This is the best thing the Tories did in office

They didn't make *everything* worse.

At last! The election is happening, and I must admit I’m pretty thrilled by this turn of events.

Obviously I’ve got some strong opinions, and you don’t need to read too much of my work to notice that I’m incredibly sympathetic to the Starmer project. But I don’t want to get too tediously party-political in this newsletter, if I can help it¹.

That’s because you don’t need me to be another braindead cheerleader for one specific candidate or faction. And besides, from a commercial perspective I know that I’ve got readers from across the political spectrum – all the way from, er, the centre-left, to the LibDems, to the centre-right².

So even if I’ll be punching the air when the exit poll drops on election night and looping Things Can Only Get Better on my Spotify account, I want to maintain the illusion that I’m capable of independent thought.

I also think this approach makes for better intellectual hygiene. For example, even though it has been a pretty wretched 14 years for many of the things I care about, I think as grown up consumers of political content we can accept that the Conservative Party in office has at least done a few good things.

For example, by promoting the ‘Contracts for Differences’ approach to energy pricing, which essentially de-risked investing in renewables, Britain has done an astonishingly good job so far of rolling out wind and solar energy³. We’ve gone from energy generation being 2.7% in 2010, to 28.7% by 2022 – and today renewables are upwards of 47.3% of the pie. That’s amazing⁴.

Then there’s gay marriage. That’s just an obviously good thing. Even if it was pushing at an open door in terms of wider public opinion, it still required some genuine political courage on the part of David Cameron to take on a significant chunk of his own party to make it happen back in 2013.

More recently, it was under Boris that the Covid vaccines were procured and rolled out. The “venture capital”-style approach to acquisition initiated by Dominic Cummings⁵ and led by Kate Bingham, which took place outside of normal byzantine civil service processes was a spectacular success.

And then there’s Ukraine, of course. I must admit I’m slightly sceptical of the idea that Boris was an especially unique figure in marshalling western support after the full-scale invasion – not least because virtually every other European leader and mainstream British politician have been closely aligned on the issue. But hey, Britain has still played a disproportionate role in supporting Ukraine and it happened on the Tories’ watch, so fair play I guess.

And hell, I’ll even grant Rishi some credit during his short tenure⁶. Putting AI regulation on the international agenda has at least gestured towards meeting what is a major technological moment. And it is probably a good thing that Britain, with its expertise in regulating things, is proactively working on AI safety now, rather than playing catch-up in ten years’ time.

There are also plenty of other ‘achievements’ I could point to too, because once you peer beneath the surface of government, there’s a lot of poorly paid, hardworking civil servants just plugging away doing broadly sensible things.

But there is one other specific achievement I want to highlight as the party heads out of office. It was an initiative that was revolutionary at the time, and remains a revolutionary idea today – and it only happened because the Tories mustered the political will to make it happen – and we’re all better off for it.

I’m talking of course about the government’s approach to digital public services.

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The genius of GOV.UK

If you’ve renewed your passport recently then you might have noticed something surprising: The experience of doing so isn’t shit.

Look how un-shit this is.

If you used GOV.UK, the government’s website, then it was almost certainly completely painless: You typed in your credentials, uploaded a photo that you took in your own home, and a few days later a new passport dropped through your letterbox. It’s brilliant.

However – the brilliance is not simply an accident.

In fact, the reason so many government services are now so easy to use is the result of a lot of hard work that began in 2011 with the founding of the Government Digital Service (GDS). It’s an arm of the Cabinet Office, and it was tasked with the mission of redesigning and rebuilding what was then an absolute horror of a government digital estate.

To give you a sense of where it was starting from back when GDS was created, the government didn’t know how many websites it had. This is because government services were fragmented across departments, which in turn had contracted out different digital services to third party providers. They all, invariably, looked more like Geocities than what we have today, and were woefully unprepared for the smartphone era that was then just getting started.

And it was into this nightmare that GDS was born⁷. What made it successful was not that the team there redesigned a few websites to look better, but that it took an entirely new approach to digital, underpinned by a number of important principles.

For example, one key early decision was that the government’s digital presence should be organised around tasks people might want to actually complete, and not the structure of government.

Say you wanted to check your benefit payments, the idea was that you wouldn’t need to know whether you need HMRC, DWP or the Job Centre – instead you can just log on to the single government domain, GOV.UK, and different welfare-related tasks would be organised around getting what you want, not divided up to match the government’s internal bureaucracy⁸.

Behind the scenes the GOV.UK website was cleverly designed too. Because it is centralised, GDS has built a bunch of services that every government department can use for its own purposes.

At the most basic level, this is the publishing tools for departments to post announcements, policy papers and transparency documents like spending records. Think something that functions like a glorified Wordpress blog.

But these common services go much deeper too. For example, ‘Notify’ is a common set of tools for government services to send messages to people. It means that instead of a department needing to spin up its own email or text messaging system, such functionality can integrated with just a few lines of code.

It can even send postal letters on behalf of departments, without them needing to employ their own people to stuff envelopes (or worse still, go through a torturous procurement process to find someone to do it). And when new technology is invented, presumably it will mean all government messaging can be upgraded at the same time⁹.

Another example is payments. Instead of departments needing to create their own system so that you can pay a bill or a fee, government departments can just use GOV.UK Pay, which can be centrally kept up-to-date with new payment methods (like the introduction of Apple Pay).

In essence then, GOV.UK is really bloody clever. It’s government designed with sound digital principles at the heart of it – meaning better access to public services for everyone. That can only be a good thing. And I haven’t even mentioned how it bakes in open standards and transparency and all of that good stuff too.

Fighting with government

What makes the GDS story particularly interesting isn’t just that it was (broadly¹⁰) a huge success – but also why it was successful. And that’s not a tech story – it’s a political one.

Simply put, GDS was massively disruptive to business as usual for how the government did IT. Because it wasn’t just a high-minded exercise in good digital policy, but it was an enormous power-grab by the Cabinet Office, at the expense of other government departments.

What made GDS work was that it was able to enforce its standards and its approach by singularly controlling digital spending across government.

When GDS was created, the dictat was enforced that only it may sign off on new IT contracts¹¹. This means that if a government department wanted to make a new website or create a new digital service, it had to comply with GDS’s strict design standards. That’s why over the last decade or so different departments have slowly gotten better at digital stuff – because the Cabinet Office was forcing them to.

And this is where the credit for the Tories comes in: It didn’t have to be like this.

It’s only because the right politicians maintained the political will to force through such institutional changes that the GDS approach was able to embed itself across government¹². And given that so much of government is often departments fighting with each other, this in itself is a real, legit achievement¹³.

It was also a brave decision to back GDS in the early days too. We weren’t the first country to embrace digital government so whole-heartedly¹⁴, but there was not really a model for doing it this way at the time. It’s not surprising that in the years since, GDS has become a global leader – to the extent that the New Zealand government literally reuses our code for their own website.

This looks weirdly familar.

And to be clear, the creation of GOV.UK also involved making some controversial choices. There are serious and clever people who I like and respect who, none-the-less, are furious with the idea of GDS – and have completely valid criticisms.

For example, by orienting GOV.UK around tasks and focusing on accessibility, this somewhat necessarily makes it harder for specialist users to find the things they need.

The FT’s Chris Cook is a long-time critic of the site for this reason, and once wrote “I think of the GDS as a hunter, roaming the internet looking for functional websites and murdering them, all in the name of making sure someone can search Ofsted and the MHRA simultaneously, for some reason.”

He is also critical of the deliberate eliding of departments into one – arguing that it damages accountability, as it is (by design) less clear who is responsible for what.

And similarly, the technologist Tom Forth has long been critical of GDS’s centralising nature – advocating instead that digital powers and responsibilities be devolved down to departments and local authorities, not hoarded by the Cabinet Office.

So there are some real trade-offs at the heart of the GDS approach to digital government. But my view is that on balance, given where digital government was before GDS – and where it is now, I think the GDS approach has clearly been a huge success, and we can unironically credit the Tories with this.

Don’t fuck it up, Labour

Even if the Tories are leaving office, the GDS ‘story’ is far from over. Not least because GOV.UK is still not finished.

This is partially because modernising the government’s digital services is a somewhat sisyphean task. There will always be services that need updating as technology evolves and government policies change.

But even beyond this, there is still a lot of government that is still waiting for an initial GDS-style transformation too. This is because despite the lick of paint on the front-end, behind-the-scenes services are still outdated. That’s why even today there are still some widely used government services that when you click through to them seemingly transport you back in time.

For example, I’m told that the Driving and Vehicle Licensing Agency – DVLA – is one of the government agencies that is more resistant to change.

Some of its services do feel fully ‘modern’. I recently renewed my driving licence and it took pleasingly few clicks, and even automatically updated my photo by connecting with the Passport service. Great¹⁵.

But if you want to do something insane, like, (gasp!) update your address, suddenly you’re back on Geocities. In fact, when I had to do this a few years ago it was literally impossible for me to do online because the website didn’t like the apostrophe in my name¹⁶, so I literally had to go to the Post Office and fill in a paper form¹⁷.

This is because in many cases across government, the backend systems driving a lot of government services are still the same as they were two decades ago. In fact, in some cases you might fill in a modern looking form on GOV.UK, but all it actually might do is send an email to a human civil servant, who will then manually enter your details into whatever ancient system is still in use.

So there is still a job to do. And what worries me about this is that on a political level the iron-willed political commitment to GDS has weakened considerably.

In more recent years, for example, the organisation has shed staff through maddening reorganisations and pay freezes. And institutionally, GDS power over spend controls has been weakened, and departments have begun to reassert their own power over digital decisions – which means more fragmentation and less adherence to the core principles that made the government’s digital approach so successful.

And this is a very political problem, as it’s not a coincidence that GDS was at the height of its power when a politically powerful Francis Maude was in the Cabinet Office – and that GDS has since been led by a parade of basically useless, no-hoper ministers, with Heather Wheeler perhaps the nadir.

So I hope that as Labour enters office, it learns from this. If Keir Starmer appoints a close ally with political power to oversee GDS, then that will be a good sign – it will not just signal that he is taking digital matters seriously, but he will give GDS the political capital it needs to do it’s job. But if he just appoints a nobody for political reasons? Then there’s a very real risk that Labour could continue the unwinding of one of the Tories’ very best political achievements.

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1. Let’s see if this aspiration can last through the next six weeks.

2. This is a very funny joke but the annoying reality is that my subscriber list also includes a Tory MP on the right of the party and a moderately well known far-left writer and pundit. I assume they just can’t get enough of my milquetoast takes.

3. Yes this was arguably a LibDem thing, led by Ed Davey when he was in the Cabinet – but even so, it was a Tory government and the Conservatives went along with it.

4. Imagine how dumb you’d have to be to campaign on Net Zero scepticism and anti-Green measures if you have this legitimately great achievement to lean on.

5. Apparently the original idea came from Sir Patrick Vallance, but it may never have happened had Cummings not pushed for it.

6. Liz Truss was, of course, only right about this one specific thing.

7. I suppose at this point I should declare that, er, someone close to me used to work at GDS and that I know a bunch of people who either work there or used to work there. But I like to think this just means you can better trust my retelling over the story, given that I literally used to watch the GDS softball team play their league matches. Though just in case any Cabinet Office press officers are reading, I want to clarify that they, er, never told me any internal gossip in the pub afterwards and focused conversation entirely on the government’s messaging priorities.

8. Here’s a great 14-year-old blog post from Martin Belam showing just how difficult it can be to break out of departmental silos when designing a web presence – though in his case, he’s talking about the BBC and not the government.

9. Imagine new richer forms of SMS message for example, like something based on RCS, or sending messages via WhatsApp or whatever.

10. Nobody mention Verify.

11. I think there’s some nuance to this, and I could write a thousand word footnote boring on at length about exactly what was and wasn’t covered, and the timing of it, but this is the general thrust of it.

12. So we can mostly thank to Francis Maude, who was the GDS minister during the early years for this.

13. Think about how many times you’ve read about a spat between, say, the Treasury and any other department.

14. Estonia is famously a very digital-first country, and even backs itself up to Luxembourg every night to secure its services against Russia fucking about.

15. Another interesting GDS design principle is that unlike most other websites, instead of the goal being to make you spend as much time on there as possible, GOV.UK wants to sort out your problem and let you leave quickly.

16. This is the last remaining acceptable form of discrimination.

17. Words cannot describe how furious this made me.