Corporate report

Government Digital Strategy: quarterly progress report July 2014

Published 24 July 2014

This was published under the 2010 to 2015 Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government

We published the Government Digital Strategy in November 2012 and updated it in December 2013. It sets out 16 actions saying what government will do to:

• create digital services so good that people will choose to use them
• support those who aren’t online
• build digital capability across government
• use digital to improve policymaking

Each department has its own digital strategy, setting out what it will do to respond to these actions. Every 3 months we publish a report on GOV.UK, showing what government has achieved against the strategy’s aims. In December 2013, we published an annual report on what we achieved in 2013 and our plans for the future.

Foreword

We’re now 18 months on from the publication of the Government Digital Strategy and we’re seeing the big changes that we promised then really gaining momentum.

We’re on track to move three-quarters of agency and arm’s length bodies’ sites onto GOV.UK by the end of July 2014. By the end of December 2014, we expect to have moved over 300 websites across. That means most government information will then be available in one place, updated to meet GOV.UK style guidelines.

Two of the 25 major services we’re transforming (lasting power of attorney and electoral registration) went live in this quarter. Electoral registration covers around 46 million people (all British and EU or Commonwealth citizens aged over 16). That’s the majority of adults living in the UK. So by the end of June, we had 3 services live; full-time student finance applications went live in January. Another 4 services will go live by the end of September.

As of 1 April 2014, all new or redesigned services must meet the Digital by Default Service Standard in full. No service can pass unless it offers appropriate assisted digital support for people who can’t use online government services independently.

The standard is also important in creating change within government; making sure that all the skills and capabilities needed to make and run a successful digital service are part of the same team, and embedded within departments and agencies.

To build a stronger, more competitive economy and a fairer society, we want the whole country to benefit from digital. So we want to give as many people as we can the access, skills, motivation and trust to go online and to make the most of the internet. This quarter, we published our plan to do that: the Government Digital Inclusion Strategy. No single organisation can tackle this alone, so we’re working with public, private and voluntary sector partners. If we succeed, by 2020 everyone who can be digitally capable, will be.

And finally, we’re achieving all this whilst helping government save money in the process. Government saved £210 million in the financial year 2013 to 2014 by scrutinising digital and IT spend requests across government, by moving websites to GOV.UK and by transforming online services.

What we’ve done so far across government

Between April and June, we moved:

• 2 more transformed services into live (electoral registration and lasting power of attorney)

• 50 more agency and arm’s length body (ALB) websites to GOV.UK, including Environment Agency

We ran:

• SPRINT events in departments and on specific topics, which gave teams working on digital projects opportunities to share what they’ve learned

• training for over 300 lead and content editors on user needs, web writing, GOV.UK style and publisher tools

We also:

• published the government’s digital inclusion strategy

What’s coming next

Between July and September, we plan to take 4 more redesigned services live and take 3 more to public beta.

We’ll continue to move the Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) website and a further 65 agency and ALB websites across to GOV.UK.

We’ll continue sharing the learning from exemplar transformation work across government by supporting a Sprint West event run by Drivers and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA).

We’ll increase user awareness that GOV.UK is the best place to find government services.

GOV.UK

Moving agencies and arm’s length bodies to GOV.UK

To support the transition of agencies and arm’s length bodies’ (ALB) websites to GOV.UK, Government Digital Service (GDS) is providing user needs and content training to these organisations. During April, May and June, we trained over 300 content leads and editors.

Between April and June, 50 more sites moved across to GOV.UK. These included:

• the Environment Agency, which receives around 2 million pageviews each week

• HM Prison Service, one of the 25 largest agencies, with around 377,000 pageviews each week

• UK Trade and Investment, which gets 114,000 pageviews a week

We are on track to move three-quarters of agency and ALB sites across to GOV.UK by the end of July, and the rest by the end of December 2014.

Sharing data openly

As more websites moved to GOV.UK, usage figures have risen. Average weekly unique visitors in May were up by over 4% on January to March figures. In May, over a third of visits to the site were made from mobiles (24%) and tablets (12%).

Between April and June, we created new features to meet specialist user needs that agencies have asked for before they can move to GOV.UK - for example a filtered search for the Competition and Markets Authority.

We improved the:

• presentation of search results across the site

• blog index page

We made it easier for:

• departments to feature and promote links to a wider range of content types like blogposts, alerts, campaigns and services

• users to view government blogs on mobiles

GOV.UK blogging platform

Action against misleading websites

GDS led cross-government action on the growing problem of misleading websites - third-party sites which charge for services that people can get for free, or at a lower cost, through GOV.UK.  They usually exaggerate the benefits of their additional services, misrepresent what you can get through GOV.UK, or falsely imply an affiliation with government.  

We’ve been working with departments to identify these sites and flag their sponsored adverts to the relevant search engine provider. A number of sites which broke the terms and conditions of the search engine providers were taken down from search results pages. The National Trading Standards Board (NTSB) is also considering what enforcement action ​can be taken in this area.

We’ve also been raising public awareness about GOV.UK being the best place to go for government services and information. Between December 2013 and March 2014, we increased the proportion of people going through GOV.UK (rather than other websites) to:

• 78% on passport applications, from 43% previously

• 55% on European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) applications, from 40%

• 64% on driving licence applications, from 41%  

#StartatGOVUK

Redesigning services

GDS is supporting departments as they redesign and improve 25 of the most important and highly used government services to make them digital by default. These ‘exemplar’ services include registering to vote, applying for EU farming subsidies, applying for benefits and arranging a prison visit. Some services have mainly individual users, others business users.

We call these ‘exemplar services’ because we want departments to learn from them about what they need to do to make transformation work effectively. Then we want to use what we’ve learnt to extend and improve digital skills and activity across the civil service.

We regularly report on what we’ve achieved on our transformation dashboard. By the end of June, 4 services were in alpha, 18 in beta, and 3 live.

Service transformation

New live services are:

• electoral registration, moving 46 million electors from household to individual registration supported by a public awareness campaign developed in partnership with the Electoral Commission

• lasting power of attorney (which was the first to pass the new full Service Standard assessment in April).

Apprenticeship applications passed their assessment to move into beta, as did prison visit bookings, and passports moved into alpha.

Electoral registration

Exemplar projects: what we’re learning

We want to make sure we learn from this transformation work. We’re looking at how organisational structures and culture need to adapt, and staff skills improve.

In April, HM Treasury published clarification of guidance on business case requirements where services are being developed using agile methodologies in line with the service standard. An agile approach to building services can maintain effective business planning and control spending more quickly than conventional project management.

Departments are working with GDS to pilot new guidance on governance for agile service work. This guidance will cover principles, processes, case studies and a range of resources like documents. In June we blogged about what we’d learned by then and asked for feedback on 6 principles we’d drawn out as a result.

To help demonstrate progress, new ways of working and approaches to service delivery, we’re encouraging departments to talk about their work, show the thing they’re building, and share what they’ve learntthroughout their digital transformations. Three exemplars did this at the Public Sector Show in May.  This huge event, held at the ExCel centre in London, attracted leaders and managers from the public sector, as well as charities, social enterprises and voluntary organisations. Nine of the exemplars were demonstrated at Civil Service Live, which took place at 4 locations on 5 days spanning late June and early July.

Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) ran events called SPRINT Defra in April and June, attended by around 140 people in total. The teams transforming services, including rural support and waste carriers registration, gave presentations and shared what they’d learnt.

Digital transformation at the Public Sector Show

Other service transformations

Other government departments continue to make their services digital by default alongside the exemplar projects.

The Department for Education (DfE) developed its academies online conversion tool in line with the Service Standard and launched a beta service during the quarter. The service allows schools to complete an application for conversion to academy status online.

In April HMRC launched a new tax credit renewals service, after passing the service standard assessment.

Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) updated its plans for moving its services to digital by default. It began work on transformation of the Chevening Scholarship application process, and undertook discovery on online appointment booking.

Ministry of Justice (MOJ) agreed plans for the future digital service transformations. These include services such as jury summons, assisted prison visits and legal aid online billing.

Meeting the Digital by Default Service Standard

The Government Service Design Manual, published in April 2013, aims to provide departments with information and guidance to help them achieve the Digital by Default Service Standard. This sets out the criteria which we use to judge whether a digital service is good enough to be launched for public use through GOV.UK.

From 1 April, all new and redesigned services handling over 100,000 transactions each year had to meet all the points in the service standard. GDS teams undertook 16 assessments between April and June; assessments are held for each service when it applies to pass between development stages. Two exemplar services assessed during this quarter lasting power of attorney and patent renewals, passed to go live.

Departments are now self-certifying services handling under 100,000 transactions each year. This means they are assessing these services themselves. We’ve already trained around 30 departmental assessors to do this. The first of these was rod catch returns from the Environment Agency.

We publish all the assessment reports on GOV.UK, including the departmental ones. Not only does this make the process open and transparent, but it also helps other services to understand the assessment process and its requirements better.

Helping more people use digital services

We want everyone who is able to use our digital services to do so. To design services that work for users, we need to understand:

• who can use digital services

• who can’t use them

• what else we need to offer people who aren’t online

To persuade people who are already online to use government digital services, we need to improve the quality of the services to make them clearly preferable to the alternatives, and make sure that people know about them. We also need to work with a range of other organisations to help people currently offline to gain the basic digital skills they need to go online safely. If people can’t use digital services on their own, we need to find other ways that we can support them so they still get the services they need.

Getting more people to use digital services - increasing digital take-up

GDS has completed in-depth user research on how people use online passport services, concentrating on first time users of digital services, and why some users revert to non-digital channels. We’ll use these findings as part of a full review of existing guidance on increasing digital take-up (including case studies) which we’ll be publishing shortly.

Alongside this, we’re clarifying exactly what we expect service managers to have understood and planned for on digital take-up before they turn up to be assessed against the service standard.

Meanwhile the latest data on costs and digital take-up from government services show an exciting trend; the cost of transactions between the government and public service users is steadily falling, and the digital take-up is rising.

Helping people get online - digital inclusion

Government digital inclusion strategy

We published the government digital inclusion strategy in April 2014. The strategy explains what departments, partners and GDS will do to help people go online.

Currently about 21% of the adult population lacks basic digital skills. The digital inclusion strategy aims to reduce the number of people offline by 25% every 2 years, meaning that, by 2020, fewer than 4.7 million people will lack basic digital skills and the ability to go online.

Building digital skills

So far, 52 organisations from the public, private and voluntary sector have signed up to the UK Digital Inclusion Charter and agreed to help people learn new skills and put them into practice. These organisations will have more impact working together than in isolation. Go ON UK will co-ordinate activity across the private and voluntary sectors.

Departments are assessing how digitally skilled their staff are so we can ensure all civil servants have the opportunity to develop basic digital skills (Level 7 on the digital inclusion scale). For example, Department of Health (DH) has identified the work needed to bring all their employees’ skills up to this level. It will ensure that staff belonging to its digital champions network achieve level 8 as part of their training and development.

DH digital champions network

Working together

The GDS team has started work with government departments to coordinate all government activity around digital inclusion and identify where helping people to use the internet might bring additional benefits. The organisations that signed the Digital Inclusion Charter are also identifying what digital inclusion work they are each already doing. This will help them to pool their resources and ideas and to develop and share new approaches and innovative solutions.

To support this work, we’re drawing together expertise and funding to run a cross-government research project. This will identify difficulties individuals and enterprises face in gaining the skills, confidence and support they need to get online. We’re also devising a common way of measuring levels of digital exclusion in the UK and identifying what types of support are successful in reducing those levels.

Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) hosted a Digital Inclusion Discovery Day for councils in April and a Health Care Bill discovery in May. They also held a Really Useful Day beta on digital inclusion in June.

DH has been assisting National Health Service (NHS) England with their Widening Participation project, which trained 59,000 people in the 8 months up to March 2014. In May, it published an evaluation microsite reporting year 1 achievements, including videos and case studies.

Care bill discovery day at the Local Digital Campaign

Helping people use digital services - assisted digital provision

Not everyone who uses government services is online, and not everyone will be able to use digital services independently. The government has to make sure everyone who’s entitled to a service can get access to it. What we provide for people who remain offline will depend on the service and the needs of the user.

No digital service will go live without appropriate support for people who aren’t online. Many people who are offline will keep using the digital services through non-digital ways, such as face by face, by phone and through intermediaries (other people and organisations doing it for them). In some cases, people may be offered help to use the digital channel independently.

Understanding user needs

The assisted digital team at GDS are helping departments establish the assisted digital requirements for their services. They’ve been:

• gathering and assessing information that departments already held on assisted digital users

• identifying and filling data gaps through further user research

• getting advice from the external stakeholder group on specific service support proposals that departments are working on

The GDS team has been using the digital inclusion scale to work with service managers to map users of their services. The aim is to understand how digitally literate users of each service are likely to be and what assisted digital support might be required.

 Piloting assisted digital support

GDS is helping the MOJ lasting power of attorney exemplar service with a pilot of its assisted digital provision. This is being done together with Age UK, Citizens Advice, and Alzheimer’s Society. The assisted digital pilot, which includes phone and face by face support, already has a lot of positive feedback. What we’re learning will inform how we design assisted digital support for services across government.

Service Standard requirements and guidance on assisted digital

From April 2014, all new or redesigned digital services must have high-quality, cost-effective assisted digital support to go live. The team will be represented on all service assessment panels for the next 3 months, to help assessors fully understand and assess assisted digital provision at all stages.

The Government Service Design Manual has newly updated guidance on assisted digital including how to develop assisted digital support and how to research assisted digital user needs.

Making civil servants digital

The Civil Service Capabilities Plan, published in April 2013, and updated in June 2014, identified building digital skills as 1 of 4 priorities across government. We want civil servants to understand the internet and technology, and how they can be used to make government policy and digital services better.

Digital leadership

Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and DH have appointed new digital leaders during this quarter. BIS’s digital leaders forum held its first meeting with representatives across its agencies.

Ministry of Justice (MOJ) formed a Digital Steering Group, which is now the decision making body for digital strategy work across the department, its agencies and ALBs.

Cabinet Office support across government

Recruitment

The GDS Recruitment Hub continues to respond to a wide range of departmental requests for help in hiring interims and making both permanent and fixed term appointments into senior civil servant (SCS) and other digital roles. This includes:

• shaping job roles and advertising approaches

• advice on salary levels and on using specialist recruitment companies

• running campaigns

• joining recruitment panels

From April to June, the hub has been involved in hiring 18 people in interim or SCS positions including Chief Technology Officers (CTO) and a Chief Digital Officer (CDO) for a number of BIS’ agencies, an interim CDO in Home Office (HO), and posts in MOJ and Department for Transport (DfT).

Guidance and advice

GDS provided assistance by:

• improving the open internet tools guidance to include further advice on digital skills and more tools - this has now had over 46,000 unique visitors

• supporting the growing community of Service Managers by starting a new style of event where 30 or so Service Managers get together to discuss ideas or problems and share solutions - it also developed and published community best practice guidelines

Support for departments and professions

GDS ran sessions at a digitally themed event for senior civil servants in the operational delivery profession in May. It also advised the profession on digital and technology learning content hosted on Civil Service Learning, and Government Communication Service on digital communication courses.

GDS co-hosted an event in May with the Open Policy Making team in the Cabinet Office to show how digital tools are being applied to open policy making and service design.

GDS worked with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) digital academy by sharing learning material, running sessions and jointly developing a 1-day digital foundation course. It also helped MOJ design organisational roles and processes to support Service Managers transforming digital services.

Improved digital training and development

Between April and June, GDS:

• created a new Digital and Technology (DaT) fast stream, which will provide career paths and training linked to current and future digital and technology roles in government, and ran an open day for the cohort joining the new scheme

• worked with Civil Service Learningto review and refine the range and number of technology courses available on the Civil Service Learning portal

• ran leadership training initiatives for senior civil servants such as digital masterclasses for senior civil servants and provided speakers on senior leadership courses

How departments are becoming more digital

Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS)

BIS established a digital leaders’ forum across its partner organisations so that those who are more experienced in providing digital services (such as Companies House) can share what they’ve learnt with others. BIS has also started a pilot scheme providing bespoke training sessions for senior civil servants to help them listen, share and engage with their stakeholders and use the web to better inform policy making.

Cabinet Office (CO)

Cabinet Office has established a Code Club involving staff from all levels and all sections to increase digital knowledge and awareness.

Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)

DWP extended its Digital Academy, which began operating in Leeds in June. The first cohort from the London academy completed their training in May, and the 16 graduates have now been deployed into digital roles across the department. These roles ranged from operational positions in job centres to working on specific projects such as Universal Credit.

DWP building digital capability

HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs)

The department now has over 100 digital specialists, with 16 scrum teams supporting over 30 projects. They are also recruiting apprentices to work in digital, and have set up a digital engagement team.

Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC)

DECC ran a series of team briefings to raise awareness of what digital by default means. The results from a recent pulse survey showed staff awareness rising to 83%.

Department of Health (DH)

DH’s Permanent Secretary, its 5 Directors General and the Chief Medical Officer are now halfway through a 6 month programme of 1 to 1 digital coaching.

DH’s digital team worked with the wider Communications Division and with policymakers and operations to improve and promote its Digital Policymaking Toolkit and work on future policy standards. The digital champions network is now up and running, helping to test them.

Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO)

The FCO held themed sessions at its annual leadership conference for Ambassadors on a “digital Embassy”, demonstrating how digital tools and technology can contribute to more effective policy, service delivery and communications.

Digital Transformation Unit drew up a training strategy for service delivery staff and began a review of digital skills across the FCO’s network of international posts. It also provided training to the FCO’s media office so press officers could undertake digital media tasks.

FCO launched a Digital Champions network to build digital capability and increase engagement on digital issues across the department.

Home Office (HO)

HO launched a recruitment campaign to expand its Digital Services team. The aim is to develop a talent pool of both digital and technology skills to develop digital services across the department.

Ministry of Justice (MOJ)

MOJ has been assisting DWP and HO by sharing its experience in recruiting to its digital team.

Ministry of Defence (MOD)

MOD is in the process of appointing a digital transformation team, which will lead on developing digital services for the public and for internal users.

Office for National Statistics (ONS)

ONS established a new Digital Publishing Division in April. It’s starting work to develop a new ONS website. Part of its role is to give staff digital training. It’s running events and briefings on things like data storytelling, accessibility, mobile user experience and web writing.

Digital working across government

The government is establishing or sharing common approaches across departments in a number of areas supporting digital. GDS and Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) lead on much of this activity, and they also support departmentally-led work where requested.

Technology leadership

The Technology Leaders Network was set up to ensure that government is equipped with the right technology to support great digital services.

Sir Bob Kerslake attended the Technology Leaders Network in May and followed up with a blog post on progress on improving government IT. We held the first of several civil servant workshops on this issue, in response to the concerns raised after an earlier blog post on the same subject.

A number of technology leaders visited Silicon Valley as part of a delegation with Francis Maude MP, Minister for the Cabinet Office. They’ve published a series of blog posts sharing their experiences and what they learnt on the Government Technology blog.

Sir Bob Kerslake at a Technology Leaders Network meeting

Identity assurance

The Identity Assurance Programme works with central government departments and agencies, as well as other public service providers, to plan their use of the new identity assurance service. It will provide a better, faster and safer way to prove you are who you say you are when using government services online.

Growing our Identity Assurance Hub

In February, HMRC’s Pay As You Earn (PAYE) service started using the new Identity Assurance hub in private beta, initially through 1 provider, Experian. The second identity provider, Verizon, joined the private beta during May. The service is available to a small group of volunteer users, signing in as individuals using identity assurance, while HMRC tests and develops it for larger numbers of people to use. GDS and HMRC have also started looking at how identity assurance works when people use a public service online on behalf of an organisation or another person.

Other services like DVLA’s view driving record and Defra’s rural support will join the private beta shortly, as the service is developed for wider use.

Buying more identity provider services

In April, GDS published a prior information notice about buying identity provider services for the next phase of the programme and it held a market engagement day at the end of the month which was attended by over 100 people.

Buying digital services

We are creating a new Digital Marketplace to provide a single place for the public sector to buy from the G-Cloud and Digital Services frameworks. It focuses initially on the G-Cloud catalogue. We began an alpha of this new service in June to gain feedback and identify improvements. The new Marketplace will replace the existing stores (CloudStore and Digital Services Store).

G-Cloud

G-Cloud allows anyone in the public sector to buy off-the-shelf cloud-based services on a pay-as-you-go basis, currently through the CloudStore. G-Cloud covers infrastructure, platform, software and support services. In May, G-Cloud phase 5 went live, with 439 new suppliers (93% are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)). This brings the total number of suppliers to 1,518, of which 88% are SMEs - an increase of 4%.

The number of services that can now be bought through G-Cloud has increased by a third - from 13,668 to 17,232. Sales by the end of April 2014 reached £175 million, with 60% by volume and value being with SMEs. We are working to increase sales further. We are tracking progress through the G-Cloud dashboard.

Digital Services Framework

In November 2013, GDS launched the Digital Services Framework. It exists to give government easy access to suppliers of all sizes with the right digital capability to help them design and build public services that are digital by default and focused on user needs. By the beginning of May 2014, 9 call-off contracts had been awarded, 5 to SMEs. The total value of these call-off contracts was £2.3 million; 30% (by value) was awarded to SMEs. We will release a second refreshed version of the Digital Services Framework in Autumn 2014.

Digital platforms shared across government

The performance platform, which provides structured data to help departments improve services, continues to grow. There are now 18 detailed service dashboards and 82 new overview dashboards. GDS launched 37 new content analytics dashboards onto the performance platform. This lets people in government departments and agencies see at a glance how their web content is performing. All departments have committed to publish information openly and transparently about how their digital services are performing.

We believe in using data to inform design. GDS has helped exemplar services review their analytics capabilities to identify what skills and tools each has available and to identify any problems. Over the last 3 months, we’ve used analysis to:

• understand online behaviour during the winter flooding and user needs of UK citizens abroad

• inform and then measure the effectiveness of GOV.UK’s redeveloped site search

• evaluate the 17 campaigns that were using landing pages on GOV.UK

To help project teams undertake high quality user research continually throughout their work, GDS established a new user research lab. This will be available to user researchers across government.

User research laboratory in GDS

Government IT systems

GDS is developing a common, cross-government approach to the things that everyone uses like desktops, hosting, etc - we’re calling this Common Technology Services (CTS). Our aim is to show a different way of designing and providing technology to the civil service. We want users to have modern, flexible technology services that are at least as good as those people use at home. These services will also be cheaper than the services currently in place.

The Cabinet Office Technology Transformation Programme is continuing to work with CESG on security accreditation for collaborative tools. It also installed fast, open wifi at 70 Whitehall as a beta service. It’s planning to roll out a full service over summer and early autumn. Civil servants have been trialling a shortlist of devices and applications and 85 people attended a  laptop try-out event in June. CO are also progressing with its plans for an in-house IT service which will include ‘tech bars’ for on-the-spot fixes.

MOJ is developing reusable code for use across its services. For example, a bookings ‘date picker’ developed for the prison visit bookings exemplar service is open source and available for use by others across government.

MOD’s Defence Gateway, which serves the army, navy and Royal Air Force has achieved accreditation for its secure hosting and cloud-based solutions from its IT security authority. This will be used to provide shared services and for communications.

HMRC now has a new “multi-channel digital tax platform” in place. Over time, this will replace the current HMRC tax portal. It will provide a secure, reliable, flexible and scalable platform for new user-facing services.

Crown Hosting Service(CHS) held a supplier day to provide an update to the market. It worked with a set of founder customers (DWP, Home Office and Highways Agency operations) and submitted an outline business case to HM Treasury.

Opening up government services and information

Action 16 of the Government Digital Strategy said we would open up government transactions so they can be delivered easily by commercial and not-for-profit organisations, and put information wherever people are on the web, by syndicating content.

New approaches to government technical architecture

A sub-group of the Digital Leaders Network is exploring common needs around data formats and exchange. This will help us understand where to focus our efforts as we develop a modern service architecture for government services. It will also identify the opportunities and expertise needed to offer high-quality application programme interfaces (APIs) that meet user needs, and allow departments to integrate services and make these available to third parties.

Departmental examples of opening up information

Since April, data.police.uk has been publishing open data on police recorded crime, outcomes, arrests and performance information through an API.

HMRC has made APIs available into the Government Gateway. This allows third party organisations, such as tax agents, to check via the gateway whether someone is registered for particular services for example.

ONS has a beta version of OpenAPI to help people reuse ONS data (for example, census data) in their own application.

Changing legislation

HMRC identified changes in the law needed to make sure that information delivered via digital self assessment would have the same legal validity and effect as information delivered in paper format. Parliament recently approved the legislation. This means HMRC will now be able to send electronic communications to self assessment customers as part of the new service.

DVLA is removing current requirements to surrender a logbook as part of its transformation of the vehicle management service, and simplifying processes to obtain a personalised registration number.

Defra has agreed to move to electronic-only waste carrier registration certificates.

Digital policymaking

At the beginning of April, Cabinet Office launched a policy lab which will help policy teams to test how different design principles and methods can improve policy making in the Civil Service.

Cabinet Office’s Open Policy Making team co-hosted an event in May with GDS, bringing together heads of policy from departments with digital leaders. They heard about how departments have used digital tools to improve open policymaking and make links between policymaking and service design stronger. The discussion also covered how the new data science team is trialling new techniques and technologies for working with data to improve the way we deliver policy and services.

The Open Policy Making team has worked with GDS to identify services that illustrate new approaches to improve open policy making. They launched a beta version of an Open Policy portal.

Many departments already use digital tools to engage with the public and to improve policy-making. For example:

Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS)

BIS ran a campaign in May to promote the benefits of digital engagement across the department, with policy leads sharing experience on how it can be used to raise awareness and gather useful data on small business’ needs from government. It started using Citizenspace to allow users to respond to consultations online and help policymakers examine this data more easily. Once a consultation is finished, it displays the results in a ‘we asked, you said, we did’ style.

Department of Health (DH)

DH is using digital channels to consult users, providers and other stakeholders about how councils should provide support and carry out reforms under the Care Act 2014.  These cover important areas such as adult needs assessments and carers’ assessment, eligibility criteria for care and support and adult safeguarding

Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)

Defra’s social media analytics team beat private sector nominees, including IBM, Vodafone and Mazda, to win gold in their category (Best Use of Social Media Measurement) and also the overall Grand Prix in the AMEC (International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communications) annual awards held in June

Home Office (HO)

HO has started work with CO’s Policy Lab and Surrey and Sussex Police to use innovative new tools to create a better crime reporting and investigation service

Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO)

FCO’s Digital Transformation Unit presented at the department’s policy excellence fair on how digital tools and technology can help policy officers in their work

FCO published a refreshed online version of its annual human rights report, with members of the public able to comment on every chapter.  FCO also launched a Facebook consultation on consular services

FCO co-hosted with the Dutch government a hackathon at the Global Summit on Ending Sexual Violence in Conflict. Participants at this “diplohack” produced technology proposals supporting the summit’s aims.  The judges selected “The Promise” as their winning choice, an application designed to help sexual violence survivors of the Syrian conflict find assistance and protection. An online vote selected “Seekr” as the “people’s choice”, a proposed database to help find missing people using facial recognition

Hackathon at the Global Summit on Ending Sexual Violence in Conflict

Efficiency savings

The Government Digital Strategy aims to improve services for people and save money at the same time. Government saved £210 million in the financial year ending in March 2014 by

• scrutinising digital and IT spend requests across government
• transitioning websites to GOV.UK
• transforming online services.