Government is still bad at services
Starting off with a pretty bold statement, why not?!
Before we dive in, I do want to be clear. I’m not the first person to have talked about these issues, far from it. Also, this isn’t a criticism of any single existing service, team or individual - it’s the result of a whole complicated system that doesn’t create incentives to do the really radical stuff for users. Radical? Let’s get into it.
Government looks pretty slick, but…
Over the past ten years, we’ve seen a remarkable shift in the way services are provided in the UK. For all its faults, GOV.UK is still a remarkable achievement. A single trusted platform to access most government services, to get quality information about what you’re entitled to or what the government is delivering for the public. Politics aside about what has been delivered, this platform is still something to be celebrated. It’s easy to miss just how messy government can be underneath the slick black and white of GOV.UK.
The problem is that the majority of services, or how we think about government, now revolves around the raising of a bar from a decade ago.
This can be good - it forces most parts of the public sector to meet a standard, crucially in making large services accessible for all sorts of specific needs across the general public. Vision issues? GOV.UK’s got your back. Colour-blind? You should manage just fine. We’ve gotten really good at making information easily accessible to the broadest possible audience, and yet, I can’t help but get the itch… how much of this information is really needed?
Don’t panic, content isn’t going anywhere, but the current ‘what good looks like’ still asks users to read and understand the rules of government. Massively simplified, much more accessible, but still - users still spend time bending to the weirdness of government.
Tax first, correct later
If I lose my job, other than a sudden sense of panic, I’ll be looking pretty quickly into what state support I can get. Most of us assume in the UK that that would lead me to making an application to Universal Credit… right? The problem is that despite the government having a very good idea of how much I was earning at the time so it can get money out of me, we all have to pretend it stops knowing who I am when suddenly I need money from the state. What’s my name? Do I have any ID? Got any utility bills?
We’re in the bizarre world where the state is very good at getting contributions from its citizens, and remarkably poor at getting that money back to the citizens who need it.
I won’t litigate the politics of benefits here - that’s a whole other kettle of fish - but it’s remarkable that every bit of state support you can get is gated by some kind of form. Over the years, this has shifted from quite painful and arbitrary paper forms to increasingly slick GOV.UK-style ‘ask the minimum in an accessible way’.
The problem is that even a good form is still misunderstanding the crux of eligiblity. If someone was entitled to money once they finished an application and got their result after 5 weeks, they were actually entitled for 5 whole weeks and were let down by the state in the interim.
Every single day spent proving eligibility is a missed day of support that the citizen was already eligible for.
You shouldn’t have to tell them twice, thrice…
I don’t want to shy away from the obvious - this is political. The idea that you accept upfront risk and pay sooner can be pretty toxic, both inside government and in the broader political realm. Unfortunately, there’s a lack of guts to make the case for doing this. I’ve used unemployment benefit as a shorthand for a much bigger issue, but I want to really stir a bit by taking one more example… Child benefit!
Child benefit is a pretty cool thing. You take the big step of becoming parents, and the state steps in to make sure you’ve got the support you need - helping to cover all sorts of potential surprises. Putting aside the exact amount given, most people think this is a generally sensible thing for the government to provide.
Despite being a pretty cool thing, it is gated - by a form and some guidance! What’s so frustrating about this is that it’s overwhelmingly a waste of time to get data that’s already owned by the state.
Taking a quick look at the eligibility criteria, there’s a few different ways you can qualify. As a potential user, I now have to sift through the many different elgibility cases created by government policy. The problem is that every case is already something the government knows about…
Your child is 16 or over
Schools know this
Their GP likely knows this
Fostering a child, provided the local authority doesn’t cover costs for them already
Pretty sure the local authority would know this!
If you have certain immigration statuses
The Home Office should know this, ahem
If you have certain immigration statuses and you’re working etc
HMRC, the place you’re going to apply, should already know if you’re working!!!
The more you dig into each service and the eligibility up front, the sooner you realise how incredibly lazy government can be. I know why - it’s really hard to join up data across government. Procurement processes, poor knowledge and distribution of DDaT skills, anxiety about ‘data protection’… amongst many other reasons create massive incentives to shrink scope fast - quickly leading to services that look and feel just like services from many years ago.
The way we chop up responsibilities in government still dictates the quality of service a user can receive.
So, what do we even do about it?
This is, ultimately, a big whinge. I’m not going to pretend this is solvable with one big project led by one of the big four consultancies (shock horror) - but it does start with all of us getting more ambitious and being willing to push even when it feels uncomfortable.
It’s political, but to move past the sort of ‘comfortable middle’ we find ourselves in, we need to be far more demanding of our governments.
Good, accessible forms have been and still are a massive step forward for much of government - it’s easy to forget simple stuff is still so far behind. Sensitive moments like paying for a funeral are only available on a phoneline - that’s just not good enough.
But beyond that, we still need to push harder. We’ve had a decade of raising the floor for digital services - I’m waiting to see who pushes the ceiling.