Digital Life Matthew Webster

There is nothing like a crisis for focusing the mind and revealing who has laid in the resources to cope with the unexpected.

The past year has provided plenty of such opportunities. While the pandemic has, no doubt, hastened the unhappy demise of some businesses, it has allowed others to show what they can achieve. I imagine that board meetings at Pfizer and Astrazeneca might be fairly cheerful events at the moment, despite everything.

There has also been a huge rise in the need for online services and information. A government department that does seem to have emerged smelling of roses is one you may not have come across, but you’ve certainly seen their work: the slightly shadowy Government Digital Service (GDS). It’s a unit of the Cabinet Office, and oversees the government’s web presence, now consolidated (by the GDS) under the gov.uk web address.

I call them shadowy because the GDS seems shy, and I suspect that most Oldie readers don’t know that it exists. It was created by David Cameron in 2011, following his Digital by Default policy, which decreed that all government services that could be delivered online should be.

The GDS doesn’t seem to publish an annual report, and it’s only cursorily mentioned in the Cabinet Office’s report.

If the cost of the GDS is published somewhere, I can’t find it; nor can I find much on its staff or size. It does admit to having a Director General, but she is, curiously, described as ‘interim’. It must have quite a budget, because it seems to be able to step up when really needed.

For example, in the space of about five weeks, the GDS and HMRC created, from scratch, the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, the online means of providing support for furloughed workers. It was designed, built and launched in less than five weeks, and it worked. Frankly, in the online world, that’s spectacular. There may be some political disappointments associated with that scheme, but you really can’t fault the online systems.

Then there was their excellently named Project Unblock, which tackled the inclination of government departments to follow their own technological preferences. That insularity meant that most departments used different video-conferencing systems, and prevented access to those systems they did not use. Ridiculous.

Project Unblock dealt with that parochialism, and now Microsoft Teams (which is better than Zoom) is available across all major departments. It’s extraordinary that it wasn’t already, and it took the GDS to unpick that knot.

It also rapidly created the online platform for disseminating coronavirus information and has trained thousands of civil servants in using their computers better.

In fact, they have done all this so well that that I imagine we take them for granted; their success during the pandemic has been, as one commentator put it, the dog that didn’t bark.

It’s not all sunshine and flowers. The muddle over developing a contact-tracing app was embarrassing, although it’s fair to say that there is no real evidence that any country has properly solved that one, despite what people might tell you about South Korea. Also, another GDS project, the Verify system for proving our identities online, doesn’t really work, and no replacement has yet been posited.

But credit where credit’s due; none of us is perfect. The efforts of the GDS mean that we all now assume that a government website will actually work. Sir Humphrey Appleby might see that as a rod for his own back: ‘Far better to keep expectations low, Minister.’ Ten years ago, public expectations of government websites were very low, and rightly. Now they are not.

So, GDS, please keep up the good work, whoever you are.