Digital public services are an increasingly important part of what government does to support citizens. But they are also an area where alignment between central and local government is weak. Cat McKimmie argues that greater consistency in the approach to digitisation can strengthen the relationship between central and local government, and create a more seamless experience for users.
There’s no denying that, in 2024, digital is king.
An increasing number of public services are moving entirely online, with the government’s Transforming for a Digital Future paper setting out a bold ambition for the digitisation of central government services.
The ambitions contained within this strategy are admirable: from developing a single digital front door for all services on gov.uk to developing a world-class workforce in digital, data and technology.
But what about local government? At its worst, the experience of using a local government digital service and a central government digital service can be like interacting with two different worlds. This leads to confusion, wasted time and avoidable handoffs.
At the other end of the spectrum – if service design standards are aligned – citizens have a better experience, and confidence in the totality of services offered by local and central government grows.
Better digital services can build bridges between central and local government
At Mutual Ventures, in much of our work, we see ourselves as ‘bridge builders’ between local and central government. Helping clients to design more aligned digital services is one way of strengthening relationships between different levels of government, with improved outcomes for citizens and taxpayers.
Without the investment and cohesion of a singular digital strategy, local government is starting the race to digital on the back foot. Even if systems are digitised, the lack of standards for local government makes it difficult to align systems in neighbouring councils or throughout a region.
In my work on the DfE’s Regional Care Cooperatives Programme, I have seen how mis-alignment of systems will also hamper regionalisation efforts. Even basic data sharing becomes a mammoth task when all the authorities in a region are using different systems, data standards and data dictionaries. A lack of a common understanding of what ‘good’ looks like makes it increasingly difficult to unlock the full potential of regionalisation.
The Local Government Association is supporting local authorities to reach 12 ‘digitisation outcomes’. These encompass the foundations of a digital economy, like security and inclusion, alongside more niche issues of economic productivity and ethics.
At a time when council budgets are squeezed from all sides, there is not always the resources available to invest in digitisation at scale. Instead, services tend to patch on top of existing digital infrastructure. This house of cards is at risk of all manner of issues, from platform vulnerabilities to adherence to outdated accessibility standards.
Learning from what is already there
In order to develop high-quality digital services, local authorities can borrow from standards and methodologies from central government. This affords the double benefit of working to existing best practice standards while ensuring that services are prepared to integrate as and when the focus of the digitisation agenda switches to local government.
The Government Digital Service (GDS)’s Service Manual is the gold standard for developing accessible services. New digital services are assessed via the 14 point standard to pass service assessments, which happen at gateways (alpha, private beta, public beta, live and retirement) during the project lifecycle. To maintain standardisation across the digital estate, services that don’t pass a service assessment must show how they have remedied issues before they move into the next phase.
The 14 points are all related to the end user’s experience of the service and ensure that input has been sought from users. Without this, the service risks creating more issues than it solves.
Here, I’ve highlighted the points most relevant to digital service development in local government:
Provide a joined up service across all channels
User research should give you a well-rounded perspective of why citizens use your service. Without understanding this, you cannot understand the entirety of the user journey. We’ve all been in a situation where our experience of a service feels jarring after we’re transferred to a different department. Ensuring that there is a standard approach, tone and manner across all services helps to reassure users that the local authority is one body rather than a disjointed collection of individual departments.
Have a multidisciplinary team
When you’re assembling your project team, take a look around the room. Does everyone look the same? Is there an array of experiences? Are you set up to hear the voices of everyone, without siloes? If your team isn’t enabled to come together and solve issues in a multidisciplinary way, then the end product will suffer. Often, siloes exist between user researchers and those delivering the technical work. Bringing these groups together and having them work closely throughout the project means that user researchers are familiar with the limitations and possibilities afforded by the platform and lets developers feel closer to those who they’re developing for.
Iterate and improve frequently
It’s critical to build in feedback mechanisms once your service goes live and even more critical to actually listen to what your users are saying. Services should be built in response to user need, which can change rapidly. Without deliberately seeking out user feedback, you cannot be confident that you’ve solved the issue you set out to. Ensure you’ve allocated continuous improvement resource to attend to issues that surface. Solving issues as they arise is always quicker than letting them accumulate.
Make source code open
This may sound counterintuitive, but sharing both physical code and less tangible learnings on your approach, methods and design is one way of encouraging innovation and promoting a digital culture both regionally and nationally. This doesn’t need to be complex: something as simple as a GitHub repository or a paper circulated through the region may help neighbours to develop better services. It’s really about developing a culture of sharing and helping one another to help our citizens.
What next?
A more consistent approach to digital public services isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s an imperative. Even though there isn’t a specific standard which local, digital public services are assessed against, it is important to understand what is best practice – and the GDS standard provides that.
Ultimately, greater consistency in the approach to digitisation will improve outcomes by strengthening the relationship between central and local government, and creating a more seamless experience for users.
If you're interested in speaking to us about improving the citizen experience of public services, particularly those with a digital element - please get in touch.
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