Mike Bracken
Founding Partner, Public Digital
State of Open: The UK in 2024
Phase Two: The Open Manifesto Report
Thought Leadership: ‘Open is the only way’
The relationships between the Government and its technology supply chain are broken. This not only impedes the development of our technology sector, more importantly, the potential for public service provision and innovation is restricted. It’s time for a system change.
The Post Office inquiry shows how the decades-long Fujitsu engagement has undermined trust in a core public service, and damaged hundreds of postmasters.
Frank Hester’s remarks about Diane Abbott are appalling, but the Government has little choice to continue using his software and services as the market he supplies is closed to innovation.
At local level, oligopolies abound, with councils, lacking scale and skills, forced to adopt sub-standard Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) products which restrict innovation and maintain high prices while the commodity technology cheapens. The legacy of system integrators remains, with 43 central Government systems described as ‘at risk’ in 2023, and 11 of those in the Ministry of Defence.
Rarely have the demands of the Government and the messages to its delivery capability been so muddled. We aspire to real-time decision making, data derived policy, and deployment of advanced technologies, and AI. Yet we continue to offer multi-year contracts to legacy IT providers and consultancies. The procurement of inappropriate shaped technologies and services is at its worst since the late Blair era.
We remain world class at innovation, engineering and R&D, but the blockers to scale remain profound.
Why? Because we are closed. Closed code, closing business development and entire markets, and closing off improved public sector outcomes.
Open policy
Opening up starts with policy. For too long we tailor ever more detailed policy ‘solutions’ and then procure their delivery from closed technology supply chains. This has to stop immediately, but starting with clear policy intent and giving teams inside and outside the public sector the opportunities to rapidly scale answers to policy questions. We did this in Covid, by necessity, and it’s time to formalise this approach again. Opening up policy to the potential of dynamic, open markets, and that often means open source and interoperable technology and data provision, is a day one move for the new Government.
There are hundreds of examples of where an open approach to policy making would benefit the Government far more than long policy documents. Here’s one from the redoubtable Anna Powell-Smith, the Director of the Centre of Public Data:
‘The Trust Registration Service, run by HMRC and set up in 2018 because of an EU law, is a database of UK trusts. Trustees are asked to describe the trust’s company and property holdings in free text, but not asked to supply title numbers or company numbers. So the database can’t be used to work out the extent of trust holdings, and when the government comes to write policy on trusts, it can’t get some basic numbers. Improving the data in the Trust Registration Service would be a good thing to do, particularly for a government that wants to raise money by cracking down on evasion.’
Opening up hundreds of these data sets to better drive the delivery of policy is a first 100 day move.
Open contribution
Opening up requires us to put to use the many thousands of skilled, committed public servants who are currently locked-out from improving the services they have to deliver. Whether triple keying across legacy systems or awaiting endless ‘change control windows,’ our workforce inside the Government could do so much more to improve data and services. Enabling our workforces does not mean making everyone technologically advanced, but rather using simple market shaping regulations to allow everyone to improve services.
Take primary care health data, locked inside systems which remain unshared across trusts and wider health professionals. A simple statutory instrument mandating that providers of these systems must participate in open, interoperable standards to allow our health professionals to share and improve patient data would radically improve the quality of healthcare.
Open wide
Public services are a team sport, not the domain of companies defending rent-seeking contracts and positions.
We should promote committers, maintainers and contributors as a central part of public service culture. Building on that capability, the provision of services and platforms should reach across and outside the public estate. Take the unheralded success of GOV.UK/Notify, a platform used by 7,000+ services and 1800 organisations in the UK alone. These platforms should unite the various parts of Government – central, local and wider public bodies – and drive market competition and innovation from private providers.
The UK has a solid body of open source in operation, and a talented, committed set of professionals curating it. What is lacking, is the open governance, with a central standards body capable of driving adoption and control across the public estate.
As a result, our pace of adoption has not matched our pace of understanding and as the world’s first open source first policy holder.
Open hearts
Technology skills in the public sector are a must, to give us situational awareness and a muscle to respond to policy needs in changing times. We need all our public sector vendors to embrace open source, participate in open, dynamic markets and help the Government shape a dynamic engine for growth. The time for change is now.
First published by OpenUK in 2024 as part of State of Open: The UK in 2024 Phase Two “The Open Manifesto”
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