Introducing The ‘Push Notification’ State

Illustration by Tracy Worrall

Taking to the stage inside the Government Digital Service’s Whitechapel headquarters back in January, Technology Secretary Peter Kyle eschewed the suit-and-tie uniform of Westminster, and instead dressed down in tech industry-standard jeans and a smart-casual jacket to reveal the Labour Party’s latest plan for digitising government.

The headlines out of the event focused on one particularly eye-catching announcement: that later this year, you will no longer need to carry your physical driving licence. Instead, it’ll be possible to carry a virtual copy on your phone – inside a virtual ‘wallet’ on the forthcoming GOV.UK app.

But as convenient as this will be for motorists, the most important announcement received significantly less attention: Kyle also used the occasion to publish a new ‘blueprint’ for digital government.

On the surface, it looks like any other dull strategy document that the government publishes, with talk of procurement, skills and transparency. But read it more closely and the blueprint is almost startlingly ambitious. If the government is successfully able to deliver on what it promises, it could transform the relationship between citizens and the state.

The next generation
What makes the blueprint significant is that it signals a transition to what is arguably the next generation of digital government.

The first generation began in the 1990s and early 2000s, with the first efforts to put government services online – interactions like filing tax returns and renewing driving licences.

The second generation was what happened following the creation of the Government Digital Service, starting in 2011, which took a more holistic approach to how government services should work online. It created the ‘single domain’ GOV.UK website, and made interacting with many government services feel almost as slick as using Google or Facebook.

And ‘almost’ is the key word here. Though the GOV.UK website looks the part, services are still disjointed and disconnected from each other.

In other words, though it is definitely more convenient to file your tax return online, it isn’t massively different from filling in a paper form and sending it to HMRC through the post. And once your digital tax return arrives at HMRC… nothing particularly smart happens.

For example, say you update your address with HMRC after moving home. Though HMRC might update its records, it won’t tell the other bits of government you might interact with, like the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), or the DVLA. The only way to keep your records up-to-date is for you to take the time to do all the admin yourself.

So, now we reach the third generation – and the big idea in the blueprint is, essentially, joining the government up. Because the government holds a lot of data – and if the countless databases and services could talk to each other, it could make the government work a lot better.

For example, say your local council rules that your child has special needs – it would be useful if DWP could be told about this automatically, so that you can receive any benefits you’re entitled to. Or how about if people newly granted British citizenship could have their National Insurance and driving licence records updated as part of the same process, instead of needing to fill in separate forms?

As things stand, this sort of automation is technically impossible because the government and its computer systems are so siloed. But this is something the blueprint intends to fix with two key conceptual shifts.

Introducing OneLogin
The first step in joining up the government has already started.

For all but a few exceptions, at the moment most government services have their own independent login systems – meaning that you might have separate user accounts for paying your taxes, claiming your benefits, and paying the fee on the Dartford Crossing, for example.
But this is all set to change with OneLogin, which is a unified login system that will eventually work across government. This will mean that you’ll only need to remember one username and password for almost every government service.

At the moment, only a few dozen smaller government services have moved over to the new system, like fishing permits and signing a mortgage deed. But at some as yet undetermined point in the future, the most-used services – HMRC, DWP and Companies House – will join the system.

What makes this important is not just that it’s more convenient for users – it’s because OneLogin is also the glue that will tie together different government services. 

Once you’ve logged into two different services with the same account, the government can be confident that they belong to the same person. And that’s what makes it possible to reliably join together services – so that updating one government department about a change in circumstances can cascade your updated information to the other parts of government that need to know. The blueprint calls this the “once only” rule.

The Bezos mandate
However, a shared login system is only one part of joining up government services. The other problem is technical – how to make different systems talk to each other. This is why the blueprint also contains plans to create a “digital backbone” that will oblige government systems to expose their data and functionality through service interfaces – what we today call APIs (application programming interfaces).

This isn’t a new idea – in fact, in tech circles, it is known as the ‘Bezos mandate’, named for the Amazon founder, who ordered the different divisions of his company to do the same back in 2002.

But simply put, an API is a method in computing that essentially enables two computer systems to talk to each other without the need for humans to press buttons or sit in the middle of the process.

And once every service has an API for exchanging data, it essentially turns the different parts of government into Lego blocks for developers to build with.

For example, let’s say the Department for Education wanted to build a system to check whether a family was eligible for free school meals. Instead of needing to hold meetings and set up bespoke technical processes to access the data held by HMRC or DWP, it could instead just write a few lines of code to connect to the HMRC or DWP API to download the information required.

From England to Platformland
Described in isolation, these changes might not sound revolutionary. But the cumulative effect of making it possible to join systems together and share data more easily could be profoundly transformative.

For example, in the book Platformland, author Richard Pope, who contributed to the blueprint, imagines a future where you might log on to the GOV.UK app and, much like Facebook, it could display notifications relevant to your life. It might remind you to file your tax return, to apply for a benefit that you’re eligible for, or to enrol your child in school.
So if the blueprint is delivered, it could dramatically improve the experience of interacting with the government.

But taken to their logical extent, these changes could signal more profound changes too. For example, there are tricky questions of privacy raised by linking together different government systems. And perhaps it could lead to a government that feels more paternalistic, as instead of waiting for citizens to call, it pushes notifications out.

It could rewire Westminster too. At the moment, power is divided between departments, with each its own independent fiefdom. But in a future where systems are linked together, where departments can reach into each other’s systems and poke around? Suddenly the division of power doesn’t seem quite so straightforward.

So, while the GOV.UK app might start as a handy place to store your driving licence, it could also hold the key to a radical new relationship between citizens and the state.