Presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation & Technology by Command of His Majesty

January 2025

© Crown copyright 2025

CP 1252

ISBN 978 1 5286 5375 6

Secretary of State foreword

The UK public sector has some digital services to be proud of, including those that help millions of people do things like apply for Universal Credit, Register to Vote, check for flood warnings, get an MOT test reminder, and order repeat prescriptions with the NHS app. Behind the scenes, there are supporting products like Pay, Notify and One Login, providing invaluable help for the teams that build the services.

Yet it’s easy to see these successes as entirely unremarkable. Across society, people’s expectations are higher, and they keep rising. So your service is available on a phone? So what? Of course it is. That’s the bare minimum that most people expect, most of the time. Too many of our services still fall short of these basic expectations.

It’s vital that government understands and responds to this. We’re still a long way from building a truly digital state - one where services work across institutional boundaries, and where digital credentials enable a more timesaving, personalised user experience. Lots of public sector services stretch across the remit of many central departments, local authority teams, and NHS trusts. There’s a lot we can do to link those services up, while reducing the bureaucratic burden on the public to remember dozens of different accounts and passwords.

It’s also vital that government responds to rapid advances in technology. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a paradigm shift, bringing substantial new opportunities that we must explore, understand and embrace - responsibly. 

There’s a con to every pro - the more we use technology, the greater the risk from technological threats. So we must protect against them. The more we use technology, the harder we must work to serve people who are less able to use it, or less confident using it. 

It’s not enough for government to just ‘keep up’ with the scale of change happening all around us. We have to understand it, use it, and shape it. And we must grasp every opportunity to drive greater value for money for the taxpayer.

The newly formed digital centre of government has been set up to lead work that’s more than just a change – it will help catalyse a wholesale reshaping of the public sector, reaching out to local government, the NHS, and the private sector too.

This document sets out how we see the current state of play, our vision for what the future might look like, and a plan for reaching it. I’d like to thank members of the external advisory panel, my ministerial colleagues and digital transformation leaders in departments for helping to create it.

It offers a long-term view that will take many years to bring about. This plan is only the starting point. 

Rt Hon Peter Kyle MP

Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology

Executive summary

1. The case for change

Despite the work of digital teams across the public sector to deliver better designed, time-saving public services, progress over the last 15 years has been uneven, and it hasn’t been fast or systemic enough. 

Rapid advances in AI make it possible to transform our public services at a faster pace than ever before. But while new technology presents us with ever-expanding possibilities to improve the way that government delivers for the public, it also demands that our people have the right skills and are enabled to work together across organisational boundaries.

The State of Digital Government Review published alongside this paper has identified deep systemic challenges: institutionalised fragmentation; persistent legacy, cyber and resilience risk; siloed data; under-digitisation; inconsistent leadership; a skills shortfall; diffuse buying power; and outdated funding models.

Addressing these means a fundamental shift - for whole organisations, not just digital teams. We must not underestimate the scale of the changes and challenges ahead. We need to adopt a digital-first operating model where we treat digital leadership skills as essential for senior leaders, redesign our services, and how we work, and use shared digital and data infrastructure to meet common needs. It must be underpinned by new funding models which support safe, sustainable services. And digital inclusion must be at the heart of how we do this, ensuring as many people as possible can access public services digitally, and that we support the digitally excluded.

2. The vision for modern digital government

The vision for modern digital government in the UK is to enable the following outcomes: 

• Easier lives: delivering transparent, next-generation public services that do the hard work for the public, can be accessed and used by everyone who needs them, and are designed around the user.
• Faster growth: helping businesses start and scale by delivering services that work as well as they do for citizens.
• Firmer foundations: securing public services so they are trustworthy and resilient. 
• Smarter organisations: changing how delivery is done to embed the right ways of working, moving at the same pace that people’s lives do, and working as agile, user-centred, multidisciplinary teams by default.
• Higher productivity and efficiency: saving public money, delivering outstanding public services at a price we can afford, and enabling front-line workers to focus on delivery.

3. A six-point plan for public sector digital reform

Transforming government for the digital era will not be straightforward. We’ve identified a set of six priorities to help us get there: 

1. Join up public sector services: enabling next-generation public services, better supporting businesses, redesigning cross-organisation end-to-end service delivery, ensuring services are consistently high standard, and acting as one public sector.
2. Harness the power of AI for the public good: establishing an AI adoption unit to build and deploy AI into public services, growing AI capacity and capability across government, and building trust, responsibility and accountability into all we do.
3. Strengthen and extend our digital and data public infrastructure: expanding GOV.UK One Login and other common components, enabling access to data through the National Data Library, strengthening cyber and technical resilience and building more responsibly.
4. Elevate leadership, invest in talent: elevating digital leadership to the centre of public sector decision-making, investing in the digital and data profession and competing for talent and raising the digital skills baseline for all public servants.
5. Fund for outcomes, procure for growth and innovation: reforming government’s approach to funding digital and technology and maximising the value and potential of public procurement.
6. Commit to transparency, drive accountability: publishing and acting more on performance data, and doing more of the work of government ‘in the open’ so that people can help shape changes that affect them.

4. Driving this change

This change will be led by the new digital centre of government. The digital centre exists to serve the public, departments and the wider public sector. It will be magnetic: the home of specialist expertise in digital service design, artificial intelligence and other areas. It will be catalytic: enabling teams to work together more easily to deliver the government’s missions and power public sector reform. It will be strategic: ensuring that the use of digital in the public sector drives efficiency and productivity gains, and helping to accelerate economic growth. 

And it will be collegiate: working in partnership with colleagues across and beyond the public sector - including over time with local councils, police forces and arm’s length bodies (ALBs) - who will continue to be home to the vast majority of digital, data and technology specialists.

The public sector cannot deliver next-generation public services alone: we need to work in partnership with industry and civil society to drive digital change in the public sector but also to support growth in the UK tech sector. 

5. Next steps

Today we are:

• Launching the new digital centre of government, to be known as the Government Digital Service.
• Announcing five ‘kickstarter’ tests and products, including a GOV.UK App. 
• Launching new collaborations to accelerate work in priority areas, such as in local government and with the Government Commercial Function.

This document is the start of a conversation: there’s lots more to do. Over the coming months, we’ll co-develop a new Government Digital & AI Roadmap, to set out our collective priorities and how they will help drive the government’s missions and public sector reform. We’ll do this in parallel with the second phase of the Spending Review. We’ll work in the open as we go, seeking input and collaboration from colleagues across central government, the wider public sector, civil society, and tech companies.

Section 1: The case for change

Context

Over the last 15 years, the UK has enjoyed periods as a global leader in digital government. Digital teams across the public sector have delivered more cost effective, time-saving public services: the Universal Credit live service was first introduced in 2013; by 2016, millions of people had access to their own digital tax account; by 2017, almost everyone over 16 could renew their passport online; by January of last year, Child Benefit claims could be made online for the first time. We’ve also created a simpler, more consistent experience of government through the GOV.UK website and publishing platform.

We’ve implemented other world-class digital public infrastructure such as GOV.UK Notify, Pay, and One Login. We’ve deployed new technologies and techniques in our security services and armed forces. During the pandemic, we showed how teams across the public sector can work to deliver critical outcomes in the national interest, like the Vulnerable People Service that delivered millions of support packages to people who were shielding. 

However, progress has been uneven, and it hasn’t been fast or systemic enough. This has left UK lagging behind leading digital nations around the world and at risk of falling further back. Too many government services fall short of user expectations, and the bureaucratic burden on people and businesses is too high. Seven years after the launch of the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations, we still have a way to go to make sure that services can be accessed and used by everyone who needs them. A number of transformation programmes have foundered, and we aren’t maximising every pound of public money spent.

Critically, we are living through a period of profound shifts in technology. AI is massively expanding what technology can do, changing the way that people expect to interact with digital services. In turn, this is bringing major new opportunities for preventative interventions in public services and to provide more personalised, effective experiences, as well as tools to help public servants do their job better and more efficiently. We are, though, still learning how to use AI responsibly and safely and are yet to harness the benefits at scale; we must make substantial changes to capitalise on this technology.

More widely, our data infrastructure remains fragmented, preventing the delivery of more joined-up, personalised services, and making it harder to realise efficiencies through improved productivity and reduced fraud and waste. We remain dependent on decades-old and costly legacy systems with crumbling foundations. Large parts of the public sector are still digitally immature. We face the most hostile threat landscape ever, at a time when we are ever more dependent on the stability and integrity of our services, and our cyber defences and technical resilience must evolve to cope.

The current paradigm for digital transformation in the public sector is not working to deliver the change we need quickly or systematically enough. We must redefine digital as a value driver rather than a cost centre, making the shift from funding one-off digital projects to funding persistent product teams; and from long discovery projects to delivering value early. We need to move away from digitising transactional services one at a time, towards more automated, real-time services; and from digital skills being seen as a specialism to an institutional understanding in every area of policy and service delivery. 

This is a key element of how we can reform our public services so that they are more people-centred and responsive, helping to catalyse broader societal and economic change, giving public servants the tools and freedom to innovate, while ensuring they are held to account for delivering high standards for everyone, everywhere.

We know that major, structural change is needed if we are to meet these objectives. Most critically, we are encumbered by the siloed structure of government and incentives that act against modern approaches. When value is measured only within organisational boundaries, it’s hard to invest in technology and services that create value beyond them. 

Net satisfaction of digital government services has declined over the past decade from 79% to 68%. Users’ expectations continue to rise: people expect government services to provide the same convenience and personalisation that they see in private sector services. They can see what’s possible. They want government to be raising the bar on universality, inclusion, reliability, security and transparency. There’s a generation gap to address: today’s young adults do not remember a time when most services were not digital; but we also need to deliver on their high expectations in a way that doesn’t exclude anyone.

Progress to date has been thanks to the efforts of dedicated people across the public sector. There’s much to learn from that work and from those people. But digital teams still often lack the capacity and endorsement required to innovate and solve problems for the widest possible benefit. 

The State of Digital Government

The Secretary of State commissioned a comprehensive review of the state of digital across the public sector, engaging more than 100 organisations, including local authorities, hospital trusts, police forces and central government departments. This is available as a standalone report which supplements and supports this one.

The review found many ways in which public sector digital teams excel: on average they’ve embraced cloud services faster than the private sector; used data and AI to improve clinical outcomes and the speed of emergency response; and found innovative ways to build and distribute mobile apps in response to national crises.

However, too often, these achievements have been made despite the system rather than because of it. Teams depend on creative ingenuity to overcome constraints imposed by cumbersome processes, legacy systems and a lack of stable funding and resources. These achievements are typically in isolation: sharing success and reusing code is rare.

The review identified significant challenges across the public sector. These include institutionalised fragmentation: digital services and the technology which underpins them are fragmented between organisations resulting in broken customer journeys, like parents needing to apply for up to 15 services if their child qualifies for free school meals; and duplication, like having over 44 different accounts to interact with government.

It confirmed the existence of persistent legacy. Despite prior funding for legacy remediation, organisations still report that high percentages of their services depend on unsupported, unpatched legacy technology systems: the count of the highest risk and most critical systems rose by 26% from 2023 to 2024 as organisations struggle to maintain focus on risk remediation alongside other priorities. Under-digitisation also persists, with only half of public services digitised, and digital expenditure 30% below benchmarks in industry and other governments. 

Government is also carrying significant cyber and technology resilience risk. We have seen a number of high-profile incidents across the public sector that have had real world impacts on citizens’ lives and incurred new costs to repair the damage done.

Siloed data continues to hinder collaboration. Data sharing between and within organisations, even after recent legislative changes and sustained effort, is high friction, with agreements taking months or even years to negotiate. 

There is inconsistent leadership. Most senior leaders don’t get the training or preparation they need to run digital organisations. Most organisations do not have digital leaders on their executive committee. Linked to this, there is a skills shortfall; the remuneration offer and overall employee value proposition is not competitive with private industry, resulting in stalled increase in growth in digital and resources, talent churn across the sector, and over-dependence on third parties at higher cost. 

Diffuse buying power dilutes value for money. Despite central constructs such as frameworks and Memoranda of Understanding, public sector organisations contract locally and individually, holding back the potential of our buying power of over £26 billion p.a.. Our funding models are outdated: over the last 15 years the technology industry has moved from a capital intensive model to a revenue intensive model, in which teams are funded on an ongoing basis and services are paid for by subscription. 

By contrast, most public sector digital funding is provided in a programme model more suitable for physical infrastructure projects. There is a clear need for sustainable funding models that support run costs over several years.

Underlying these challenges we have identified five root causes that need to be addressed in order to overcome them. These are:

• Leadership: There is little reward for prioritising an agenda of service digitisation, reliability, or risk mitigation. Organisational leaders are not paid, promoted, or valued for doing so. Digital leaders are not consistently placed at senior levels, and do not have the power to shape the strategic agenda.
• Structure: Public sector organisations are independent bodies with limited mechanisms to contract services from each other. Consequently, most choose to build and maintain their own technology estate, inhibiting standardisation, interoperability, reuse, and constraining the ability to benefit from scale. 
• Measurement: There is no consistent measurement of digital performance across the public sector, including service quality, cost, risk, or ability to deliver change. This lack of measurement inhibits the ability to recognise high performance, identify organisations which need help, and make cross-sector strategic decisions.
• Talent: Compensation and career progression are uncompetitive with the private sector, especially for senior leaders, making it hard to attract and retain top digital and data talent. The lack of an integrated cross-public sector workforce strategy limits the sector’s ability to respond strategically to resource and skills gaps. 
• Funding: Spend is biased towards new programmes with insufficient prioritisation of the effective operation and maintenance of existing systems, especially legacy assets. This presents an acute challenge for digital services, which increasingly depend on committed and sustained funding.

Section 2: The vision for modern digital government

Below, we set out our long-term vision for the future of digital government in the UK, to enable five outcomes: easier lives, faster growth, firmer foundations, smarter organisations, and higher productivity.

It’s a future that relies on more smart automation, without expecting it to take over. A future where the whole public sector works together as a buyer and builder of public services. A future where those services work harder, mostly behind the scenes, to improve people’s lives and contribute to economic growth. A future where “digital” is not an add-on, an optional extra, or something that’s outsourced: it’s embedded. It’s structural. And it’s permanent.

This is an ambitious and far-reaching vision, one that will require a combined effort across the whole public sector over the next decade. We recognise the challenge it represents. It won’t be easy or quick. It represents a significant shift in culture and ways of working. This is not just a shift for digital teams, but for all public servants. As well as delivering great digital services, we need to shape policy and legislation to be digital-ready and reimagine front-line operations for the digital age. It asks a lot, from teams and organisations already working hard to deliver critical live services.

It’s a vision for everyone: the people who use and rely on public services, and the people who design and deliver them right across the public sector, including smaller organisations and ALBs, local authorities and NHS trusts, as well as the larger central government departments. We know that the public, public servants, civil society and businesses all have a contribution to make to this vision, and we will set up the right routes to work in partnership with them.

This is a vision. There is more work to do to build the detailed plan to deliver, and we know it will take time and effort to make this a reality. It sets out where we want to get to, and a direction of travel for achieving it, but we expect that the details will change along the way as we test new approaches and learn what works. These measures are ambitions and will be subject to the allocation of funding through the usual terms of trade between departments, or other means. In Section 1 we set out a six-point plan for how we will begin the reforms necessary to achieve this vision.

What we want to deliver

Easier lives

Modern digital government should reduce the ‘time tax’ on people using public services. Not just the time it takes to use a service, but the time to understand what needs to be done. The future we see is one where services are designed around people: wasting less time, money, and energy, and cutting the time that UK citizens spend trying to access public services. 

That means accelerating improvements to user experience, and reimagining public services so they’re more proactive and more joined up. It shouldn’t be a citizen’s job to work out what benefits it’s worth them applying for. Nor should it be a business owner’s job to remember what steps the government needs them to take when starting a new business.

What that looks like: 

• Next-generation public sector services will do the hard work for the public: anticipating, reminding, and connecting.
• Services will understand more about the people who use them, which means those people will have to understand less about how services work. Services will come with built-in timelines and status updates, so people always know where they stand and what happens next. 
• Services will come to users, not the other way around. They will be there, when and where people need them: in their pocket, at the GP surgery, on the high street.
• Public services will work for everyone. No-one should have difficulty using government services - that includes disabled people and people who need extra support, as well as those who don’t have internet access, or lack the skills or confidence to use it. This applies for people across the UK, as well as British citizens overseas. It will be easier for workers, carers and volunteers supporting those in need to arrange services on behalf of those they support. 

Faster growth

Economic growth is a priority for the UK. We need to help businesses start and grow faster and more easily than before, through services that minimise the bureaucracy. We should make the business of running a business less of a chore. 

There’s also the business of doing business with government. There’s a lot we could improve about how public data is made available - with appropriate safeguards and permissions - for new commercial opportunities. And there’s a lot we could improve about how suppliers and start-ups can work with government and across the wider public sector to solve the most pressing public challenges.

What that looks like: 

• Government services for businesses will be as good as those for individuals, making it easy for them to do the things they need to. We’ll use clarity as an enabler: it will be clearer what licences and certifications a business must apply for, what permissions it must seek, what tasks it must complete, and which it’s already completed. 
• Businesses will be able to connect to digital public infrastructure, to build new products and services, with appropriate security and privacy controls. They’ll be able to create new services, catalysing growth and innovation.
• Government will build a new relationship with the commercial sector, becoming a helpful collaborator rather than a source of frustration. It’ll be easier for innovators and entrepreneurs to work with government, and the public will get better value for money.

Firmer foundations

People expect that public services are secure, accurate, trustworthy, and available when they need them. This needs to remain true even in the face of cyber threats and attacks, and as we begin to use AI more in public service delivery.

We need to reset our relationship with technology risk so it’s managed effectively, to reduce our dependence on decades-old legacy systems and bolster our inadequate cyber defences - all without slowing down the pace of change.

There’s also enormous untapped value in the data and technology capabilities locked in silos across the public sector. We want to release that value, reducing duplication, fragmentation and waste. Data should be treated as a public asset, along with the platforms that facilitate access to it. Central government needs to be better connected and integrated with the wider public sector, including local government.

What that looks like:

• We will have a clear understanding of the risks facing digital public services, and manage them responsibly, investing public money efficiently to tackle the most urgent cyber security and technical resilience risks. We’ll learn from industry and use data to track progress.
• Government will hold itself publicly accountable for the safety, security and quality of services, publishing performance and progress transparently and building in mechanisms to enable evaluation, audit and challenge.
• Public sector organisations will be connected, not fragmented. Modern digital public infrastructure will make public organisations more integrated, and we’ll responsibly share high value data within and outside the public sector.

Smarter organisations 

Changing what the public sector delivers means changing how delivery is done. Too often, we ship the org chart. Despite a number of improvements to processes and practices, we still need major reform to embed modern ways of working and thinking as the norm. 

This goes deeper than agile service design teams – it reaches into every part of our work, including funding and governance. It means we’ll need to be more systematic in how we find, train and retain the expert practitioners we need, and be bolder in breaking down the barriers that get in their way.

It also means investing in the component parts that make large scale digital service design possible – the platforms, data, and digital credentials that tie everything together.

What that looks like: 

• Government will move at the same pace that people’s lives do. Information will move through the system faster, enabling more automation for uncomplicated, rules-driven tasks and more human intervention to oversee complex cases.
• Public sector digital teams will have the skills and support they need to build services that better echo people’s lives and real-world experiences: in healthcare; in education; and in national, local and devolved government. 
• Agile, user-centred, multidisciplinary teams will be the default in most circumstances, embedding best practice, with service teams that traverse across the public sector in the same way a citizen’s life does. Policy and delivery will always work hand-in-hand, and we’ll have the confidence to test good ideas and learn from failure. 
• We will have the right mix of internal teams and external suppliers, relying less on wholesale outsourcing, but working in partnership with industry to bring in innovation and targeted support.

Higher productivity and efficiency

As economic forces continue to put pressure on public spending and families’ budgets, the need to deliver outstanding public services at a price we can afford has never been greater. The State of Digital Government Review found £45-87 billion per year of savings and productivity benefits are not realised, equivalent to 4-7% of public sector spend.

We know there’s significant scope to deliver better value for the taxpayer by tackling waste, duplication and fraud. We need to look at all opportunities to reduce waste in the way we buy and build services, and to combat fraud through better data exchange and stronger counter-fraud capabilities. To do this we need to build on great examples like GOV.UK One Login, as well as the debt and fraud data sharing powers in the Digital Economy Act, which have saved £137 million since being introduced.

The latest tools and technology, including but not limited to AI, present major savings opportunities. They can take on more of the tasks that humans can do perfectly well, but that computers can do faster. That creates space for humans to do the tasks that computers can’t do at all, allowing public sector workers to focus on delivering the crucial front-line work that will always require human relationships, judgement and empathy.

What that looks like: 

• We’ll reduce the costs of delivery by harnessing AI and automation technologies. AI will give us new tools and techniques for spotting patterns and processing information, with a focus on prevention as well as time saving. If we use it responsibly, it can remove the need for routine automatable tasks and reduce the cost of delivery. 
• We’ll improve value for money by tackling waste and fraud, ensuring every pound of taxpayer money is spent effectively on public service delivery. 
• We’ll put the right tools and technologies into the hands of hard-working public servants. We’ll give workers the tools, training, data access and autonomy to innovate, adapt, and make decisions that best serve the public. We’ll work with public servants to understand which parts of their roles they value most, aiming to achieve not just higher productivity, but also make public sector roles more satisfying.
• Even as they become more digital, services will be more human, too. Technology will do what it does best: calculating, listing, sorting. That will speed up, and scale up, as the technology improves. All of this leaves public servants more opportunities to improve the services where human interactions matter most, maintaining and enhancing public trust and satisfaction.

Section 3: Making it happen: a six-point plan for government digital reform

Setting out a vision is one thing. Making it happen is another. In this section, we set out some of the main changes we believe are needed to start to address the root causes set out in the State of Digital Government Review (Section 1) and work towards the vision set out in Section 2.

These reforms outline the changes the digital centre will need to drive over the coming years, in partnership with colleagues across the public sector. They are an important starting point, setting the direction of travel, but we have more work to do to convert this into a detailed and fully funded roadmap for delivery. That’s why we will develop these ideas into a Government Digital & AI Roadmap alongside the second phase of the Spending Review, to be published in summer 2025. This will supersede the existing 2022-2025 roadmap for digital and data, Transforming for a Digital Future.

Progress since 2022

The 2022-25 roadmap generated a step change in collaboration: senior leadership across government came together to collectively create it and commit themselves to a series of tangible actions. These included: to transform 50 of the top 75 government services to a ‘great’ standard; develop and implement a single sign-in for government services, GOV.UK One Login; and grow the size of the Government Digital and Data profession to 6% of total civil service headcount.

Progress has been made across the roadmap, including:

• Supporting the transformation of priority services by embedding the ‘great’ framework for service performance into government service standards and directly supporting 24 services to reach the ‘great’ standard.
• GOV.UK One Login has now onboarded more than 50 government services for authentication and identity proving, while more than six million people have so far used it to prove who they are.
• Growing vital digital and data capabilities, including bringing new recruits into government through the TechTrack apprenticeship programme which launched in August and received thousands of applications for the first apprenticeship roles. 

However, though delivery against the 2022-25 roadmap laid important foundations, the State of Digital Government Review highlights a number of areas where we have not been able to make enough sustained progress on some of the broader systemic change that is needed. We have more to do to match the government’s aspiration for how digital, data and AI can transform public service delivery. 

What is different this time?

We believe this moment is different. We recognise that an even greater level of ambition is needed; we have learnt from what has worked and what hasn’t; and we have an opportunity to build on the collective commitment of ministers across government to this reform. We have: 

• A recognition across the public sector, from the NHS to the courts system, that digitally-enabled change is a vital and urgent part of getting our public services working again.
• A clear shared vision, backed by senior ministerial sponsorship by the Digital Inter-Ministerial Group representing the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), HM Treasury and the Cabinet Office.
• A strengthened digital centre of government, bringing together specialist digital, data and AI skills into a single central organisation.
• Commitment to fixing the systemic blockers that have held previous attempts back, including a focus on funding models designed for digital delivery through the upcoming spending review, and opportunities to improve public procurement of digital and technology as the Procurement Act 2023 comes into force next year. 
• A moment of change in the technology landscape, with the advent of generative AI bringing new opportunities and threats that compel action.

1. Join up public sector services

To the user, public services are not joined up. Some people have to interact with more than 40 different services across nine organisations when managing a long-term condition or disability. The digital centre will work with departments to enable next generation public services and make it easier to join up and act as one public sector.

Creating GOV.UK and building better services around user needs was a great start. But if we really want services that do the hard work, we need to create the right conditions for building them and change how we develop policy in the first place. 

To radically improve value for money we need new approaches to transforming services, both nationally, and local areas as we invest to support place-based growth. We need to holistically improve policies, business processes, data, and systems rather than on a piecemeal basis. That’s a considerable shift in how government delivers.

The digital centre will build on existing work to enable more personalised user interactions across multiple channels. To make it easier to join up services we plan to scale common infrastructure. We will continue to create a shared digital workplace where public servants can access and use the latest AI and productivity tools. And over time we will extend this work to the wider public sector.

Aligning with other ongoing work on digital inclusion, we aim to improve digital access to public services and support the digitally excluded. 

2. Harness the power of AI for the public good

The digital centre will strengthen responsible AI use and skills across government. The work of the AI Incubator (i.AI) will focus on building and testing AI tools to boost public sector productivity, targeting the £45 billion per year potential improvements identified in the State of Digital Government report. 

As outlined in the recently published AI Opportunities Action Plan, AI has enormous potential to improve lives, drive growth and increase productivity, for example by helping target preventative interventions better at those who need them. We must harness this by integrating AI and automation safely and securely within the design and delivery of public services. We have made a good start, with the creation of i.AI and work in many parts of the public sector to explore and pilot potential opportunities, but there is a long way to go, for example to address the data fundamentals needed to make AI possible.

What’s more, we have a unique opportunity to demonstrate the use of AI in line with public values to promote equity, fairness, and transparency. The public sector will role model the responsible use of AI and seek to partner with the UK’s thriving AI sector in the process.

That means we will continue our work to embed AI and automation in common products and platforms to provide public servants with better tools to support their work and improve services for the public. Building on the work of the Responsible Tech Adoption Unit, we will provide clear and actionable guidance to embed best practices in trust and responsibility, as well as taking a proactive approach to managing the environmental impact of our use of AI and other technologies.

3. Strengthen and extend our digital and data public infrastructure

Our infrastructure needs to be stronger than ever before to protect against current and future threats. In the last year alone, we have seen multiple examples of the impact that our digital systems failing can have on the lives of people across the UK. The digital centre will build on GOV.UK One Login, improve data infrastructure, and strengthen cybersecurity and national technical resilience. 

Thousands of teams across the public sector are already using our world-leading digital components such as GOV.UK Notify, Pay and Design System. We need to do more of this and build the underlying infrastructure that makes it easy for teams across the whole public sector to work together, access shared technical components and data, and connect with external organisations and the public. For example, we will support the introduction of a single unique identifier for children to improve data linkage.

Our infrastructure also needs to be resilient and secure against threats if we’re to build and maintain public trust and confidence. Currently, vital systems and services are too exposed to risk: we need to tackle these and embed security by design, at scale.

That means we will continue our work to expand GOV.UK One Login’s availability, while exploring the development of an equivalent for businesses. We will continue our work to reduce the barriers to sharing data by implementing standards, frameworks and tools that ensure quality, trust, security, privacy and interoperability.

We should adopt best practices for technical resilience, focusing on safeguarding key services and managing failures with integration into existing cyber response capabilities. We will evolve centrally defined guidance with proven patterns and standards developed with industry partners for responsible technology adoption, and we will continue to explore how to improve the environmental sustainability of government’s digital services.

4. Elevate leadership, invest in talent

The public sector’s digital and data capability is severely lacking, and as a result depends heavily on third parties. This is costly, with the average contractor costing three times as much as a public servant. The digital centre will work with the Government People Group to elevate digital leadership, invest in the profession and the competition for talent, and raise the digital skills baseline for all public servants. 

Change won’t happen without the right people with the right expertise, working at the right levels, in multidisciplinary teams. We need greater technological literacy at the top of public sector organisations to ensure that digital is not an add-on but a core skillset across the public sector. 

We need to make digital government the compelling choice for specialists seeking new careers by competing successfully with the private sector, providing an attractive public sector offering for specialists, and growing talent from within.

That means we will continue our work to equip all senior leaders to be effective in the digital age through an updated curriculum and learning programme. We will enhance digital, cyber security, and AI understanding among non-specialists by integrating standards and learning into all professional curricula, which is a significant culture shift. 

We will also work with the people function to run high-profile recruitment campaigns targeting the most important skills gaps. And we will look to expand the cross-government TechTrack upskilling apprenticeship programme and protect headcount to develop the future pipeline of digital experts. We will explore opportunities to link up this work across the broader public sector, for example into the NHS.

5. Fund for outcomes, procure for growth and innovation

Only one in five State of Digital Government survey respondents felt the current funding model enabled effective investment in and running of digital services. The digital centre will work with HM Treasury to reform the government’s funding approach, and work with the Government Commercial Function to maximise the value and potential of public procurement. 

We must spend in line with modern digital practice, both internally and with suppliers. Digital services need to be funded in a way that focuses on outcomes, allows for prototyping, iteration and pivots, addresses risks and enables joined-up action across the sector. The way we fund also needs to explicitly address service resilience, cyber security shortfalls and technical debt - so that we prevent the creation of new and costly legacy. 

As the country’s largest digital buyer, we must also make use of our scale to unlock greater value and procure in a way that drives creation of responsible, inclusive and secure technologies and benefits the public, public services and UK businesses including SMEs.

That means we will continue our work to streamline governance and approvals to enable agility and iterative delivery while protecting value for money. We will also continue our work to negotiate whole-of-public-sector agreements and contracting once for a limited number of high value cases, including platform services such as cloud. And we will align research, innovation and procurement policies to create ‘cradle-to-growth’ relationships with innovators and entrepreneurs.

6. Commit to transparency, drive accountability 

The digital centre will help central government work in the open, publish more performance data and act on it to improve accountability. 

Increased use of technology can improve government services, making them faster, more personalised and consistent. But experience shows that things can go wrong, and that automated mistakes can scale quickly. 

We need to make sure that agile accountability mechanisms are baked into the system, with front-line public servants able to apply oversight and judgement to individual decisions, and senior leaders able to account for the overall operation of a system.

Transparency is crucial to making accountability possible. It is essential to foster trust, giving people and businesses confidence that government organisations are treating them, and their data, with appropriate care.

That means we will enhance transparency by building on the Algorithmic Transparency Recording Standard to increase openness about AI usage, working with the new Responsible AI External Panel (see point two). Our services will be designed to give people visibility and control over how their data is used, ensuring it benefits end users. We will include diverse external voices in impact assessments for new technologies to ensure comprehensive and inclusive evaluations.

Section 4: Driving this change

We’ve made the case for change, set out a vision for what it should look like, and listed our plan for getting started. Next, we will describe how the digital centre will take the lead.

The digital centre will be overseen by the Digital Inter-Ministerial Group consisting of the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and chaired by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. This group will advocate for digital change across government, putting the conditions in place that enable departments to deliver, driving major cross-government digital and data programmes, holding departments to account, and prioritising funding. This new integrated function will be referred to as the Government Digital Service.

The digital centre’s scope and remit

The expanded Government Digital Service will be led by the Government Chief Digital Officer. It will be a distinct unit within the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), unifying existing teams across the Government Digital Service (GDS), the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO), the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (i.AI), Geospatial Commission and parts of the Responsible Tech Adoption Unit into one organisation.

The digital centre exists to serve departments and the wider public sector. It will be magnetic: the home of specialist expertise in digital service design, AI and other areas. It will be catalytic: enabling teams in different organisations to work together more easily to deliver the missions and power public sector reform. It will be strategic: ensuring that the use of digital in the public sector drives efficiency and productivity gains, and helps accelerate economic growth. And it will be collegiate: working in partnership with colleagues across and beyond the public sector - including over time with local councils, police forces and arm’s length bodies (ALBs) - who will continue to be home to the vast majority of digital, data and technology specialists.

Changes in focus

The full remit of the new Government Digital Service is set out in Annex A, but in summary, the focus will shift towards catalysing joined-up delivery in line with the government’s missions, to drive better services that cut across organisational and functional boundaries and different levels of government, and that serve businesses as well as individuals to improve people’s experience of government. That will require us to serve and connect the wider public sector, starting with targeted support for local government and the NHS, and eventually reaching approximately 100,000 digital and data professionals across the public sector. 

As we embrace and encourage the use of AI at scale, we’ll work hard to use it safely and ethically, building upon existing delivery expertise in GDS, and specialist expertise in i.AI to plan, incubate and scale AI products, working with other departments. 

We’ll be responsible for taking a strategic view of national opportunities and risks, developing more strategic relationships with technology companies of all sizes, and proactively monitoring and addressing threats to resilience at a national level. 

There are some things we will stop doing, especially things that are delivered better outside the centre, or where central ownership slows down teams. That will mean radical consolidation of guidance and standards for digital and technology, retiring out-of-date and duplicative things, updating critical ones, streamlining the information teams need and making it easier for them to understand what to do. We’ll reform controls, in favour of more strategic, data-driven decision-making using performance metrics; and close the Top 75 programme in favour of a focus on catalysing deeper service transformation.

What this will feel like for the public sector

We’re not here to take the wheel - we’re here to steady the ship.

The majority of digital teams in central government departments and the wider public sector already know what to do, and how best to do it. They should - and will - continue to lead the delivery of their services, for their users. They will be home to the vast majority of digital, data and technology specialists. The digital centre will support and champion this work, providing leadership and guardrails where needed, and getting out of the way of delivery where it is not. Our aspiration is that organisations will see and feel:

• Greater clarity on what the centre does, and who to go to for what.
• An elevated digital and data profession that is seen as a decision-maker and driver of public service reform. 
• Confidence to work in the open, being open about the challenges and learning in public.
• Public celebration of success, giving hard-working teams credit for their achievements, and helping teams learn from one another. 
• Better support and tools to deliver, including guidance and processes that are easier to understand and less reliant on controls and interventions alone.
• Easier ways to join up work across organisations so that collaboration becomes the norm, teams have the agency to take on cross-cutting challenges, and there is a coherent thread from policy intent to delivery.
• More focus on addressing risks, including cyber security and legacy technology, and data quality.

What this will feel like for suppliers and the UK tech sector 

The public sector cannot deliver this transformation alone: we need to work in partnership with a thriving tech sector across the UK. If we get this relationship right, we can deliver more digital change in the public sector, and support growth in the UK tech sector. Over time, tech companies will find:

• It’s easier to do business with the public sector, regardless of how big your organisation is, with more consistency and less complexity in the demands made of suppliers.
• There are more opportunities to link their products and services directly with digital public services or data sets, delivering more for users, building on good examples in tax and public transport.
• Relationships with the digital centre are clearer, especially for suppliers that supply a product or service to multiple government organisations.

What this will feel like for civil society and local communities

The more we work in the open, the clearer our intentions will be. That helps people feel that they have a voice, they are listened to, and that they can play a part in shaping the services they rely on. Civil society groups have a key role to play in making this possible. We will follow the principles of the Civil Society Covenant Framework launched by the Prime Minister in October 2024, which are currently being consulted on. Civil society groups will find that:

• They are invited to co-design services in partnership with communities and public sector workers to ensure they are responsive to their needs.
• They are able to use data sets to influence their own decision making and service delivery.
• Their voices are listened to and respected, via the new Responsible Tech Advisory Panel.
• The public sector holds itself to the highest standards of ethics, accountability and transparency in its use of AI and digital technologies.

Section 5: Next steps

Today, we’re establishing the new digital centre, unifying existing teams as a single organisation and point of access and expertise for central government and – over time – organisations across the wider public sector.

Kickstarters to kick things off

Over the first six months of 2025, the digital centre will start by launching five bold and transparent kickstarter initiatives. They will be designed to showcase a new era of digital government, delivering progress and cultural change through open collaboration and public engagement. 

More specifically, we’ll start work on: 

• A beta GOV.UK App and GOV.UK Wallet, enabling more personalised user experiences, verifiable digital credentials, and next-generation public services.
• Collaborations with organisations across the public sector, supporting the government’s goal to Get Britain Working, by piloting improvements on how we can better manage a long-term health condition or disability.^{[footnote 3]}
• Piloting GOV.UK Chat, an LLM-powered chat user interface for GOV.UK that resolves complex queries using natural language in seconds, providing targeted support to and reducing friction for businesses and business users. Marking our shift to better support businesses and growth in the new digital centre, we also see this as a good way of demonstrating responsible use of AI in digital public services.
• Launching a new AI accelerator upskilling programme, helping digital professionals to become machine learning engineers. This will deliver important new AI expertise in leading government departments. 
• Launching a new cross-government vulnerability scanning service, so that we can find and address weaknesses in our systems and services. This work is vital in ensuring our infrastructure is resilient and is a step towards better securing it against threats.

Addressing the big challenges

We have more work to do to define how the digital centre will tackle some of the biggest challenges. To get started on this, we will:

• Work with HM Treasury to take a new approach to digital funding in Spending Review Phase 2, demonstrating and testing a shift in funding models to drive the right outcomes, better value, increase agility and reduced risk. There’ll be more focus on realising efficiencies and productivity gains across departments, including through tackling fraud and waste. 
• Start work on a Digital Commercial Centre of Excellence, identifying opportunities for reform to digital procurement practices and policies to support growth and innovation.
• Research the needs of UK businesses to streamline their interactions with central government and scope the potential of GOV.UK One Login equivalents for businesses.
• Work with local government, MHCLG and other departments to define new models for collaboration, aimed at improving outcomes for residents and reducing the financial burden on local authorities. This will include identifying opportunities to:
  • Extend the digital centre’s specialist talent programmes and adapt capability frameworks to meet local authorities’ needs and boost local digital leadership.
  • Extend the digital centre’s work on technology procurement and strategic supplier management to help local government achieve better outcomes and value for money. 
  • Set common data standards and taxonomies, and facilitate better data exchange to enable more joined-up services. 
  • Reduce and better coordinate the digital and data demands on local authorities from central government (which for instance occur through policy changes). 
• Set out clear metrics for how we will drive and measure progress against the outcomes described in this document.

In summer 2025, we’ll publish a new Government Digital & AI Roadmap, setting a clear direction for digital and the safe and responsible use of AI in the public sector. We’ll align this with the Spending Review to secure funding for priorities and be transparent in how we communicate progress in the years ahead, and how we will support the five national missions.

Annex: The new Government Digital Service

At a glance guide to the remit of the digital centre

Setting direction and strategy

• Setting the overarching vision and strategy for government digital, including publishing a new Government Digital & AI Roadmap in summer 2025.
• Setting strategy in specific cross-functional areas or domains, to include legislative development, data and sourcing strategy.

Delivering common products and services

• Running and improving GOV.UK and developing the GOV.UK App.
• Continuing the rollout of GOV.UK One Login.
• Maintaining and investing in our suite of GOV.UK common components, including Forms, Pay and Notify.
• Managing Public Sector Domains including .gov.uk.
• Incubating AI products, and scaling these into cross government services. 
• Defining a common public sector approach and delivering centralised infrastructure for verifiable digital credentials.
• Building the National Data Library and delivering the National Underground Asset Register.

Catalysing delivery and building community

• Providing direct ‘centre of excellence’ expertise to practitioners across government, in particular in AI, risk and resilience, service delivery and data.
• Incubate work to join up public sector services, and accelerate delivery of the missions, through a new Service Transformation Team. 
• Championing the work of teams across government, by shining a spotlight on good practice. 
• Building community, including by supporting the development of communities of practice.
• Effectively prioritise spend in Spending Review Phase 2 to drive greater efficiency and interoperability.
• Convening and coordinating cross-government groups including the Functional Leadership Group for Chief Digital and Information Officers. 
• Maintaining guidance and tools to support best practice including the Service Manual.

Saving money and applying guardrails 

• Measuring and managing digital performance across government via a consistent metrics framework and governance model.
• Applying central spend assurance and digital spend controls, in line with earned autonomy principles. 
• Negotiating whole-of-public-sector commercial agreements. 
• Providing shared cyber security services including domain-based vulnerability management, the Cyber Assessment Framework and an information assurance service for Public Services Network, in collaboration with Government Security Group and the National Cyber Security Centre.
• Taking a cross public sector view of national technical resilience.

Supporting and advocating for the profession

• Maintaining and building out the Capability Framework.
• Assess the overall package for digital and data professionals, including remuneration.
• Managing and building on the Government Digital and Data brand to aid recruitment.
• Setting the policies and standards that digital teams must meet when designing and delivering services, building or buying products, and running a digital function – currently including the Service Standard, Technology Code of Practice, Functional Standard, GovAssure, Secure by Design, data standards owned by the Data Standards Authority, Data Maturity Assessment and Algorithmic Transparency Recording Standard.
• Ensuring close collaboration with HM Treasury and the Cabinet Office, and with other cross-government priorities including the national missions and public sector reform. 

Changes in structure

To deliver this change, the digital centre will make some internal changes too. It will:

• Bring GDS and CDDO back together, reducing duplication and ensuring a clear single place for departments and other public sector organisations to go to.
• Evolve central AI capabilities in line with the AI Opportunities Action Plan, to meet the existing and emergent challenges and opportunities.
• Set up a new Service Transformation Team to look at whole public sector service transformation and the improvement of priority services.
• Expand its scope to include catalysing change and join-up across the wider public sector, starting with local government and the NHS.
• Work towards an account management structure to enable more strategic partnership with government departments and other partners.
• Take full advantage of the transition into DSIT to join up our approach to using digital technologies in the public sector with government’s approach to digital technology in the broader economy (including on how we engage with the tech industry, and improve, amongst other things, cyber security, technical resilience and digital inclusion).