Government could save £70bn by 2020 if it shifts to digital and cuts jobs - Policy Exchange

Think tank recommends that government should shop around for procurement deals and make use of big data analytics

The government could save up to £70bn by 2020 if it shifted away from paper and digitised its activities, learned to work in new ways but with fewer staff, sought out for the best procurement deals, and made use of data and analytics, according to the think tank Policy Exchange.

In a report, called ‘Smaller, Better, Faster, Stronger', the think tank aims to show how the government continues to waste billions of pounds by relying on paper-based public services.

For example, the Crown Prosecution Service prints one million sheets of paper every day, while the Passport Office also uses paper in instances where digital services would be better, the report suggested.

Last year, Computing found that the DVLA would be cutting 1,213 jobs as a result of embracing the government's ‘Digital by Default' agenda, through which the government aims to deliver "digital services that are so straightforward and convenient that all those who can use them will choose to do so while those who can't are not excluded".

Despite this move, two articulated trucks loaded with letters and paper work continue to pull into the DVLA every day, the report said.

The think tank went on to say that everything that the government does "should be online, unless a face-to-face interaction is essential". It said that about 60 per cent of people in the UK access the internet using a smartphone, and people are now expecting government services like tax returns or driving licences to be online.

The Policy Exchange commended the government for its moves to become digital and make use of more online services. Strategies including the government ICT strategy, digital strategy, shared services vision, Civil Service reform plan and open data initiatives were all moves in the right direction, it said.

But the think tank said that although much progress has been made in recent years to become digital by default, many of the deeper ways in which government operates have not changed in any substantive way for many decades.

It recommends that the government should adopt electronic purchasing to make procurement more efficient, and should issue electronic proofs instead of paper certificates. It should also expose application programming interfaces (APIs) to enable developers to write apps that can communicate with government systems.

Government could save £70bn by 2020 if it shifts to digital and cuts jobs - Policy Exchange

Think tank recommends that government should shop around for procurement deals and make use of big data analytics

It suggested that by 2020, government needs to have "moved from open data as a fringe activity to ‘total data' as its guiding philosophy". It recommends that digital and data skills should be incorporated into the Civil Service competency framework, and that Whitehall should open up all non-personal public sector data with persistent uniform resource identifiers (URIs), as a foundation for accountability and economic growth.

"The government should also start buying in big data analytics on a payment-by-results basis, to flush out savings that the public sector has thus far been unwilling or unable to realise," the report reads.

It claimed that by taking on the recommendations, by 2020 the government could be up to eight per cent more effective than if it continued doing business as usual. In turn, this could free up £24bn a year to be spent on a combination of public service expansion as well as any deficit reduction.

In response to the report, Mike Bracken, executive director at the Government Digital Service (GDS), said: "We've made huge progress since setting up GDS, working with other departments to release Gov.uk and start making services digital by default. But there is still significant potential to drive digital into everything the government does. This report is a timely reminder that our digital journey is only just beginning, and should inspire everyone in government to aim high when deciding where we go next."