A few quick comments after reading Whitehall Monitor 2020

I finally found time over the weekend to read the latest Whitehall Monitor (overview page, full PDF, launch video). For those not familiar with it, it’s the annual publication from the Institute for Government covering the size, shape and performance in 61 charters and lots of high quality analysis. Thanks as always to Gavin Freeguard and the rest of the IfG team for an excellent read.

To avoid the kind of tweet-splosion I had after watching the last IfG Data Bites video here’s some short blog-based thoughts instead.

My first thought after reading Whitehall Monitor is always the same. The wish that either someone would fund the IfG to take the longitudinal data that goes into the report and feed it into Gapminder Tools or that the IfG could find a willing student to use their data for a significant university project. I strongly believe that seeing animations of the data evolving over time could have a powerful impact.

I’ll break my other thoughts down by the appropriate areas in the document.

Chapter 3 : The Civil Service

It’s very good to see information about social mobility alongside other demographics in this section of the report. However, I’m still most keen to see educational background included in this as well. This would naturally be a difficult feet for all 400k+ civil servants, especially given the issues with departments producing even basic staff data, but feels achievable for, say, the top 250 civil servants. I still suspect that not only specific universities but also a set of fee paying schools make up the background of very senior civil servants — particularly in some departments.

It was surprising to see that there are 11k people working in “IT” in government. It would be very interesting to see a further breakdown of those roles. For example, how many are maintaining contracts and keeping the lights on for legacy systems vs. the number building new user centred services.

I was equally surprised to hear that there are 2,500 people working in Knowledge and Information Management. I wonder how the success of those roles is measured as I personally still feel that the government, for the most part, is fairly woeful in this area. I’m still looking forward to the Cabinet Office’s thoughts on the civil-servant-access-only wiki that any staff from any government organisation can edit. I think that would quickly turn out to be an amazingly powerful tool.

I read that there were 29 government Professions and 14 cross-cutting Functions. While there’s a nice Professions page on Civil Service Jobs and they, alongside the Functions, are all listed in the GOV.UK Organisations page (albeit mixed in with everything else) it still very much doesn’t feel like these organisations are taking advantage of the 21st digital tools now available to everyone for online community building. There’s so much that could be done in this are regarding community building, following the Emily Webber model. I would have thought that at least a small number of the 3,700 professional Comms people in government could be re-tasked to try that out.

Chapter 4 : Digital Services

It continues to be impressive to see the take-up of GOV.UK Notify and GOV.UK Pay. I agree that Verify continues to have serious issues but much of that is due to over-promising what could be achieved. If we, as a nation, continue to agree that national ID cards are a bad idea then any government ID system will always struggle as a citizen will need to provide a mixture of ID proofs — many of which rely on each other (supply your passport to get a driving license) or strongly maintain a lack of responsibility (“This is not a form of identification on birth certificates”). Likewise, the people government are most often trying to serve, the most vulnerable, struggle to have any form of ID. Verify is the best of a difficult situation and ideally would be given more time to become more popular — especially in the local gov and private sector.

However, the biggest loss in my opinion is still the lack of GDS owning a strong central microservices based infrastructure platform that can be use by anyone in government. Pay and Notify, for all their excellence, are products not part of a cohesive platform. I notice that GOV.UK PaaS isn’t mentioned in the report at all. Instead, each of the major departments has and continues to spend considerable money building duplicate walled gardens of digital infrastructure rather than a shared common resource.

In the same vein we now have the FOI return on the GDS Submit — the service cancelled some years ago that was investigating the possibility of building a centralised “form-builder” for government. Informal cross-gov form-builder related meetings continue to this day but with little backing from any funding departments. There is a huge opportunity to use the excellent GOV.UK Design System to build such a system since a high percentage of digital work in government is simply bringing forms online. Then again, it would mean departments being able to supply and receive data from outside their walled gardens and data is a whole issue for another time (although I’m glad to see more and more good people working on the issue).

Next time I hope there is opportunity to cover how NHS Digital is building on the great work GDS and others have previously done. Their latest show and tell on their Service Manual can be found here.

The quality of digital service for staff still tends to be very low and the dreaded “shared services” tend to be provided by the same small coterie of large outsource providers. I would love the next WM to have some data on the opinions of civil servants on the systems they have to work with.

Chapter 7 : Transparency

It would be really interesting to know if departments provide the raw data of FOI requests that are submitted. I can imagine a very interesting project to analyse the requests to see what the common factors are and then to further investigate whether the digital systems currently set up in the appropriate departments allow for the easy fulfilment of those requests.

Finally, it’s pretty woeful that government struggles to produce mandated data, such as spending information, at all — and that the current stretch goal is to have such information made available “in a spreadsheet” (I suppose as opposed to embedded in a giant PDF). We’re not going to get close to a decent ambition of regular updates of machine readable data until we have named Officers who are responsible for each departments publications who can be asked pointed questions at the Public Accounts Committee.