Innovation and entrepreneurship are the key to better government.
17 June 2024
The next decade can be a golden age for public service reform.
Not necessarily because of which party will be in government, but because they will be operating in an era in which it’s practical to remake our institutions rather than simply maintain them.
Digital services are quicker to prototype, easier to scale and significantly less costly to run than their 20th century analogue predecessors. Most importantly, best-in-class digital services are what citizens in the 21st century expect – and are entitled to.
Any government that means business should be taking maximum advantage of technology to do better for less.
This post is about how to get there as quickly and impactfully as possible.
Most people take GOV.UK for granted nowadays, but it wasn’t always this way. In the early 2010s a new Government Digital Service rationalised hundreds (and then thousands) of government websites onto a single domain and award-winning design system.
The full story of this revolution in digital government is worth your time. For now, the pertinent point is that a small team of outsiders came into government and quickly delivered the sort of meaningful progress that eluded the incumbent bureaucracy. The things they built had a direct and positive impact on peoples’ lives.
The basic principles have stood the test of time: focus on user needs, build digital services so good that people choose to use them, and leverage open source and commodity services to move fast and save money.
The next big leap will be to apply this approach across the whole of government. Of course transforming hospital appointments, tax and benefits administration, school applications, or dozens of other touchpoints between citizens and the state is not the same task as transforming government publishing. But it’s not so different either, and is central to a radical but sensible reform agenda.
While powerful, the approach pioneered by GDS also has its vulnerabilities. Outsiders in government derive authority from their political sponsors, but politics is an unpredictable business. And in time, outsiders can get captured by the very systems they were brought in to change.
The solution is not to compromise on ambition, but to double down.
For the next phase of reform, government should empower more entrepreneurs on the outside to build and ship better public service experiences – and let them compete directly with the incumbent bureaucracy to meet user needs.
To make this work, government would:
If a new service successfully scales past an agreed threshold of citizen takeup it would become the norm, and a date would be set for its predecessor to be retired (and any edge cases to be accommodated).
If a new service fails to find product-market fit, it would wind down fast with financial consequences for investors. This is to be expected, and should not be problematic in a portfolio of investments with different likelihoods of paying off. In fact, if none of the investments failed this would signal a lack of ambition, not good management!
With enough startups backed, an approach like this could incubate a whole new generation of public-minded entrepreneurs who transform government for the better – and maybe even go on to export their ideas around the world.
Any attempt to focus more energy on remaking the state is much more likely to bear fruit with the right digital foundations in place. Some sensible places to start would include:
These are prerequisites for making existing government systems interoperable with third-party service providers. The state will have to be the one to put these foundations in place, and this should be a top priority at the very heart of government. Without this interoperability, the dream of radical improvements driven by crowding in innovation will be dead on arrival.
All of this is one example of how to think about Government as a Platform – providing common core infrastructure to underpin a range of different citizen-facing services. It’s important to note that what’s envisaged here is quite different to other interpretations that focus on building reusable components for use inside government (though the two approaches can co-exist).
There’s little dispute that centrally-directed government monopolies over public services drove huge progress in the 20th century. The institutions born in that era tend to move slowly though, and the pressure to change is never particularly high (unless there is a crisis). In the language of business, they accumulate sustaining innovations and are never pushed by disruptive challengers to fundamentally rethink how they serve their users.
It’s like being stuck with Blockbuster when we could be enjoying Netflix.
Even when they know this, policymakers responsible for public service reform are often hesitant about adopting a more radical agenda. But the purpose of government is to deliver the things citizens need to lead happy, prosperous and fulfilling lives – not to cement the institutional status quo.
Importantly, a mission to accelerate innovation in government by harnessing technology and entrepreneurship is entirely consistent with progressive values. Public services that do a better job of meeting user needs are self-evidently desirable; any savings that result can be recycled to improve the important things government does that can’t be automated or digitised.
Faced with the twin challenges of a dire fiscal position and rising populism, progressive leaders cannot afford to settle for incremental change. Bold strategies built around the use of technology to deliver significant, rapid and broadly shared benefits offer the best prospect for the centre to hold.
This means urgently creating the right conditions to remake our institutions for the 21st century – not because state capacity has had its day, but because effective institutions have never mattered more.