Digital bogged down by bureaucracy: an interview with Tom Loosemore formerly of Government Digital Service (GDS)

'There are so many vested interests in this country feeding off the friction that the bureaucracy makes for itself'

Tom Loosemore, who until recently was deputy director of the UK Government Digital Service (GDS), is an eminently quotable man. Here's one of his: "There are so many vested interests in this country feeding off the friction that the bureaucracy makes for itself."

Having recently joined former GDS colleagues at the Co-operative Group, Loosemore is now able to talk about his achievements and frustrations during his time in government, but first let's take a step back. What exactly is GDS and what does it aim to achieve?

"Government is not that big - it's about the size of a small bank"

The volume of transactions between departments and citizens make the UK government small fry compared with internet-based companies. However, the way that it has grown up based on paper documents has favoured a siloed approach where each department gathers as much information as it can. This has led to a situation in which not only is each department sitting on vast amounts of data of dubious currency and quality, but each uses different identifiers for the same object, such as a business.

"HMRC doesn't trust Companies House, local authorities don't trust either and companies don't use unique identifiers to trade with other companies," Loosemore explains.

There are many other examples like that. The idea behind GDS, which was kicked off by Francis Maude MP and entrepreneur Martha Lane Fox in 2011, is to break down these silos and to have a "single version of the truth" for everything that government touches. It is also about realising publisher Tim O'Reilly's 2009 vision of Government-as-a-platform (GaaP) - an ecosystem of supporting services built on common standards with departments acting as trusted registries of data and with layers of trust and consent built in.

Loosemore again: "Government is not that big, the size of a small bank in terms of transactions, and this is eminently doable.

"It is about changing the shape of the government so there are bits of government that only deal with some data and other bits of government that don't deal in the same data because they trust another bit of government to provide them with the identifier for a company, or how much tax you paid last year, or whether your car is insured - rather than at the moment collecting all that data themselves."

Having each department focused only on collecting and maintaining data that's within its remit would be hugely more efficient, more secure, less prone to error, and vastly cheaper Loosemore maintains. It would also kickstart a whole new area of commerce as companies are able to build on GaaP, interfacing with relevant public datasets via APIs.

"It's the most radical thing that this government has done"

The whole system depends on secure verification, and Verify is one part of GDS that's already up and running, albeit in beta.

Rather than having a "government number", as with the hated abandoned ID card scheme, citizens and businesses can store different aspects of their identity with different approved providers, be they government-run such as the Post Office, or a commercial entity such as Barclays Bank or Verizon.

"That diversity is very important for national resilience," says Loosemore. "Should the worst happen and one of the techniques becomes compromised you just turn them off. Just go and use another identity provider."

This scheme will ultimately make it easy for citizens to access all relevant government digital services - even those of other governments - with their identities authenticated by trusted third parties. It will be very difficult for government departments (or commercial entities) to track individuals' activities across government sites as there is no central ID, making this a privacy enhancing measure.

Loosemore describes this citizen-centric approach to identity as "the most radical thing the government did in five years" and says it puts the UK in a world-leading position on identity. "A lot of other countries are watching us," he says.

"It takes a war or a space race to change the shape of government"

Although it started at a sprint, GDS soon became mired in the bog of bureaucracy.

"The shape of government needs to change," Loosemore says. "Businesses don't run on siloed departments any more and neither should government."

Just as the Victorians created new institutions to manage new public infrastructure such as water supply and sewerage systems, so new bodies are needed to push through the digital agenda, he argues.

"The hard thing is creating new institutions. You need political capital to change the role of different bits and to actually put the citizen's concerns at the heart of it, to trust that the citizen will know what's best for the citizen. It's an institutional change and a cultural change. But political capital is scarce I'm afraid."

The structure of the civil service is to blame, he goes on.

"The civil service is a continual civil service and that includes the Treasury. They run the country not the elected ministers. You've got an institution that really is reinforcing the bureaucracy."

He continues: "If you're a minister you've only got one or two people that really support you - your special advisers. Civil servants are there for the duration. Most of them are brilliant by the way but bureaucracies exist to protect bureaucracies. It takes a war or a space race to change institutional shape and allow the introduction of new institutions with different roles."

There are also challenges around new roles being allocated to - or removed from - existing institutions.

"We need to decide what is the canonical idea of what a company is and where that data resides. Is it Companies House or HMRC? Because it can't be both."

"Real progress will only come when we get jealous of other countries"

In August GDS director Mike Bracken left the government to join the Co-operative Group, and his erstwhile colleagues Russell Davies, Ben Terett and Tom Loosemore soon followed. Loosemore cites slow progress and the bureaucracy described above as being behind this decision.

Despite these difficulties the GDS project is moving onwards under the leadership of Stephen Foreshew-Cain. Many people were pleasantly surprised that the project was awarded an additional £450m in the Chancellor's spending review in November in spite of big cuts elsewhere, seeing it as a sign that the vision of GaaP is still being actively pursued.

"My successors are doing a lot of really brilliant stuff. It wasn't going fast enough me to stay but they are actually trying to do the right stuff given the constraints institutionally," Loosemore says.

However, he fears that the UK's leadership in the area has already been lost.

"Real progress will only come when we get jealous of other countries," he predicts. "The Australians are making their address data infrastructure open. The friction that that will take out by having a single source of truth that is properly curated and properly managed and that offers redress if it's wrong - it's massive.

He continues: "Unfortunately we sold ours with the Royal Mail. We are the best in the world at geography but we hide it all between trading funds that charge for it and put restrictions in the way. So Royal Mail owns the postcodes even though they're minted by local authorities, and Ordnance Survey owns the unique property reference number. We will lose that too if OS is privatised.

"There are so many vested interests in this country feeding off the friction that the bureaucracy makes for itself," he adds. "In Sweden you can buy a house in a day. Here it takes six months."

Loosemore is unwilling to talk much about his new role as digital services director at the Co-operative Group, beyond saying that it is "very early days but very exciting".

"Working with a company whose interests are aligned between customers and owners, that clarity of ownership in a personal data economy is very valuable. A shareholder-owned company is always going to have a tension between using customers' data to maximise shareholder value versus really actually serving their customers," he says.