Digital Government at the Crossroads

Introduction

Governments have launched a series of ambitious digital strategies over recent decades to improve how they operate and interact with citizens. However, many of their anticipated benefits have yet to be achieved, leaving governments ill-equipped to respond effectively to a growing array of social and economic policy challenges, both domestic and international. The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee recently expressed concerns at:

The number of complex, large-scale digital programmes we continue to see fail […] Departments have failed to understand the difference between improving what currently exists and real digital transformation, meaning they have missed opportunities to move to modern, efficient ways of working.^[1]

These setbacks come despite nearly three decades of digital initiatives in which the UK was a pioneer: its first pan-government website launched in 1994 and within a few years brought together information from 180 separate public sector organisations.^[2] By 1996, the UK government was exploring ‘the opportunity to transform the whole operation of government’.^[3] And in 1998, work was underway to exploit technology to ‘facilitate fundamental changes in the relationships between the citizen and the state […] with implications for the democratic process and structures of government’.^[4] By 2002, the ambition was ‘to enhance our democratic structures […] to give individuals more choice about how they can participate in the political process’.^[5] Technology was increasingly seen as integral to the creation of a more participative, transparent, and collaborative form of democratic governance and citizen empowerment.^[6]

However, between the idea and the reality falls the shadow. As futurist Alvin Toffler predicted over fifty years ago, governments’ industrial era institutions and practices have proved ill-equipped to cope with the pace of technological change.^[7] In place of a democratic renaissance, subsequent decades have seen the mass digitisation and automation of governments’ industrial-era institutions and practices, creating often undesirable results.^[8] Technology has all too often become synonymous with processes that undermine the rule of law^[9] and democracy.^[10] It’s used to industrialise surveillance,^[11] erode legal but ‘offensive’ free speech,^[12] and automate injustice and inequality in the name of bureaucratic ‘efficiency’.^[13]

These outcomes are the opposite of what was originally promised. They stifle democratic reform and disadvantage the most vulnerable members of society.^[14] In parallel, governments exhibit a near-perpetual state of panic about all things digital—artificial intelligence, AdTech, the gig economy, hybrid warfare—and provide inadequate and lethargic political responses to proven harms, including the toxic impact of social media.^[15] No wonder many democracies ‘are experiencing serious institutional debilities and weak public confidence’,^[16] with over half the world’s democracies reported to be in retreat.^[17]

Western governments’ failure to exploit technology as a strategic asset stands in sharp contrast to its exploitation by authoritarian regimes. From China^[18] to Iran,^[19] North Korea,^[20] and Russia,^[21] autocracies have integrated technology deep within their policies and plans, from pervasive national surveillance and suppression of free speech and civil society, to disrupting the affairs of other nations using everything from bot-driven false information to deepfakes and cyber-attacks.^[22]

Failing to harness technology as a means of democratic renewal has left our governments ill-placed to tackle an increasingly complex and challenging political landscape. If democracies are to survive and prosper, they need a more effective and principled approach to technology—rooted in a vision of what they stand for:

An affirmative, persuasive, secure and privacy-preserving, values-driven, and rights-respecting view of how technology can enable individual dignity and economic prosperity, and also what they will stand against—the misuse and abuse of technology to repress, control, divide, discriminate, and disenfranchise.^[23]

Rethinking government

The use of technology to digitise policy and administrative silos within and between central government departments and local, regional, and national administration, creates painful—and sometimes deadly^[24]—divisions in people’s lives. These boundaries prevent governments from working across their historical organisational structures to become more effective in how they learn, plan, adapt, and respond to domestic and international challenges.

Ed Vaizey, a former UK government minister, commented in 2017 that he ‘would completely re-engineer government. I would abolish government departments, I would have government by task’.^[25] His remarks echo the earlier political desire to use technology as a force for good in the modernisation and reform of government, and to:

Provide better and more efficient services to businesses and to citizens, improve the efficiency and openness of government administration, and secure substantial cost savings for the taxpayer. (1996).^[26]

Make sure that public service users, not providers, are the focus, by matching services more closely to people’s lives […] [and] deliver public services that are high quality and efficient. (1999).^[27]

Such sentiments reveal an enlightened political interest in harnessing the positive potential of science and technology, one memorably expressed in Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s 1963 speech when he asserted that ‘The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated methods on either side of industry’.^[28] However, the subsequent failure of successive governments to modernise their ‘outdated methods’ and ‘industrial era institutions and practices’ has become a contributory factor to the decline in democracy and our public institutions.^[29]

Technology’s policy implications

Digital technologies and practices can help governments access, analyse, and model information within and between the silo boundaries of current public administration. They offer new opportunities to engage communities and individuals in shaping and co-creating their own futures. They can inform the evidence base, continuously enlightening policymaking to deliver better outcomes. And they have an essential role in helping to reshape, redesign, and optimise organisational structures and practices to deliver better outcomes that escape the outdated methods prevalent in both public and private sectors.^[30]

However, the political perception of technology is stuck in the web-centric mindset of the late twentieth century. Digital government programmes focus on creating elegant website veneers over industrial era processes,^[31] marginalising the citizen/state relationship into a transactional one between ‘customers’ and ‘services’. This digitisation of point-to-point online transactions comes at a high cost: it displaces the role of technology in transforming governments’ ability to better understand and solve complex and interweaving social and economic problems. And it prioritises bureaucratic structures and processes over the radical overhaul of public policymaking and administration.^[32]

The customer/service mindset is in part a toxic hangover of new public management (NPM), the private sector concepts parachuted into the public sector during the 1980s. Digital government strategies adopt the language and mindset of NPM in their ideological emphasis on ‘users’ and ‘services’. They often lack formal mechanisms to assess whether digital initiatives are legally compliant: developers can make decisions and write code that creates or breaks policy, bypassing policymakers, legislators, and voters—a problem described by Lawrence Lessig, an American academic and attorney, as ‘code as law’:

The code regulates. It implements values, or not. It enables freedoms, or disables them. It protects privacy, or promotes monitoring. People choose how the code does these things. People write the code. Thus the choice is not whether people will decide how cyberspace regulates. People—coders—will.^[33]

The mass digitisation of paper-era transactions has become the primary output of many digital programmes. Yet governments knew as early as 1996 that ‘applying technology to existing working practices, or at the customer interface, will not achieve the full benefits that information technology has the power to deliver’.^[34] The result is that digital strategies all too often fail three critical tests. The ‘Toffler test’—modernising governments’ industrial era institutions and practices. The ‘Wilson test’—tackling outdated methods. And the ‘Vaizey test’—reorganising government and public policy around outcomes.

The digitisation of government’s historical configuration presents a major impediment to progress. It makes the public sector harder to redesign and integrate around citizens, cross-cutting policies, better policy outcomes, and improved administration. The failure to modernise governments’ internal capabilities, data, structures, processes, policies, and operations undermines their ability to anticipate, react, and respond in more timely, appropriate, and effective ways to an increasingly challenging and volatile world. As a former UK Permanent Secretary, Jonathan Slater, recently commented, ‘Whitehall’s remoteness from the public and frontline results in policymaking which is fundamentally inadequate to address the challenges we face’.^[35]

The threat

Technology itself is not inherently good or bad, but neither is it neutral, as historian Melvin Kranzberg reminded us.^[36] A relentless focus on the positive applications of technology is essential to protect and advance democracy. However, the absence of guiding democratic principles for the design, development, and implementation of technology leaves many digital government programmes serving less altruistic short-term goals.^[37]

This democratic deficit has economic and societal ramifications that reach well beyond governments’ domestic political programmes. When former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared Russia to be on ‘the path of democracy and not of empire’,^[38] followed by the dissolution of the USSR in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it seemed as if the citizen centred freedoms and practices of the West had triumphed. For a moment in time an opportunity existed to reforge a global democratic renaissance, to reaffirm technology as a force for good, rooted unashamedly in the principles of liberty, justice, and the rule of law proclaimed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

However, as with Russia’s own subsequent retreat into autocracy and militarism, many democratic governments have chosen a very different path. At their worst, they mirror the behavioural traits of technology corporations and authoritarian regimes. They deploy often unproven technologies that automate inequality and undermine human rights and the exercise of justice in the pursuit of their own political goals. Many of the artificial intelligence governance principles belatedly being implemented by governments and businesses, for example, make no mention of human rights.^[39]

These failings need an urgent fix: the number of countries in the world with full democracies remains low, at just 14.4% in 2022.^[40] Most people live in flawed democracies, or hybrid or authoritarian regimes. The latter represents the largest group: 36.9% of the world’s population endures the diktats of a privileged, and often brutal, controlling elite. Across the categories assessed by The Economist Intelligence Unit—electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties—technology can play an essential beneficial role in re-asserting and protecting fundamental democratic rights, rather than accelerating their demise.

The opportunity

Today

Since the late 1990s, technology has been used to streamline citizens’ transactional interactions with government, from obtaining a new passport, to completing self-assessment tax returns, or making an appointment with a GP. Yet policymaking is little changed, and neither are governments’ associated structures, practices, and administration.

Citizens’ digital experiences of the public sector mimic the siloed, organisation-centric processes and forms that preceded them. Inside government, Ministers and officials lack timely access to basic information and insight about how their department is performing, what’s going well, what’s broken, what citizens think, or insight into the impact of their policies, short- and long-term, across departments and national, regional, and local government.

To paraphrase computer programmer Melvin Conway, any organisation that designs a system will produce a design that mirrors the organisation’s existing structure.^[41] In large-scale, siloed organisations like government, digital initiatives reflect and reinforce existing hierarchies and silos. It’s the opposite of what’s required: as Conway also noted, ‘flexibility of organization is important to effective design. Ways must be found to reward design managers for keeping their organizations lean and flexible’.^[42] Yet governments are well behind the curve in using technology to provide such flexibility, despite the long-known benefits of networked forms of organisation:

Networks are ‘lighter on their feet’ than hierarchies. […] [they involve] discrete exchanges [not] by administrative fiat, but through networks of individuals engaged in reciprocal, preferential, mutually supportive actions […] the parties to a network agree to forego the right to pursue their own interests at the expense of others.^[43]

Tomorrow

The UK government recognised over two decades ago that:

Many of the biggest challenges facing Government do not fit easily into traditional Whitehall structures […] [We need] a comprehensive package of measures to improve and modernise the way we handle cross-cutting issues […] the role of leadership; improving the way policy is formulated and implemented; the need for new skills; budgetary arrangements, and the role of external audit and scrutiny.^[44]

Technology can help governments transition from their industrial era policy boundaries and rigid operational and financial hierarchies towards more effective, networked, and collaborative ways of working. Doing so will help officials work beyond ‘the boundaries of their agencies to accomplish the broad mission, rather than simply managing the more narrow activities within their agency’s walls’.^[45] It will improve the way policy is developed and informed, and provide more joined-up approaches to complex issues like intergenerational poverty and homelessness.

These changes will also have implications for administrative law. Departmental and process boundaries, funding, and accountability are often stipulated in legislation, including the naming of departmental Secretaries of State in Acts of Parliament. Redesigning policymaking and public administration around outcomes will require changes to existing processes, oversight, and accountability. Funding models will need major reform so that resources flow more effectively to where they have maximum beneficial impact instead of perpetuating silo organisational structures and processes.

Making it happen

To reset digital government onto a better track will require political vision and affirmative action on multiple fronts, including:

Leadership

Technology’s strategic role in helping renew democracy and our public institutions needs to be understood at the most senior political and official levels. Governments will need to break the habit of handing digital political portfolios to junior, transitory politicians who lack the insight or experience to exploit technology as a tool of strategic improvement. If governments are serious about modernising the public sector, they need a Cabinet-level politician with the authority to deliver improvements across government’s policy and structural silos.

The political challenge of harnessing technology to reinvigorate democratic values and institutions is significant. David Freud, a former Minister for Welfare Reform, accurately pinpointed why digital programmes frequently fail: ‘We’ve been looking at this as a technology issue. It is much more than that, [it’s] a major cultural change in the relationship between the state and the people it needs to support’.^[46]

Capabilities

To improve their capabilities, governments need to ditch the tactical, low-level ‘digital training’ of the past^[47] and move to education programmes^[48] built around improved citizen engagement and the transformation of policymaking and policy outcomes, including the organisational structures, administrative processes, funding, and technology needed for their delivery. Similarly, technology leaders should have access to education programmes that develop their understanding of democratic principles, policymaking, and legislative processes to inform and guide their work.

Governments need to adopt more systems thinking to better understand how different policies, organisations, and processes interact with and influence each other.^[49] For transformation to succeed, politicians and senior officials will need to work in more collaborative, participative, and outcome-based ways. This has major implications for Ministers and Secretaries of State: their portfolios will increasingly focus on cross-cutting issues rather than current departmental structures and need to be supported by updated processes for citizen engagement, policymaking, legislation, resourcing, and funding.

Open government

Governments need to open up their policy and administrative silos—and their associated systems, data, and processes—to liberate citizens from the experiences that William Beveridge, pioneer of the UK’s welfare state, criticised as long ago as 1941. He found that seven different government departments were involved in providing cash benefits.^[50] This was not only inefficient and costly but also created a dehumanising, demeaning, and fragmented experience for benefit claimants.

Similar citizen experiences still abound today. Duplicated functions and processes operate in hundreds of places, both within and between departments and across local, regional, and national administration. They frustrate public sector employees too, who find themselves caught in a web of contradictory policies, funding, processes, systems, and structures. An open government mandate will provide opportunities for modernisation and innovation inside and outside of the public sector.

However, an open government initiative that delivers solely at a technical level will not in itself encourage citizen participation and improve transparency and trust:

Technology does not drive anything. It creates new possibilities for collecting and analyzing data, mashing ideas and reaching people, but people still need to be moved to engage and find practical pathways to act.^[51]

Governments should encourage a nationwide open architecture to support and inform systems thinking, and to provide opportunities for improved collaboration, evidence, and research into social and economic issues and better policymaking. This open architecture will let civil society and others add significant value, helping get important things done by letting people take the initiative, with government responding ‘in the here and now’.^[52]

Identity

For many of our interactions with government, proof of who we are is irrelevant, such as when we access online welfare or tax guidance. Other interactions, however, require a high level of assurance that we are who we claim to be and that the information we provide is accurate. High levels of assurance are needed not just for citizens and businesses, but public sector employees too.

Instead of emulating the state-dominant identity systems of authoritarian regimes, our governments need to create democratic exemplars that are citizen centred, private, and secure. The Estonian government, for example, lets citizens see when public officials have accessed their personal information, helping provide transparency and build trust.^[53]

Good identity design protects and enhances democratic rights. It preserves citizens’ anonymity and pseudonymity, and lets them prove something about themselves, such as being ‘Over 18’ or their right to work, without disclosing unnecessary information or facilitating state monitoring and surveillance. David Birch, a digital finance and identity expert, points out that ‘we need a digital identity infrastructure that supports our transition to a new economy, not one that stutters along digitising the relics of the post-industrial revolution’.^[54]

To protect and enshrine democratic principles, identity needs to be developed around the citizen and not the state. Government initiatives must adhere to high standards of privacy and security, tapping into initiatives such as the Decentralised Identity Foundation (DIF)^[55] and Solid,^[56] together with ICAO digital travel credentials^[57] and ISO mobile driving licences.^[58]

Personal data

Personal data safeguarded in departmental silos is often blamed for preventing governments from taking a holistic view of citizens and their circumstances to design and deliver integrated policies and processes that better meet their needs: ‘Currently, the information that government holds is scattered across disparate systems and saved in a variety of formats, making it difficult for policy makers to find what they need when they need it’.^[59]

From a citizen’s perspective, we want more effective policies and better outcomes, but we don’t want officials and governments accessing and misusing our personal data. We need to improve public administration through smarter information management without invading citizens’ right to a private life or risking an increase in fraud. But transitioning public administration from a departmental responsibility to a government-wide one risks creating insecure and invasive approaches to our personal data, and the creeping extension of the state into citizens’ private lives.

In 2013, the UK Government’s Technology code of practice stated that ‘Users should have access to, and control over, their own personal data’.^[60] Although the policy commitment has yet to be delivered, the principle remains sound. And effective regulation and technical and legal enforcement must accompany these rights. Just as Open Banking lets consumers manage their financial information across multiple organisations today,^[61] tomorrow citizens should be able to manage their information and experiences across public, private, and voluntary sectors, creating ‘new forms of citizen and state co-operation and dialogue for the 21st century’.^[62]

Reduce and remove transactional interactions

Governments should question why so many paper-era interactions are still needed in the digital age. What prevents public administration operating without online forms? How can technology deliver better outcomes by working across silo organisational structures, processes, and data? And how can governments design better and less dehumanising and fragmented experiences for citizens?

As governments make better use of data and involve citizens and businesses directly in its curation and maintenance, they will be able to reduce or even remove many of their existing transactional interactions, and become more efficient and effective in the process.

Algorithmic injustice and the rule of law

Governments need to prevent the misuse of technology products and services across both private and public sectors. They also need to guard against replacing the prevailing New Public Management transactional ‘user/service’ mindset with the equally problematic pathologies of New Public Analytics (NPA), with their data-driven, automated injustice:

For those in positions of vulnerability who lack the skills, competences and ready internet access, and whose encounters with the state are now mediated primarily via digital systems rather than frontline human officers, their experience of the state has become increasingly and shamefully Kafkaesque, dehumanising and unjust. However, the capacity of these systems to function automatically and at scale enables the collective violation of the rights of affected individuals, including the presumption of innocence, producing serious injustice at scale […] there is an urgent and serious need for lawyers and legal scholars to work with policymakers and technical experts in order to ensure that systematic, practical and effective constitutional safeguards are in place.^[63]

Digital government initiatives need immutable constitutional safeguards, public oversight, and design principles founded on the rule of law, human rights, privacy, and security—to defend and protect democratic values and ensure positive social and human outcomes. Although some promising work has taken place with algorithmic transparency in government,^[64] mandatory transparency is required of all algorithms with social and economic impacts, including those hyped as ‘artificial intelligence’. Routine algorithmic audits and impact assessments during the design, development, and deployment of new systems will help check for bias and regulatory compliance.^[65]

Conclusion

The ambitious ideals of digital government will not be delivered until politicians and political parties weave the democratising potential of technology into the fabric of their thinking, their public consultations, their manifesto promises, and their policies, using it as an immutable force for good. As the US initiative to advance technology for democracy observes:

The first wave of the digital revolution promised that new technologies would support democracy and human rights. The second saw an authoritarian counterrevolution. Now, the United States and other democracies are working together to ensure that the third wave of the digital revolution leads to a technological ecosystem characterised by resilience, integrity, openness, trust and security, and that reinforces democratic principles and human rights.^[66] 

Our governments need a radical rethink and reset of their digital initiatives if this third wave of digital revolution is to succeed. They need to commit to the open, participative, collaborative, and cross-cutting uses of technology to deliver fundamental and much-needed improvements to democracy and the relationship between citizens and the state.

The upsides of doing so are clear: technology can protect and improve democratic processes and institutions; make policymaking and public administration more accessible, more collaborative, more transparent, more accountable, and more effective; and deliver better, more just, and more enduring social and economic outcomes.

After three decades of unfulfilled promises, digital government stands at the crossroads: for the health of democracy and our democratic future, it’s clear which road it needs to take.

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Jerry Fishenden

Dr Jerry Fishenden FIET FRSA is a technologist, writer, and composer, with a career that spans both public and private sectors. Former roles include National Technology Officer at Microsoft UK; Senior Executive, Business Systems at the City of London’s financial regulator; Network Planning Officer of the House of Commons; and IT Director in the NHS. Jerry was the Specialist Adviser to two House of Commons Committee inquiries into digital government, and advises governments, businesses, and other organisations on the effective design and implementation of technology. His latest book, Fracture: The collision between technology and democracy—and how we fix it (2023), explores technological opportunities and challenges for the future of democracy and our democratic institutions.

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^[1] House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, ‘Challenges in implementing digital change’ (House of Commons, 10 December 2021) <https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/8146/documents/83439/default/> accessed 1 July 2023.

^[2] Jerry Fishenden, ‘Remembering government direct - the first interactive green paper’ (New Technology Observations from the UK, 20 March 2019) <https://ntouk.wordpress.com/2019/03/20/remembering-government-direct-the-first-interactive-green-paper/> accessed 1 July 2023.

^[3] ‘The Government IT Strategy: Annex E’ (Central IT Unit, Cabinet Office, June 1996) <https://ntouk.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/uk-government-it-strategy-1996-from-the-ntouk-digital-archives.pdf> accessed 1 June 2023.

^[4] ‘Electronic Government’ (Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, February 1998).

<https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/post/pn110.pdf> accessed 1 June 2023.

^[5] ‘In the service of democracy. A consultation paper on a policy for electronic democracy’ (HM Government / UK Online, 15 July 2002) <https://ntouk.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/e-democracy.pdf> accessed 1 June 2023.

^[6] Creative Research, ‘e-Democracy. Report of Research Findings’ (Communications on behalf of the Office of the e-Envoy, 23 December 2002) <https://ntouk.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/full_report.pdf> accessed 1 June 2023.

^[7] Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (Random House 1970).

^[8] Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (Macmillan 2018).

^[9] ‘You Reap What You Code’ (Child Poverty Action Group, June 2023) <https://cpag.org.uk/policy-and-campaigns/report/you-reap-what-you-code> accessed 1 July 2023.

^[10] Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie, ‘Many Tech Experts Say Digital Disruption Will Hurt Democracy’ (Pew Research Centre, 21 February 2020) <https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/02/21/many-tech-experts-say-digital-disruption-will-hurt-democracy/> accessed 1 June 2023.

^[11] Heather Brooke, ‘States haven’t stopped spying on their citizens, post-Snowden-they’ve just got sneakier’ (London, 6 June 2023) <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/06/edward-snowden-state-surveillance-uk-online-safety-bill> accessed 1 August 2023.

^[12] Ross Anderson and Sam Gilbert, ‘The Online Safety Bill. Policy Brief’ (University of Cambridge and Bennett Institute for Public Policy, October 2022) <https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Policy-Brief-Online-Safety-Bill.pdf> accessed 1 May 2023.

^[13] Ed Pilkington, ‘Digital dystopia: how algorithms punish the poor’ The Guardian (London, 14 October 2019) <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/14/automating-poverty-algorithms-punish-poor> accessed 1 June 2023.

^[14] ‘India’s high-tech governance risks leaving behind its poorest citizens’ The Economist (London, 16 October 2021) <https://www.economist.com/asia/2021/10/16/indias-high-tech-governance-risks-leaving-behind-its-poorest-citizens> accessed 1 August 2023.

^[15] Jean M Twenge, ‘Increases in Depression, Self‐Harm, and Suicide Among U.S. Adolescents After 2012 and Links to Technology Use: Possible Mechanisms’ 2020 2(1) Psychiatric Research & Clinical Practice 19-25.

^[16] Thomas Carothers, ‘Why Technology Hasn’t Delivered More Democracy’ (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 3 June 2015) <https://carnegieendowment.org/2015/06/03/why-technology-hasn-t-delivered-more-democracy-pub-60305> accessed 1 January 2023.

^[17] Yasmeen Serhan, ‘Half of the World’s Democracies Are in Retreat. Here’s What to Expect in 2023’ Time (New York, 21 December 2022) <https://time.com/6242188/global-democracy-report-2022/> accessed 1 March 2023.

^[18] ‘China’s digital dictatorship’ The Economist (London, 17 December 2016) <https://www.economist.com/leaders/2016/12/17/chinas-digital-dictatorship> accessed 1 April 2023.

^[19] ‘Iran’s cyberwar goes global’ The Economist (London, 14 September 2022) <https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2022/09/14/irans-cyberwar-goes-global> accessed 1 June 2023.

^[20] ‘North Korea’s hackers are after intel, not just crypto’ The Economist (London, 7 July 2023) <https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/07/07/north-koreas-hackers-are-after-intel-not-just-crypto> accessed 1 August 2023.

^[21] ‘Russia is trying to build its own great firewall’ The Economist (London, 19 February 2022) <https://www.economist.com/business/russia-is-trying-to-build-its-own-great-firewall/21807706> accessed 1 June 2023.

^[22] ‘FACT SHEET: Advancing Technology for Democracy’ (The White House Briefing Room, 29 March 2023) <https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/03/29/fact-sheet-advancing-technology-for-democracy-at-home-and-abroad/#:~:text=From%20AI%2Dpowered%20mass%20surveillance,critics%20at%20home%20and%20abroad.> accessed 1 October 2023.

^[23] ibid.

^[24] Linda Geddes, ‘Child deaths are linked to social deprivation in England—NHS report’ The Guardian (London, 13 May 2021) <https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2021/may/13/child-deaths-are-linked-to-social-deprivation-in-england-nhs-report> accessed 1 February 2023.

^[25] Nicola Hughes, ‘Ed Vaizey reflects on his time in government for the Institute for Government’s Ministers Reflect project’ (Institute for Government, 8 December 2016) <https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/ministers-reflect/ed-vaizey> accessed 1 May 2023.

^[26] ‘Government Direct. A Prospectus for the Electronic Delivery of Government Services’ (Cabinet Office, 1996) <https://ntouk.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/government-direct.pdf> accessed 1 May 2023.

^[27] ‘Modernising Government’ (Cabinet Office, March 1999) <https://ntouk.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/modgov.pdf> accessed 1 May 2023.

^[28] Brian Walden, ‘The white heat of Wilson’ (BBC News, 31 March 2006) <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4865498.stm> accessed 1 May 2023.

^[29] Jerry Fishenden, Mark Thompson, and Will Venters, ‘Better Public Services. The Green Paper accompanying Better Public Services, A Manifesto’ (Digitising Government, March 2018) <https://digitizinggovernment.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/0/7/13071055/green_paper_interactive_pdf_compressed.pdf> accessed 1 June 2023.

^[30] Jerry Fishenden, Mark Thompson, and Will Venters, ‘Appraising the impact and role of platform models and Government as a Platform (GaaP) in UK Government public service reform: towards a Platform Assessment Framework (PAF)’ 2017 34(2) Information Quarterly 167-182.

^[31] ‘Design your service using GOV.UK styles components and pattern’ (GOV.UK Design System, March 2023) <https://design-system.service.gov.uk/> accessed 1 July 2023.

^[32] Mark Thompson, ‘UK voters are being sold a lie. There is no need to cut public services’ The Guardian (London, 12 February 2015) <https://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2015/feb/12/uk-voters-cut-public-services-amazon-spotify-uber> accessed 1 August 2023.

^[33] Lawrence Lessig, ‘Code is Law’ (Harvard Magazine, 1 January 2000) <https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law-html> accessed 1 July 2023.

^[34] ‘The Government IT Strategy’ (n 3). 

^[35] Jonathan Slater, ‘Fixing Whitehall’s broken policy machine’ (The Policy Institute, King’s College London, March 2022)

<https://www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-institute/assets/fixing-whitehalls-broken-policy-machine.pdf> accessed 1 April 2023.

^[36] Melvin Kranzberg, ‘Technology and History: “Kranzberg’s Laws”’ (1986) 27 (3) Technology and Culture 544-560.

^[37] Janna Anderson and Lee Raine, ‘Concerns about democracy in the digital age’ (Pew Research Centre, 21 February 2020) <https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/02/21/concerns-about-democracy-in-the-digital-age/> accessed 1 September 2023.

^[38] Graeme Gill, Symbolism and Regime Change in Russia (Cambridge University Press 2013).

^[39] Kate Jones, ‘AI governance and human rights’ (Chatham House, 10 January 2023)  <https://www.chathamhouse.org/2023/01/ai-governance-and-human-rights> accessed 1 May 2023.

^[40] ‘Democracy Index 2022’ (Economist Intelligence Unit) 

<https://www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracy-index-2022/> accessed 1 June 2023.

^[41] In 1968, Melvin E Conway created an adage now popularly known as Conway’s law, namely that ‘Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure’.

^[42] Melvin E Conway, ‘How do committees invent?’ (Datamation magazine, April 1968) 

<http://www.melconway.com/Home/Committees_Paper.html> accessed 1 July 2023.

^[43] Walter W Powell, ‘Neither Market Nor Hierarchy: Network Forms of Organisation’ (1990) 12(1) Research in Organisational Behaviour 295-336.

^[44] ‘Wiring it up. Whitehall’s management of cross-cutting policies and services’ (Cabinet Office, January 2000) <https://ntouk.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/wiring-it-up-2000.pdf> accessed 1 May 2023.

^[45] Donald F Kettl, The Next Government of the United States: Why Our Institutions Fail Us and How To Fix Them (Norton 2009).

^[46] David Freud, Clashing Agendas: Inside the Welfare Trap (Macmillan 2021).

^[47] ‘GDS Academy’ (GDS Academy, November 2021) <https://web.archive.org/web/20181130230208/https:/gdsacademy.campaign.gov.uk/> accessed 1 August 2023.

^[48] ‘Written evidence submitted by Dr Jerry Fishenden, Professor Mark Thompson, and Assistant Professor Will Venters’ (House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, 6 December 2023) <https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/39203/pdf/> accessed 1 October 2023.

^[49] ‘Systems thinking: An Introductory Toolkit for Civil Servants’ (Government Office for Science, 2022) <https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6290d241d3bf7f036cb7a09f/GO-Science_Systems_Thinking_Toolkit_2022_v1.0.pdf> accessed 1 March 2023.

^[50] Jose Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography (Macmillan 1997) 365-412.

^[51] Rakesh Rajani, ‘Why Technology Hasn’t Delivered More Democracy’ (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, June 2015) <https://carnegieendowment.org/2015/06/03/why-technology-hasn-t-delivered-more-democracy-pub-60305> accessed 1 January 2023.

^[52] Audrey Tang, ‘Inside Taiwan’s new digital democracy’ The Economist (London, 12 March 2019) <https://www.economist.com/open-future/2019/03/12/inside-taiwans-new-digital-democracy> accessed 1 April 2023.

^[53] Jaan Priisalu and Rain Ottis, ‘Personal control of privacy and data: Estonian experience’ (2017) 8(1) Data Protection Journal 441-451.

^[54] David Birch, ‘Doing Something About Digital Identity’ (Substack, 25 August 2021) <https://dgwbirch.substack.com/p/doing-something-about-digital-identity> accessed 1 February 2023.

^[55] ‘Decentralised Identity Foundation’ (Minutes of the Decentralised Identity Foundation, June 2023) <https://identity.foundation/> accessed 1 October 2023.

^[56] ‘Solid: Your data, your choice’ (New Think Tank, February 2023) <https://solidproject.org/> accessed 1 October 2023.

^[57] ‘Digital Travel Credentials’ (ICAO, March 2023) <https://www.icao.int/Security/FAL/TRIP/PublishingImages/Pages/Publications/Guiding%20core%20principles%20for%20the%20development%20of%20a%20Digital%20Travel%20Credential%20%20%28DTC%29.PDF> accessed 1 May 2023.

^[58] ‘ISO/IEC 18013-5:2021. Personal identification—ISO-compliant driving licence—Part 5: Mobile driving licence (mDL) application’ (ISO/IEC, March 2023) <https://www.iso.org/standard/69084.html> accessed 1 May 2023.

^[59] Lewis Lloyd, ‘Policy making in a digital world. How data and new technologies can help government make better policy’ (Institute for Government, 2020) <https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/policy-making-digital-world.pdf> accessed 1 October 2023.

^[60] ‘Technology code of practice’ (Cabinet Office, 2013) <https://ntouk.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/technology-code-of-practice-e28094-government-service-design-manual-2013.pdf> accessed 1 February 2023.

^[61] ‘What is Open Banking?’ (Open Banking Ltd., June 2023) <https://www.openbanking.org.uk/what-is-open-banking > accessed 1 June 2023.

^[62] Tang (n 52). 

^[63] Karen Yeung, ‘The New Public Analytics as an Emerging Paradigm in Public Sector Administration’ (2002) 27(2) Tilburg Law Review.

^[64] ‘Algorithmic Transparency Recording Standard Hub’ (Central Digital and Data Office, 5 January 2023) <https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/algorithmic-transparency-recording-standard-hub> accessed 1 October 2023.

^[65] ‘Examining the Black Box: Tools for assessing algorithmic systems’ (Ada Lovelace Institute, 29 April 2020) <https://www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Ada-Lovelace-Institute-DataKind-UK-Examining-the-Black-Box-Report-2020.pdf > accessed 1 April 2023.

^[66] (n 22).