a valid point.
    
That said, it’s also important to remember that external consultants can do things the civil service can’t do on its own. The best value is delivered when both sides focus on what they do best, but with a clear focus on sustainability beyond contracts or specific statements of work.

Embrace open source platforms
One of the big constraints for the government when it was digitising services in the 2010s was its reliance on locked-in relationships with legacy applications and technology suppliers.  Moving forward, government departments must focus on ending those relationships by adopting open source platforms.
    
The Central Digital and Data Office’s ‘Be open and use source’ pages on Gov.uk provide clear guidance on this. The guidance describes how digital projects can benefit projects by saving time and resources, while also lowering implementation and running costs.
    
At the end of this new round of austerity, we will hopefully see that government departments have fully embraced this opportunity to reduce costs and build more flexible services. And use the time and money they save to focus on the innovation needed to advance the delivery of digital public services based on user needs now and in the future.  

A more sustainable way forward
Aside from the controversial call for digital ID cards, the ‘A New National Purpose’ report by Messrs Blair and Hague makes several interesting recommendations that could help to advance the UK digitally. It talks about making greater use of AI in schools and healthcare settings, for example, and the need for a radical shift in government’s approach to data.
    
These are long-term future ambitions that may or may not be followed up. In the meantime, government departments should learn from the mistakes of the recent past so they can deliver the services our society needs to move forward despite present budget constraints.