GOV.UK is intended to be the single point of online access for UK government information and services. The project leader in the Government Digital Service recounts the transformation in the early 2010s of over 2,500 fragmented public websites into a ‘boring’ but efficient and award-winning site.
In 2010, the UK central government ran over 2,500 public websites. The only common thing in this fragmented digital landscape was inconsistency. GOV.UK changed that.
The project consolidated thousands of functions into a single domain. Today, if you want to learn to drive, get a passport, claim a pension or start a company, you’ll find simple, clear and accessible information and services on the government’s single website. Indeed, every week more than ten million people rely on GOV.UK.
What’s more, the consolidation saved over £70 million a year in hosting costs alone. Improved outcomes for citizens and reduced demand on government telephone lines has saved many millions more.
Figure 1: The OECD’s digital government index
Source: OECD (2022), Survey on Digital Government
More than a decade on, the approach continues to deliver. The UK was the third best performing country in the OECD’s 2023 digital government index – falling only behind South Korea and Denmark. The UK’s approach scores particularly highly in ‘digital by design’, and the OECD uses GOV.UK as an exemplar in its toolkit for effective government information websites.
What principles guided the transformation?
GOV.UK was oriented according to citizens’ expectations of government, not organisational boundaries.
By design, governments are not a single monolith. They are loose federations of organisations with different roles and mandates. Central government thinks of itself as hundreds of different departments and agencies. So do experts and journalists who interact with the government all the time. But citizens just see ‘government as government’.
The confused web estate prior to GOV.UK was a textbook example of Conway’s law – the idea that organisations that design systems often end up reflecting their own internal communication structures. The 2,500 websites mirrored Whitehall’s organisational chart, whether or not it made any sense at all to the people for whom the website had been built.
But building a national government website is not just about design and technology. It also requires the conditions that allow change to happen.
The incentive challenge
If you are a public servant or politician making decisions in a typical bureaucracy, your actions are determined by two types of incentives: rational incentives, which flow from the laws, processes and political context in which you operate; and cultural incentives, which are set by the behaviours, reactions and responses of your peers.
To make GOV.UK a reality required changes to both of these types of incentives, across the federation of nearly 500 central government institutions. It required a strong mandate from the top to change the rational incentives – and an equally powerful cultural movement from the bottom up, to put the needs of citizens ahead of the convenience of departments.
Designing the updated system
In 2010, Martha Lane Fox (now president of the British Chambers of Commerce) was asked to review central government’s online services by the new coalition government’s cabinet office minister, Francis Maude. Her 11-page report, ‘Revolution, not evolution’, recommended that the government set up a new digital institution (the Government Digital Service), and give it unequivocal powers to improve radically the quality of all government’s online services.
A key recommendation was for central government to move to a single website. It took Maude’s willingness to spend personal political capital persuading fellow ministers that closing their departments’ websites was in their interests, and the public support of the previous Labour government’s digital minister, Tom Watson, to make GOV.UK – which I joined the civil service to lead – difficult to kick into the long grass.
The aim was to put the needs of the users of government services first, and to do so by adopting what for government was then a wholly new way to develop online services: a digital way of working.
The definition of digital for the redesign was as follows: applying the culture, processes and operating models of the internet era to respond to people’s raised expectations (as opposed to ‘digital equals IT’).
This translated into an open, collaborative and multi-disciplinary culture, putting the needs of users first; iterative and incremental processes, embracing agile ‘test-and-learn’ approaches to delivering outcomes; dynamic operating models that made it possible to fund and support new multidisciplinary teams in days, and roll out multiple software releases every hour; and technologies that were open source, cloud-based and modular.
From alpha to beta to launch
The team needed to show what this new way of working meant in practice. Over 12 weeks, a 15-person multi-disciplinary team of user researchers, designers, software developers and product managers worked iteratively to launch a very early ‘alpha’ version of the website.
This alpha set the template for all that followed. Simple, clear, jargon-free content, designed to be easy to find, read and understand by anyone in the UK. Securely hosted in a website that was designed to be updated every minute of every day.
The alpha team worked in the open, blogging and tweeting about what they were doing, and what they were learning. From day one all the code was open source and published on Github.
The team included people from both within and outside the civil service. Smaller internet-era companies came into the supply chain for the first time, and major procurement reform followed to reduce dependency on a handful of very large IT consultancies that had long dominated the market.
Launching the successful alpha version of GOV.UK gave the cultural reforms essential momentum and attracted a network of willing collaborators across departments and agencies. These people were advocates for change throughout Whitehall, making the case for GOV.UK within their own organisations. This often meant convincing colleagues to turn off their existing department websites – a tricky task to sell.
The alpha of GOV.UK also gave ministers confidence, and a budget was swiftly approved for a public beta version. This gained further approval and momentum. A new version of GOV.UK was live by February 2012 (although the websites it was due to replace had not yet been turned off at this stage). The alpha cost £261,000.
Meanwhile, Mike Bracken – founder of the Government Digital Service (GDS) – had been busy changing the logic underpinning the rational incentives holding back the adoption of GOV.UK. He got approval from HM Treasury for departments and agencies to retain any savings made from closing their websites, with GOV.UK funded separately by the Cabinet Office. Money talked, not least during this period of austerity.
GOV.UK was launched without fanfare in October 2012 – a remarkably short timescale for the development of a new piece of critical national infrastructure. The biggest websites it replaced were turned off, and their pages archived or seamlessly redirected to their replacements on GOV.UK. Something this bold either happens swiftly, or not at all. Digital ways of working had proved themselves.
The legacy of digital transformation
In the years that followed, GDS shifted focus to supporting departments’ transformation of online public services such as applying for your passport, car tax and driving licence.
All this required more changes to rational incentives acting on tens of thousands of civil servants, including reinventing the recruitment processes to attract people with the required digital skills, introducing the digital marketplace to open up the supplier base, changing the business case process to provide better support for test-and-learn approaches, and making sure civil servants were given tech kit that was at least as good as they used at home. We even fixed the wifi.
Broader reform required bigger levers to shape rational choices. GDS acquired joint control with HM Treasury of all department IT spending. It had the power to stop a new online service from going live if it did not meet a new service standard.
Cultural incentives for reform were also amplified. GDS had a team dedicated to blogging and making YouTube videos of existing civil servants in other departments sharing their experiences of adopting the open, iterative, multi-disciplinary digital ways of working.
Cross-government communities of practice for designers, developers, product managers and user researchers created a new cross-government set of design patterns (the GOV.UK Design System). These well-researched design patterns have since been adopted by all online services.
As with all public services, the risk of stasis is ever present, even with something seemingly as bold as GOV.UK. The website is likely to be challenged over the coming years by artificial intelligence ingesting and re-presenting government information, if not whole services.
So it’s heartening to see the team running GOV.UK sharing what this trend might mean for how they produce government content and services that meet citizens’ raised expectations, while retaining their trust.
GOV.UK remains an outlier. Most governments around the world present their public with a trust-eroding smorgasbord of poorly designed online services. But there are some signs of change. In the United States, President Trump has appointed Joe Gebbia, one of the founders of Airbnb, to the new position of chief design officer. His stated mission is to improve the design of thousands of federal government websites, rather than replacing them all.
Creating something as simple and clear as GOV.UK is hard. Not because it’s hard to design, but because delivering simplicity requires you to change deep-rooted incentives across a federated institution.
More than ten years on, GOV.UK is still a remarkably well-designed and built website. In 2013, it won the world’s leading design award. It was the first website ever to win, and the first public service. The Daily Mail headlined the news ‘Boring.com’. If the worst thing that newspaper can say about a public service is that it’s boring, then you’re doing okay.
Where can I find out more?
- The story of the government digital service.
- UK government digital service: Moving beyond a website (2017): Harvard Kennedy School case study.
- Digital transformation at scale: Why the strategy is delivery.
- Interview with Sarah Winters, author of Content Design.
- A blueprint for modern digital government (HTML): Policy paper, January 2025.
- 2023 OECD Digital Government Index.
Who are experts on this question?
- David Eaves: Associate Professor of Digital Government and Co-Deputy Director of the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at University College London.
- Jennifer Pahlka former US Deputy Chief Technology Officer and founder of US Digital Service.
- Andrew Greenway, author of Digital Transformation at Scale.
