Sir Jeremy Heywood is the Cabinet Secretary and the Head of the UK's Home Civil Service ... He published his review of calendar 2015 in a series of 54 tweets between 23 December 2015 and 3 January 2016 ...
Sir Jeremy Heywood is the Cabinet Secretary and the Head of the UK's Home Civil Service ... He published his review of calendar 2015 in a series of 54 tweets between 23 December 2015 and 3 January 2016 ...
No such review of 2016 is being tweeted at the moment by Sir Jeremy.
Perhaps nothing much has happened this year.
We noted on 8 February 2016 that Sir Jeremy has linked his fate to the fate of the Government Digital Service (GDS): "Sir Jeremy can't keep away from the importance of the digital transformation of government by GDS".
GDS were given a budget of £450 million in the Spending review and autumn statement 2015. That was 13 months ago on 27 November 2015. GDS have never explained what they're going to do with the money. In that sense perhaps nothing much has indeed happened this year.
The department that Sir Jeremy depends on to transform government digitally has operated for more than a year with no published strategy. And the published strategy before that had no academicsupport.
GDS keep promising to publish their new £450 million strategy. As late as 14 December 2016 ex-Goldman Sachs man Kevin Cunnington, GDS's director general, was telling Civil Service World magazine that the strategy would be published before Christmas: "A new strategy is due out before Christmas which will set out our priorities for digital and a really ambitious transformation agenda for government".
The director general says the document will be published before Christmas. Two days later, egg on face, he turns out to be wrong. It's unsettling to see such an about turn.
There has to be a good reason to endure the embarrassment of saying you're going to publish a document that's already been divulged to journalists and then not doing so. What is that good reason?
Not just one. There are several good reasons you might suggest.
Before considering those good reasons, note that the delay in publication of the GDS strategy could be a good sign. It could indicate that responsible mandarins are finally looking at GDS's actual skills and not the supposed skills puffed in GDS's PR – reality could be getting a look-in:
Transforming government requires original thought. It requires innovative imagination. There has been no sign of that at GDS in the five years of their existence. GDS always say that it's no good just changing the front end of government services, public administration needs to be thoroughly re-engineered. Then they change the front end and leave it at that. That is the opinion of GDS's first deputy director, Tom Loosemore, now at the Co-op:
Edgy? Revolutionary? Restlessly and tirelessly in search of solutions? No. Slaves to fashion, bound by convention, GDS has already retreated into the comfort of process. They keep doing the same thing. Even when it doesn't work.
Transforming government requires considered experience of public administration and GDS don't have it. As Stephen Foreshew-Cain said when he was briefly executive director of GDS, it's the other departments and their suppliers who "understand their users and services better than we ever will ... They know the policy, the intent of that policy, and the legislation that sits behind it ... They know their users better than anyone. They are by far the best people to meet those user needs".
Transforming government requires some ability to work professionally with the departments of state, their agencies and local government. GDS got off to a bad start with the Electoral Commission, who blamed them for causing delays to the 2012 confirmation pilot for individual electoral registration. Relations broke down with DEFRA's Rural Payments Agency, please see Government Digital Service “hindered delivery” of rural payments programme, Public Accounts Committee says. GDS have been witheringly dismissive of local government for years. That has changed now that GDS find themselves in need of local government. Mike Bracken, GDS's first executive director, told the Americans three years ago that his job was not to collaborate with Whitehall but to route round it. As late as 5 July 2016, he was still saying of Whitehall that it is set up for nothing more than "an intellectual pissing match". Stephen Foreshew-Cain, Mr Bracken's successor at GDS, said that he recognised the need for collaboration but promptly accused other government departments of "decades of inaction and inertia". There are bridges to mend.
Transforming government is held by GDS to involve getting rid of the established "oligopoly" of suppliers (Capgemini, HP, BT, IBM, Fujitsu, Atos, CSC, Capita, ...) and replacing them with small and medium-sized enterprises (20.11.14) on short contracts (not that the SMEs always agree). GDS lack the data processing skills to design, build and maintain large complex computerised systems. Or even smallsimple ones. After five years, there is barely a dent in the armour of Capgemini, HP and the rest.
Transforming government is held by GDS to involve getting rid of the established "silos" of data maintained by the separate departments of state and replacing them with "canonical registers" shared all across Whitehall to support government as a platform. In their Walter Mitty imagination, GDS would have "domain control for the register.gov.uk domain", i.e they would have control over a new single source of truth super-silo-of-all-the-silos, please see Smash the silos. The departments of state might in the circumstances be imprudent to abrogate their constitutional duty in this way.
"Digital transformation" is held by GDS to mean putting public services on the internet: "digital means applying the culture, practices, processes and technologies of the internet era to respond to people’s raised expectations". The caravan has moved on since the internet's hippy innocence of 1995. In addition to the beneficial culture, practices, processes and technologies of the internet era, people now consider also fraud enabled by the internet, and espionage and surveillance and paedophilia and terrorism and pornography and the monetisation of personal information. But GDS are still in 1995, they promise unqualified security that they can't deliver and they promise privacy/confidentiality that ditto.
The digital transformation of government requires universal identity assurance services to support transactions between people and public services. There was no progress in 2016, nothing happened, GDS's GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is still not up to it. No identity assurance, no digital government transformation.
There are more but that's enough good reasons to delay the publication of GDS's strategy for many a Christmas yet. It behoves us all to support Sir Jeremy and Whitehall's other mandarins if they have finally spotted that it is a delusion to suppose that GDS is the obvious centre for government transformation.
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Updated 2.1.17
Data at GDS (the Government Digital Service) is "a blog about the tools and techniques used by GDS for data analysis" and back in November GDS told us about how they use artificial intelligence to automate the assessment of user feedback, please see Understanding more from user feedback.
GDS use topic modelling: "In machine learning and natural language processing, a topic model is a type of statistical model for discovering the abstract 'topics' that occur in a collection of documents". A human being reading a piece of user feedback knows what it's about, it's obvious what the topic is. A computer program has to "abstract" it. How?
Answer according to GDS, by using techniques like "Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) ... and Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF)". Using Kullback-Leibler divergence with LDA allows GDS to "find the statistically optimum number of topics" so that, if the words "find" and "contact" for example occur in a piece of user feedback, then "we can see that users are trying to complete the task of finding a way to contact a service".
"This approach can also be used", GDS conclude, "to tackle a range of text analysis challenges ... such as quickly understanding policy consultation responses".
That's quite a leap. One minute GDS are telling us how hard it is to work out algorithmically what a piece of text is about. Next minute we're supposed to believe that natural language processing could assess the merits of a tax expert's response to a consultation conducted by Her Majesty's Treasury.
How close are GDS getting to artificial intelligence that can grasp the semantics of documents written in natural language?
Just before Christmas GDS published Using machine learning to classify user comments on GOV.UK. They're looking at three features of user comments: "the ratio of upper case characters to total characters, the total number of characters entered in the text box, and the ratio of exclamation marks to the total number of characters".
So, not close. You may have been hoping for something sophisticated. Something transformative. In the event, in the name of data science, they're counting exclamation marks.
His latest article isn't just about the ghastly Digital Economy Bill. It also covers GDS's dance-of-the-seven-veils national digital transformation IT strategy:
The Cabinet Office has said that the publication of the new GDS strategy was expected to be unveiled by Cabinet Office minister Ben Gummer this week.
All the top performers have left the GDS stage now. Ditto the senior members of the chorus.
There's almost no-one left at GDS to support Mr Gummer as he comes out from behind the curtain and, blinded by the footlights, makes his way to the front of the stage to entertain a packed house wearing nothing more than version 107f, or whatever, of the aforementioned national digital transformation IT strategy. There's ex-Goldman Sachs man Kevin Cunnington, Director General of GDS. And after that, no-one. They've all left.
Support could be provided by drafting in some of the GDS talent of yesteryear.
Maybe it would help to have some razzmatazz from the US or Australia.
GDS could call on the bottomless pool of talent at the Department for Culture Media and Sport, the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy.
John Manzoni or Sir Jeremy Heywood could assist at the unveiling of the long-awaited strategy.
It's going to be lonely. Good luck, Mr Gummer.
Updated 20.2.17
Neil Merrett promised us the publication at last of the long-awaited government transformation strategy please see above and, lo, it finally came to pass a year late on 9 February 2017.
"Building on the work we have already done", GDS say on pp.11-12, "our priorities for government up to 2020 are ... making better use of GOV.UK Verify [RIP] by working towards 25 million users by 2020 ...".
A fortnight before the publication of GDS's strategy, HMRC had already announced that they were proposing not to use GOV.UK Verify (RIP). Both DWP and the NHS have in the past expressed reservations about using GOV.UK Verify (RIP). Scotland has its own identity assurance scheme, the private sector has several and has no need of the under-performing GOV.UK Verify (RIP) and neither does local government.
The question arises therefore how on earth GDS could possibly achieve 25 million GOV.UK Verify (RIP) users in three years time.
They can't ...
... unless they cheat ...
... in connection with which, cast your mind back all the way to 1 February 2017 and the GDS blog post Growing Verify: services that need less proof of identity. The proposal there is to go back to "basic accounts", GOV.UK Verify (RIP) unverified accounts, self-certification, level of assurance 1 accounts.
Perhaps GDS could get 25 million people to self-certify. The basic accounts created would be of no use whatsoever to relying parties like DWP, the NHS, et al. But GDS would have achieved their strategic target – 25 million sort-of-users.
Updated St Patrick's Day 2017
Neither of them is employed by GDS any more but according to Tom Loosemore and Stephen Foreshew-Cain "digital means applying the culture, practices, processes and technologies of the internet era to respond to people’s raised expectations". GDS haven't advanced any other definition of the word "digital" and we may assume that they are still happy with it.
We have pointed out certain problems with that definition based on the culture of the internet era. The culture includes large dollops of pornography and fraud and it involves the mass destruction of any notion of privacy. GDS surely don't approve of that but they haven't yet distanced themselves from those aspects of the internet era by providing a new definition of "digital".
They probably should do. Today we learn that Gov.UK pulls plug on its YouTube ads amid extremism concerns. Inadvertently, Her Majesty's Government have been paying for advertisements to appear on extremist websites, thereby funding extremism. This discovery is all thanks to an investigation mounted by The Times newspaper, please see for example Taxpayers are funding extremism.
It's time for GDS to provide a serviceable definition of "digital".
Updated 27.3.17
We noted a month ago that the chances of the Government Digital Service (GDS) increasing the number of people registered for GOV.UK Verify (RIP) accounts to 25 million by the year 2020 are nil. If they're lucky.
GDS could cheat. They could count unverified accounts as though they were verified. But that would be cheating. It wouldn't convince anyone. Certainly not the ladies and gentlemen of the UK financial sector who, GDS hope, are looking for a way to use GOV.UK Verify (RIP).
That hope may be in vain but it's all GDS have left. As noted in an interview they gave to Government Computing. Talking about the inability of GOV.UK Verify (RIP) to match the Government Gateway, ex-Goldman Sachs man Kevin Cunnington, director general of GDS, says: "It would be nice if they become a citizen brand called Verify".
"It would be nice". Hope. Wishful thinking. Sad but that's all there is ...
... or not quite all. There's also a plan. A plan for how to achieve 25 million accountholders. What kind of a plan? A concrete one. A very concrete one – Cunnington: “Very concrete” plans mapped for 25m user Verify expansion. There's a "plan" and a "target" and an "ambition" and an "aim". The plan/target/ambition/aim "exists", we are told, and it's "very specific" but it's "not publicly available". So much for the GDS watchword make things open, it makes them better.
Mr Cunnington is openly planning/aiming to include basic, unverified GOV.UK Verify (RIP) accounts "because not all services require you to so formally identify yourself". The 25 million accounts will include millions of self-certifications. You don't need an identity assurance scheme to do that and you don't need to pay "identity providers" to do it for you. It's smoke and mirrors.
"The tax domain was one area Cunnington suggested where this lower level of ID assurance may be relevant to increase the number of Verify users". Really? Does Mr Cunnington really think that Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs will be happy to pay tax refunds to someone whose identity hasn't been verified? We looked at this last November. It's self-deception.
Wishful thinking. Unverified verifications. Smoke. Mirrors. Self-deception. This isn't a strategy. Goldman Sachs wouldn't put up with it. Neither should Whitehall. Nor should we.
Updated 4.4.17
Last week the National Audit Office (NAO) published a new report, Digital transformation in government. They say: "This report examines the role of Government Digital Service [GDS] in supporting transformation and the use of technology across government":
It is not yet clear what role GDS will play in relation to the [Transformation Peer Group] ... (13)
GDS has also struggled to demonstrate the value of its own flagship initiatives such as Verify, or to set out clear priorities between departmental and cross-government objectives (20)
... there continues to be a risk that GDS is trying to cover too broad a remit with unclear accountabilities (21)
To achieve value for money and support transformation across government, GDS needs to be clear about its role (21)
... we recommend that ... GDS, departments and other parts of the centre of government should clarify responsibilities for transformation ... (22a)
... we recommend that ... Roles, responsibilities and plans for delivering the new transformation strategy are more clearly defined (22a)
GDS should undertake a further phase of planning with clear costs, timescales and monitoring arrangements (22a)
... we recommend that ... GDS improves the clarity, relevance and consistency of guidance and technical standards (22c)
It should make clear the relative status of guidance documents ... (22c)
It should track performance against clear technical and programme measures ... (22d)
It is not yet clear how GDS will measure the [Government Transformation Strategy]’s progress ... (1.13)
... we examine Government Digital Service’s (GDS’s) role in setting strategy and consider its recent experience of ... developing a clear strategy for government (2.1)
GDS’s experience over the last five years highlights challenges relating to the clarity, completeness and interpretation of the [2012 Government Digital Strategy] (2.3)
It is not yet clear how GDS will prioritise its activities over the next few years, or how it will develop a plan to support its new approach (2.5)
GDS’s role in supporting transformation is not set out clearly in the new Government Transformation Strategy (2.7)
We found that responsibilities between GDS, the [Infrastructure and Projects Authority] and departments are not clearly defined (2.7)
It is not clear who is responsible for driving business transformation in government ... (2.7)
It is also unclear how they will do this (2.7)
In an internal review in 2015, GDS found that there was a lack of clarity about the purpose of the Performance Platform (2.10)
The minutes for four months from September 2016 noted that the Digital Group (which covers Verify and other common services) had to ask [GDS's Advisory Board] to clarify current priorities ... (2.17)
In the new Government Transformation Strategy, GDS has restated the importance of using data to support transformation in government ... It is not yet clear how GDS plans to take forward its work in this area (3.15)
Overview of GDS’s activities to support data transformation ... No overall data strategy to provide clarity of overall purpose (Figure 9)
Lack of clear framework for [Technology Code of Practice] (4.9)
GDS has had to clarify its guidance in response to confusion about requirements for adopting different contracting models (4.12)
It is not clear how new platforms are meeting the greatest need ... (4.16)
Lack of clarity of purpose and a poor understanding of wider government requirements can lead to unanticipated problems ... (4.18)
It is not clear how or when GDS will determine whether continuing with Verify will achieve projected benefits (4.26)
... the business case is highly reliant on assumptions about savings in departments, and it is not clear whether these are reasonable (4.27)
GDS’s estimate of savings is heavily dependent on avoided costs in departments ... it is not clear that these are good benchmarks (4.31)
It is not yet clear whether Verify will be able to overcome the limitations that have prevented its widespread adoption across government ... (4.33)
GDS has also struggled to demonstrate the value of its own flagship initiatives such as Verify, or to set out clear priorities between departmental and cross-government objectives (Figure 15)
... there continues to be a risk that GDS is trying to cover too broad a remit with unclear accountabilities (Figure 15)
... GDS needs to be clear about its role ... (Figure 15)
After a while, you get the point. The NAO were looking for clarity. And didn't find it.
Hardly surprising. GDS have little or no experience of public administration.
If the NAO wanted to learn about digital transformation in government, they'd do better to study HMRC, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs.
The NAO report will give both local government and the private sector occasion to re-consider the prudence of their involvement, if any, with GDS's identity assurance platform, GOV.UK Verify (RIP). And central government, too: "... this means that departments face weak incentives to adopt Verify" (4.30).
The NAO add nothing to anyone's confidence in GDS's payments and notifications platforms, GOV.UK Pay and GOV.UK Notify. Confidence in GDS's performance platform is further undermined.
Relations between the data.gov.uk team, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and GDS will be strained by the NAO report. What do GDS have to teach data.gov.uk and the ONS about data analysis (3.13-15)?
The NAO are silent on GDS's contributions to the discipline of machine learning ...
Sir Jeremy Heywood, Cabinet Secretary and head of the civil service, has previously reposed his trust in GDS to improve the public's trust in Whitehall. The NAO report suggests that he may be disappointed.
Updated 14.2.18
Take a look:
From: Data.gov.uk Team [mailto:team@data.gov.uk] Sent: 11 April 2011 12:32 To: 'DMossEsq' Subject: Re: [Questions] Home Office spend over £25,000
Hi David,
Thanks for getting in touch with data.gov.uk and for flagging up that these links are incorrect. It appears that the incorrect URL for the file has been added to the data.gov.uk registry, hence the link does not work. I have asked the department to resubmit the correct links. In the interim, you can view the expenditure data on the following page of the Home Office web site:
The data.gov.uk team On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 5:05 PM, <DMossEsq> wrote: David Moss sent a message using the contact form at http://data.gov.uk/contact.
The returns for November and December 2010 are missing. Can we the public please see the figures.
Worthy? Yes. Dull? Yes. But look at the date. April 2011. Getting on for seven years ago. And when did data.gov.uk get started? Answer, "Data.gov.uk launched publicly with a beta version in January 2010", eight years ago.
Now roll forward eight years to last Thursday, 8 February 2018, and Kevin Cunnington's blog post, The Government Transformation Strategy - one year on: "We’re helping government make better use of data - to use data as an enabler of public services. We’re also helping government publish data through data.gov.uk and registers".
Mr Cunnington is the director general of the Government Digital Service (GDS), his blog post is all about the tremendous achievements of GDS during the year since he finally published his strategy and here he is trying to take the credit for data.gov.uk doing the job it's been doing very well since before GDS existed.
GDS try to provide the components for government departments to assemble into systems and Mr Cunnington tells us that: "There are now more than 175 services across government that use one of the common components we operate. For example the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency [DVSA] uses GOV.UK Notify to remind people when they need to have an MOT test for their vehicle. This service now has more than 500,000 users" and "Bath and North East Somerset Council uses Notify to let residents know about bin collection days".
DVSA send DMossEsq emails to remind him to get MOTs for his two cars. (Is DMossEsq one user in Mr Cunnington's calculus, or two?) Is GDS trying to take the credit for inventing email? Lotus Notes has been providing workflow management since 1989. Should IBM, who now own Lotus Notes, thank GDS?
153 services use GOV.UK Notify out of Mr Cunnington's impressive-sounding 175. So the other components GDS provide rack up just 22 services between them.
"Public sector current receipts are expected to be about £769 billion in 2018-2019". That's what it says in HM Treasury's Red Book (p.5) while Mr Cunnington tells us that "more than £39.3 million in payments has passed through GOV.UK Pay". That's 0.0051105332% of expected receipts. Mr Cunnington doesn't tell us who we should thank for the other 99.9948894668%.
"And we’re tackling the challenge of identity assurance through GOV.UK Verify [RIP]. GOV.UK Verify [RIP] is being used in a range of services [16 of them] across government. For example, HMRC is using it to help people check their income tax online and HM Land Registry will use it to support the launch of a new digital mortgages service". That's Mr Cunnington again.
The story of GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is the story of failure, there is no need to go over it again here, please see DMossEsq passim.
Except for that last bit, "HM Land Registry will use [GOV.UK Verify (RIP)] to support the launch of a new digital mortgages service".
HM Land Registry have created their own electronic signature system. That's what might support their digital mortgage service, not GOV.UK Verify (RIP). GDS and their "identity providers" refuse to accept any liability for their identity assurance failures and, as a result, Parliament is being warned that the taxpayer will have to pick up the cost of any contingent liabilities which arise.
One last example of GDS's success in the first busy year of its strategy: "... we’re building service journeys into GOV.UK – piloting this approach with the ‘Learn to drive a car: step by step’ page. These service journeys take all the content and transactions on GOV.UK and put them into a coherent service journey that users and government understand":
GDS were given four years to 31 March 2020 to spend £450 million
As to the future, "EU Exit is the biggest challenge government faces at the moment and GDS is supporting all departments to meet this challenge".
How much do GDS know about Brexit?
Let's hope it's a bit more than they know about data modelling. And data ethics. And artificial intelligence. And machine learning. And the internet of things. And distributed ledgers/blockchain. And biometrics. And public administration. And ...
Updated 3.12.18
In the UK welfare system we have a benefit called "carer's allowance":
How it works You could get £64.60 a week if you care for someone at least 35 hours a week and they get certain benefits.
You do not have to be related to, or live with, the person you care for.
You do not get paid extra if you care for more than one person.
Carer's allowance is administered by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
Five- Four-and-a-bit years ago back in July 2014 Mike Bracken, the first executive director of the UK's Government Digital Service (GDS), published a blog post – What we mean when we say "service transformation". Under the tutelage of GDS, DWP Digital had introduced an on-line claim form to supplement the existing paper one:
It’s dramatically faster to use and works beautifully on phones and tablets as well as standard computers.
The paper form issues from "an outdated mainframe computer that churns these things out the same way it was designed to churn them out years ago". Not so with the on-line service:
... when we talk about "transformation", we don't just mean messing about with the hardware and software that makes things happen. We mean thinking about the whole service, getting a multidisciplinary team together, and transforming the experience for users, for the people who are seeking help when they put in a claim. We mean delivering a better experience for them, doing something that makes a genuine difference to their lives.
Thanks to GDS, DWP now has "new ways of working" using "agile techniques". DWP are "making decisions with data", they "release code on a two-week cycle, rapidly iterating on what came before" and "the team is now making use of cloud-based infrastructure and services".
This is "delivery in action, ... The DWP’s Digital Leader Kevin Cunnington [now director general of GDS] has some great people working on this and other projects (and has been busy recruiting more)". DWP will "end up with a truly transformed service, something designed to meet the needs of the people who use it. Something that delivers".
Nothing in the encomium above could prepare you for that day's edition of BBC Radio 4's Money Box which reports that the House of Commons Work and Pensions Select Committee has accused DWP of "shocking ineptitude" and "gross incompetence".
DWP have been over-paying carer's allowance. They are dealing with about 70,000 cases at the moment, out of 850,000 claimants. There has always been some over-payment but never so many cases at once. And DWP are taking so long to identify cases of over-payment that the claimants don't owe just a few weeks-worth of £64.60 but several years-worth. These carers are now being sued by DWP, some of them, for tens of thousands of pounds.
That shouldn't happen. It's inept of DWP and incompetent.
So much for transforming the experience for users, making decisions with data and delivery in action. Releasing code on a two-week cycle doesn't seem to have helped and neither do agile techniques, rapidly iterating and making use of cloud-based infrastructure and services.
So much for when we talk about transformation, we don't just mean messing about with the hardware and software that makes things happen. We mean thinking about the whole service ...
With GDS, it's just talk. They say they've transformed the whole system, end to end. In fact, it's just the front end. It's putting lipstick on pigs, please see above.
They say they're making decisions with data but an all-time high of 70,000 investigations into over-payment says they're not.
Money Box reveals that DWP are sent up to date information about the carers' income and about the PAYE/NI that they're paying. That's Pay As You Earn (i.e. income tax) and National Insurance. That is presumably a reference to Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs's RTI system (Real Time Information).
RTI is designed to collect this information every time someone is paid instead of just once a year. The idea is precisely to make the appropriate changes to welfare payments quickly. That clearly isn't happening.
GDS's repeated assertion that data-sharing would ensure better public services is not the simple tautology they claim. It is a dubious hypothesis. Certainly in the case of DWP/HMRC data-sharing it is. 70.000 times over.
GDS, the Government Digital Service, were meant to have an identity assurance service "fully operational" by March 2013.
That didn't happen but they have been testing GOV.UK Verify (RIP) since February 2014 ...
... and the system was declared to be live on 24 May 2016.
Between 23 May 2016 and 11 December 2016 237,850 GOV.UK Verify (RIP) accounts were created. That's an average of 1,172 per day.
The Office for National Statistics estimate that there were 50,908,702 people in the UK aged 18 or over in mid-2014.
At the rate of 1,177 1,172 per day, it would take 43,450 days to create 50,908,702 GOV.UK Verify (RIP) accounts. That's more than 119 years.
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Updated 10:43
GDS have a number of "identity providers" under contract to provide GOV.UK Verify (RIP) with identity assurance services. Relying parties like HMRC, for example, need to know that the person on the other end of the line applying for a tax rebate really is who they say they are before any money can be legitimately handed out.
These contracts are entered into under the terms of a framework agreement.
There was an early framework agreement covering the test phase of GOV.UK Verify (RIP). Then, on 25 March 2015, GDS announced that they had Framework 2 up and running. There were to be nine "identity providers". PayPal never showed up and Verizon have disappeared so, in the event, there are just seven. Those seven "identity providers" have trouble registering more than about 70% of applicants. Even where an application succeeds, it is unclear how reliable the identity is.
The contract notice for Framework 2 is available on OJEU, the Official Journal of the EU: "The Government's aim is that all the central government services that need identity assurance for individuals will be using GOV.UK Verify [RIP] by March 2016". That didn't happen.
The contracts under Framework 2 last for a maximum of four years. If the registration of adults in the UK is going to take 119 years – please see above – then we must expect it to end under Framework 30.
Updated 12:43
Framework 1 was valued at a ridiculously low £25 million + VAT.
Framework 2 was valued at £150 million: "Estimated value excluding VAT: 150 000 000 GBP". In a UK population of 50,908,702 adults, that's about £2.95 of assurance per person.
Suppose the next 28 framework agreements are valued at the same £150 million. That takes the total for all 30 frameworks to £4,375 million.
We know from the Framework 2 contract notice that: "This procurement competition is managed on behalf of the Contracting Authority by the Crown Commercial Service (CCS)".
We know from a report by the National Audit Office (NAO) that: "... This reduction in CCS’s income will be offset by an increase to an existing levy that suppliers pay when they provide services under CCS frameworks ... The levy is currently around 0.5% and will become around 0.9% of the costs of services provided under CCS frameworks" (para.3.5, p.47). So over the course of the 30 framework agreements, CCS would expect to rake off between £21.875 million commission at ½% and £39.375 million at 0.9%, call it £40 million in round numbers.
That may seem like a relatively small amount of money but, given that the NAO find that CCS add no value whatever, it's a waste: "it is not possible to show that CCS has achieved more than departments would otherwise have achieved by buying common goods and services themselves".
81.6% of people are satisfied or very satisfied with how easy it is to use GOV.UK Verify (RIP). 84.5% of people feel secure registering with the system and 80.5% are comfortable with "identity providers"/certified companies.
These user satisfaction figures are taken from the GOV.UK Verify (RIP) dashboard on the Government Digital Service's GOV.UK performance platform. They are based on 11,687 responses to the ease of use question, 11,623 to the security question and 11,552 on "identity providers".
DMossEsq and other critics can carp all they like. They're wrong, GDS may say. Just look at those user satisfaction ratings. Over 80% of people are satisfied with GOV.UK Verify (RIP) or very satisfied with it. That's what counts. And "counts" is the right word. We're dealing with numbers here. And you can't argue with numbers ...
... or can you?
The user satisfaction statistics haven't been updated on the GOV.UK Verify (RIP) dashboard since 19 September 2016. There's no point guessing why but they're two months out of date.
As at 19 September 2016 847,433 GOV.UK Verify (RIP) accounts had been created and they had been used 881,914 times. That means that 1,729,347 identity verification transactions had taken place. Which means that the user satisfaction ratings are based on responses to about 0.68% of transactions.
"84.5% of 0.68% of people feel secure registering with the system" doesn't make for a knock-down cogent conclusion in favour of GOV.UK Verify (RIP).
Do the views of 0.68% of the population indicate the views of the other 99.32%? We have learned in the UK to be sceptical of polling results like this. The pollsters got the 2014 Scottish independence referendum wrong and the 2015 general election and the 2016 EU referendum.
They still get their forecasts wrong but at least the pollsters have become very careful over the decades about the wording of survey questions and the way in which they are asked. GDS don't have that professional hinterland ...
... and it shows. GDS ask how secure people feel, registering with GOV.UK Verify (RIP) – people may feel secure and yet not be. People may only be comfortable with using "identity providers" because they are misguided.
What we're left with is a question. How useful are GDS's user satisfaction statistics for GOV.UK Verify (RIP)? And we don't know the answer.
It's not just GOV.UK Verify (RIP). HMRC were talking about their on-line Personal Tax Account service the other day (PTA): "It’s still less than 12 months since the PTA was launched but, with 6.7m users and a customer satisfaction rating of 77%, it’s already transforming the way our customers can deal with us".
What does "a customer satisfaction rating of 77%" mean? We don't know. Not least because there is no PTA dashboard on GDS's performance platform. That's a serious gap in coverage.
HMRC have plenty of figures on the performance platform for other services of theirs. The figures haven't been updated for over a year, since September 2015. That's another serious gap in the coverage. A gap that the ONS, for example, or data.gov.uk with their years of expertise would not condone.
GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is ignored by most of PTA's 6.7 million users. And by the tens of millions of users of HMRC's other on-line services with billions of transactions to their name every year. They prefer to use the alternative Government Gateway.
That's the system the UK depends on to raise revenue to fund public services. What are the user satisfaction measurements for the Government Gateway? How many accounts are there? How much revenue has been raised through the Government Gateway over the course of its 15 years of operation to date? How much does it cost to operate the Government Gateway? We don't know. Once again, there's no dashboard for it on GDS's performance platform.
We don't know how much it costs to operate GOV.UK Verify (RIP) either. Another serious gap in the coverage of the performance platform.
We used to know that only about 70% of people who make the attempt can create a GOV.UK Verify (RIP) account. The target was – and still is – 90%. But we don't know how much progress GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is making towards that target because GDS stopped reporting the figures, saying that they didn't tell us much. Yes they did.
Missing dashboards, missing data, suppressed data, unhelpful questions about feeling comfortable, ..., GDS's performance platform is not a good advertisement for data analytics.
Nor are GDS's attempts at data modelling. The GOV.UK Verify (RIP) account creation success rate for 16-24 year-olds will leap from 40% in the autumn of 2015 to more like 80% in early 2016. That's what GDS told us. Their assertion was based on a mathematical model. The mathematical model was wrong. No such leap took place.
GDS still make predictions about the account creation success rate: "The data we’ve gathered shows that if activity from [social media] accounts could be used for activity history, GOV.UK Verify [RIP]’s demographic coverage of the adult population overall could increase by 9%, and for the 16-25 demographic could see a potential increase of up to 38%".
But who believes that now? Probably not even GDS.
It was never clear why Mike Bracken, executive director at the time of GDS, was appointed the government's chief data officer back in March 2015. And it still isn't clear why data analytics is supposed to be one of GDS's specialities. The data simply doesn't support that claim.
Mr Bracken was ejected from Whitehall in September 2015 having made no progress on GDS's data skills in the intervening six months. His successor as executive director, Stephen Foreshew-Cain, lasted 10 months, ditto. Since 1 August 2016 GDS has had a director general, Kevin Cunnington, who said hello on 4 August 2016 and also:
I want to strengthen and accelerate the pace of change. I’ve read many times about the end of GDS, but it has always come back stronger than before. I want to tackle one thing head on: GDS will not be broken up. We remain part of the Cabinet Office with a clear mandate to lead digital, technology and data across government.
It is not clear why GDS has this mandate. Just because GDS know how to design a pretty front-end system it doesn't follow that they have the first idea how to analyse the data maintained by the back end.
81.6% of people are satisfied or very satisfied with how easy it is to use GOV.UK Verify (RIP). 84.5% of people feel secure registering with the system and 80.5% are comfortable with "identity providers"/certified companies.
These user satisfaction figures are taken from the GOV.UK Verify (RIP) dashboard on the Government Digital Service's GOV.UK performance platform. They are based on 11,687 responses to the ease of use question, 11,623 to the security question and 11,552 on "identity providers".
DMossEsq and other critics can carp all they like. They're wrong, GDS may say. Just look at those user satisfaction ratings. Over 80% of people are satisfied with GOV.UK Verify (RIP) or very satisfied with it. That's what counts. And "counts" is the right word. We're dealing with numbers here. And you can't argue with numbers ...
Selected UK local authorities are now conducting trials of the Government Digital Service's dead duck, GOV.UK Verify (RIP).
Generous to a fault with other people's money, GDS won't charge those local authorities – "GOV.UK Verify [RIP] accounts will be free to councils that participate for the duration of the pilot".
Other UK local authorities will have to pay for their use of GOV.UK Verify (RIP). How much? No-one knows. Not even GDS.
Suspend your disbelief for a moment and suppose that all UK local authorities depended on GOV.UK Verify (RIP). Some would pay for the privilege. Others wouldn't. GDS's generosity would inspire tensions.
GDS have further spiced up the recipe for tension with this little gem – there are "no plans to charge for the service being used by those outside the public sector". GDS aim to offer GOV.UK Verify (RIP) to the private sector for free.
This is the market in identity assurance that the ever-generous GDS have always said they wanted to create. While the London Borough of Merton would pay for it, the Royal Bank of Scotland would get GOV.UK Verify (RIP) for nothing.
That would be a nightmare. It is recommended that you now wake up and re-engage your disbelief. It won't happen. That's no way to run a market. It couldn't work. You know that even if GDS don't.
GDS are obviously worried about charging for GOV.UK Verify (RIP). Quite right, too.
The only way they can achieve any volume, they think, is to give the wretched service away for free. That won't work either. Ergo GOV.UK Verify is dead. RIP.
11 local authorities are going to try to use GOV.UK Verify (RIP) to issue concessionary travel passes. And 14 local authorities are going to try to use it to issue residents' parking permits.
The plan previously was to see if GOV.UK Verify (RIP) could help with issuing taxi licences as well. It was always a peculiar plan and now it's been dropped.
... and local authorities only want to use GOV.UK Verify (RIP) if it saves them money. That plan hasn't been dropped. GDS still haven't provided a price list but they're going to have to soon.
What should we expect to see as these trials unfold?
Standardisation v. localisation This is quite different from the form we fill in here in the London Borough of Merton, for example. The two forms are doing one job. Why have two forms? That looks like the sort of duplication GDS normally abhor.
Getting everyone to use the same tools to do the same job is precisely the rationale for Government as a Platform. Are GDS happy to see different parking permit application systems developed in each local authority? Hundreds of different forms? Hundreds of different on-line application systems?
It seems unlikely while they are at the same time telling central government departments that they should all use the same (non-existent) payments platform, GOV.UK Pay.
Two years ago the BBC were belabouring local government. They were said to be wasting money by failing to standardise. Bull Information Systems joined in with the criticism. So did Skyscape. And the Taxpayers' Alliance. And Policy Exchange. GDS threw in their contribution by claiming that most government IT applications are about as difficult as the requirements of a medium-sized dating website.
Not a single local authority among them, of course, these critics are all confident because they've never done the job. Most attempts to share services between local authorities seem to fail. But the ignorant faith in standardisation remains.
As the pilot projects to which both GDS and the local authorities are committed unfold, expect to see an element of this tension between standardisation and localisation.
Data protection Right at the top of the form, before any other business, there's B&HCC quite properly reassuring its parishioners about the personal information they're about to enter on the residents' parking permit application form:
Brighton & Hove City Council is the Data Controller for the purposes of the Data Protection Act 1998. This means that Brighton & Hove City Council is responsible for making decisions about how your personal data will be processed and how it may be used. The purpose(s) for which your data will be processed is Parking Permits. The information you provide may be used in detecting possible fraud. The information you provide will be treated confidentially at all times. Security safeguards apply to both manual and computerised held data, and only relevant staff/named disclosures can access your information.
If you have any queries contact the Data Protection Officer Tel: 01273 291207
That is a set of statements B&HCC can't possibly make if GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is inserted into their residents' parking permit application system. B&HCC will have no control over what information is collected, the uses to which this information is put, who can see it or where it will be stored. You can ring 01273 291207 all you like ...
... you won't get anywhere. GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is the end of privacy. In Brighton, and Hove, and anywhere else it infects. As long as that is understood, these trials may proceed smoothly. If there's any objection to local authorities abdicating their responsibilities and throwing their parishioners to the wolves, then it's going to be a bumpy ride.
Exclusion Let's take it for granted that B&HCC need to know who is applying for a parking permit:
GOV.UK Verify (RIP) doesn't collect titles. Further, when you come to register for a GOV.UK Verify (RIP) account with one of GDS's remaining "certified companies" which often aren't certified:
The certified company will also ask your gender. Anyone, for any reason, can opt out of identifying themselves in this way and choose an ‘I prefer not say’ option. You’re not required to provide an answer and - even if you choose to do so - the certified company won’t verify it.
But that's the least of B&HCC's problems if they rely on GOV.UK Verify (RIP) to identify applicants for parking permits.
The level of assurance offered by GOV.UK UK Verify (RIP) that the applicant is who they say they are is low. The US National Institute for Standards and Technology believe that GOV.UK Verify (RIP) achieves no proof of identity whatever, it's no more than a self-certification scheme.
And that's the case for people who manage to register. Lots of people can't even self-certify.
The verification success rate with GOV.UK Verify (RIP) hovered around the 70% mark for a while until GDS stopped publishing the figures. They had previously made 90% success a condition of going live. 70% is less than 90%. GOV.UK Verify (RIP) shouldn't have gone live in May 2016. It hadn't satisfied GDS's own conditions.
If B&HCC can only use GOV.UK Verify (RIP) to get about 70% of applicants to self-certify – and it may be less than that – how is it going to save them money? They're going to need to operate other systems in addition. That looks like costing more, not less.
B&HCC may have a greater commitment to data science than GDS. Oh to be a fly on the wall when the Council discusses the merits of spending more money to automate the worthless self-certification of parking permit-holders.
It's quite a mouthful. There's a lot there. Let's take a step back.
GDS's "dream" was outlined by their ex-deputy director, Tom Loosemore.
"Just sort it all out for me"
The idea is that when government is fully digitised there will be no need to apply for anything, including parking permits. The government will know what you need and will provide it. (Pre-parking. C.f. pre-crime.)
There should be no need for the applicant to specify the controlled parking zone they want a permit for (A, C, E, F, G, H, M, N, O, Q, R, T, U, W, Y or Z), that should be deducible from the address GOV.UK Verify (RIP) has already provided. B&HCC know the zones, they're B&HCC's zones for goodness sake, the applicant doesn't have to tell them.
Ditto, B&HCC can find out whether the application is for a low-emission vehicle as soon as they have the registration number. Certainly if it's a UK-registered car – DVLA, DVSA and the car insurance companies are already sharing this data. And even for foreign-registered cars – at least in our dreams. There's no need for the applicant to tell B&HCC.
Is the applicant a Blue Badge-holder? B&HCC probably already know the answer, they probably processed the Blue Badge application themselves, there's no need for the applicant to tell them.
GDS believe that transactions with government should be "friction-free". Asking the applicant to confirm information B&HCC already has is just friction. Out with it.
In GDS's dream CCTV camera records and other records will have alerted B&HCC to the existence of a car which is about to be transferred to one of their parishioners and if the council just interrogate enough databases/registers they can easily work out who is involved and offer them a parking permit before the applicant has even thought about it.
Taking into account their income from all sources, their savings and their financial commitments, an algorithm could calculate better than the applicant whether to opt for the 3, 6 or 12 month permit and even – to save inconvenience/friction – take the payment from the applicant's bank account.
There's no need to issue a material parking permit, of course. An entry on a database is quite enough by way of proof of the entitlement to park for B&HCC's digitised enforcement officers. At most, the applicant might be issued with a digital certificate to be stored on his or her mobile phone as a receipt for the payment made.
Too much to expect from B&HCC?
You may be right. Perhaps this work should be centralised in Whitehall. There's no need to duplicate these functions in each local authority.
That is the at once childish and sinister vision of GDS's Government as a Platform. A panopticon in which algorithms exercise your will for you based on what the pious Mr Loosemore calls a "single source of truth", i.e. hundreds of registers full of personal information about you.
It's quite beyond them to bring it about, of course. GDS couldn't even computerise farm payments. It's all just "internet jibba jabba", as Mr Loosemore was told, on his way out of GDS.
When B&HCC and GDS sit down to re-engineer or re-imagine or "imagineer" the new residents' parking permit application scheme, let's hope that someone remembers the benefits of friction.
GDS approach local government now as supplicants. Local government is GOV.UK Verify (RIP)'s last hope.
No doubt local government is generally kindhearted but they are in no position to take on what everyone else has rejected. Why should they? What does GOV.UK Verify (RIP) have to offer them? What do GDS have to offer them?
GDS will tend to fight the "local" in "local government". GOV.UK Verify (RIP) will take the "protection" out of "data protection". It will exclude large chunks of B&HCC's population. And all for the sake of what? Some pie in the sky imagineering about Government as a Platform.
Imagine being able to create a new service in hours, not months. Imagine being able to create two slightly different versions of a service, and see which one works best. And then, having done the research and iterated and improved the better one, simply killing off the one that didn’t make the cut ... Imagine being able to do that at negligible cost ...
Mr Foreshew-Cain took over as executive director of GDS when Mike Bracken left, at the same time as Tom Loosemore, in September 2015. Now he, too, is gone. As is Janet Hughes, GOV.UK Verify (RIP)'s sometime funeral programme director.
"Wildly unrealistic expectations". That's the verdict on GOV.UK Verify (RIP) ...
The LDC say: "This document is the first iteration of the case for local authorities to transform their digital services through the use of GOV.UK Verify [RIP] and other common components". It's a piece of sales literature. What's the pitch?
A traditional sales line, everyone's seen it before, and some people may even still believe it.
The LDC add weight to their claims by citing supporting documents:
A combination of GDS gifts "lowers the barriers to ‘moving between suppliers’ and allows to switch from underperforming contracts4", for example, refers the reader to another document produced by the LDC.
And something else the LDC recommend "can achieve reductions of up to 5% of savings in local authorities expenditure5" is supported by reference to a CIPFA document. (Savings will be reduced by 5%?)
This is laudable practice, to provide independent support for your argument, but it makes it stand out like a sore thumb when you fail to.
The LDC give four examples (p.6) of how savings have been achieved by using GDS products, services and standards. Three of them have supporting citations ...
... and this one doesn't: "£111.44 million National Audit Office (NAO) approved savings through GOV.UK Verify [RIP]". No evidence of any such NAO approval has been found yet. This may explain the lack of a citation.
Updated 13.4.17
As noted above last October, 11 local authorities were going to try to use GOV.UK Verify (RIP) to issue concessionary travel passes. And 14 local authorities were going to try to use it to issue residents' parking permits:
Residents’ Parking Permits
Concessionary Travel Pilot
Brighton and Hove City Council
Brighton and Hove City Council
Buckinghamshire Councty Council
Buckinghamshire Councty Council
Southampton City Council
Southampton City Council
Northumberland County Council
Northumberland County Council
Camden
Camden
Hillingdon London
Hillingdon London
Chelmsford City Council
Luton
Barnet London Borough
Central Bedfordshire
Oxfordshire County Council
Essex County Council
Canterbury City Council
Hertfordshire
Tunbridge Wells Borough Council
Warwickshire Councty Council
Wigan Council
Newcastle City Council
Sunderland City Council
Next month the Local Digital Coalition (LDC) are going to lay on a showcase to "share the products we've delivered during the alpha phase of #VerifyLocal work - from prototypes to user research, and technical patterns to business case findings".
Will all 19 local authorities be there?
No.
It can be inferred from the LDC website that many local authorities have pulled out of these pilot schemes:
Eight of the original 14 local authorities (57%) have pulled out of the residents' parking permits pilot scheme and six of the original 11 (55%) have pulled out of the concessionary travel scheme.
An unwary observer might believe that there are still 19 local authorities taking part in these GOV.UK Verify (RIP) pilots. Neither GDS nor the LDC have blogged to tell us that 10 of the original 19 local authorities (53%) are no longer involved.
That's a pretty hefty attrition rate that's going to be showcased.
Updated 28.4.17
There's no progress on the concessionary travel pilot that the Government Digital Service (GDS) is conducting with local authorities. Or, at least, with the five local authorities left, out of the 11 that started.
Eight of the original 14 local authorities have pulled out but for the survivors: "A key step has been reducing the level of assurance required for parking permit applications, reflecting the fact that permit applications are less sensitive than other services for which Verify could be used". I.e. GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is the wrong product to be using ...
... all a local authority really needs to know is that a car is registered at an address in their area. But, wait for it ...
... "Plans for the [Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA)] to enable checking of the vehicle registration to a given address have not been included in the current prototype as the agency is going through a transformation programme".
The residents' parking permits pilot is using the product it shouldn't be using and it isn't using the product it should be using. Good luck to the guinea pig residents of Buckinghamshire, Northampton, Sunderland, Oxfordshire, Tunbridge Wells, Sunderland and Cambridgeshire with that.
"The Theatre of the Absurd attacks the comfortable certainties of religious or political orthodoxy. It aims to shock its audience out of complacency, to bring it face to face with the harsh facts of the human situation", as we used to say.
GDS's religious/political orthodoxy has been confronted with the harsh fact that they have promised to sign up 25 million people to the unwanted moribund GOV.UK Verify (RIP) in three years time. Shocked out of their usual ineffable complacency, their absurd response is to reduce the already low level of assurance offered by GOV.UK Verify (RIP) and to ignore the essential DVLA product that is needed to meet residents' parking permit needs.
Absurd. It makes for amusing theatre. But the digital transformation of government in the UK it ain't.
Updated 11.5.17
13 April 2017, DMossEsq's millions of readers learned that over half the local authorities taking part in GDS's trials of GOV.UK Verify (RIP) had walked away.
PT followed up on the story. Why are the councils walking away?
We don't need GOV.UK Verify (RIP):
When asked by PublicTechnology for their reasons for leaving the trial, two councils - Hillingdon and Southampton - indicated that they were happy that their existing systems. Southampton said that its existing online verification service for bus passes “provides a similar functionality to the Verify solution”.
We've got more important things to do:
Brighton and Hove - which left in February, just before the pilot entered alpha phase - said in a blogpost that it was “a great project but currently the timing isn’t right for us”, as the digital team “has a lot to deliver this year”.
Maybe later:
[Brighton and Hove] added that its plans for a virtual permits service “stands to benefit from a tie up with Verify at a later date”.
Camden made a similar point, saying that it had already invested in master data management, which it was looking at “fully integrating into the next phase of Verify”.
Wigan, Chelmsford and Newcastle councils all issued the same statement: “We are not participating in the current phase of the GOV.UK Verify [RIP] local authority pilots. We remain in contact with GDS on further GOV.UK Verify [RIP] developments and hope to include the system in local services in the future.”
“Councils are used to procuring not building tech. Councils mostly lack the skills to do discovery, work in sprints and collaborate cross border,” said Adam Walther, project director at FutureGov.
GDS don't understand:
“... [GDS's Verify local team] have probably underestimated the complexity of working with this sector, and lack some of the design, delivery and political skills.
“To move beyond central government to support other parts of the public sector requires more humility, better design and reaching out to partners by everyone involved.”
... Matthew Cain was head of digital at Buckinghamshire County Council ... said that some of the initial requirements and expectations were unrealistic - for instance on the level of tech spend available to councils and in asking for roles that “didn’t even exist in the authority” ... in order to make headway, there needs to be more understanding on both sides.
Maybe it would help if GOV.UK Verify (RIP) didn't verify people's identity:
Kat Sexton from Cambridgeshire County Council - which joined the trial at a later date - told the Socitm spring conference last week that GDS was working on allowing Verify to offer a lower level of assurance that someone is who they say they are.
Maybe it would be best if GOV.UK Verify (RIP) didn't do anything at all. That would make its use completely frictionless:
GDS have gone away and...they’re actually creating a lower level of assurance, which is great because we’ll be [keen to use] that,” Sexton said.
HMRC and DWP don't want to use GOV.UK Verify (RIP).
Why not use the Government Gateway, like "138 public services" already do?
These trials concern residents' parking permits and concessionary travel, relatively easy applications, and yet there's no progress – suppose GOV.UK Verify (RIP) tried something difficult like the social care of vulnerable children or the victims of Alzheimer's, the sort of problems local government has to solve all day every day?
... but that's quite enough to be going on with.
Eight of the original 14 local authorities (57%) have pulled out of the residents' parking permits pilot scheme and six of the original 11 (55%) have pulled out of the concessionary travel scheme.
Updated 18.8.17
11 local authorities started the concessionary travel pilot for GOV.UK Verify (RIP). When we last looked there were only five left. Now that Hertfordshire and Warwickshire County Council have pulled out we're down to just three survivors.
