'A modern equivalent to London's Victorian sewers' - Francis Maude hails importance of government digital reforms

Cabinet Office Minister tells TechUK that 'government-as-a-platform' digital services can revolutionise the public sector

Building efficient government digital services that truly benefit the general public is a civic infrastructure project as important as building the National Grid or the Victorians constructing sewers under London.

That's what Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude MP told the audience during his keynote address at TechUK's Public Services 2030 Conference, in what's likely to be one of his last speeches ahead of the May general election.

Maude described how under his tenure the Cabinet Office is "modernising the way that government provides its services to the public" and how Whitehall's new operating model is evolving into what he described as "government-as-a-platform".

Maude has long been an advocate of digital services, last year stating that "if it can be done online, it should only be done online".

Maude argued that the Cabinet Office has replaced the disjointed and fragmented government digital services of the past with an "environment where cross-government platforms are used by every department and every agency".

"New common platforms cut across the structure of government, providing a common core infrastructure of digital services technology and business processes," he said. Departments can now "focus on their core business, without having to build every single component of a service from scratch", he added.

Maude pointed to the Gov.uk digital service programme as a successful template of how "we'll work as one government for the digital age" by enabling government departments to easily share information, data and services between themselves, and where applicable, the general public.

"We saw that if one department needed a service, publishing information on the web, so will other departments, so we built a platform they can all use and share and indeed have to use and share," he said.

Online payment and appointment booking were other examples of services that could benefit from sharing a common digital platform across government, he said.

"These are done in lots of different parts of government and yet we build it fresh everywhere, expensively and inefficiently, we're not learning from elsewhere," he said.

According to Maude, the "government-as-a-platform" model will allow Whitehall to improve how it offers digital services by "creating common building blocks that can be combined in various ways to build and adapt at speed, with a minimum of effort and expense".

Maude, who is standing down as an MP at the general election, emphasised how important providing proper government digital services is by likening it to huge British infrastructure projects of the past.

"These new digital and technology platforms are the foundations of our new civic infrastructure, a modern equivalent to London's Victorian sewer network, or the building of the National Grid," he said, before describing how an open platform could improve various government services.

"By opening up the procurement interfaces, the APIs of our services, it'll allow others to integrate their services with ours. You could, for example, buy your car tax at the same time as buying your car insurance. In the future, public services will need to be fully integrated with this platform in order to be viable," Maude said.

"The era of bespoke solutions, commissioned at extortionate cost by individual departments is definitively over," he added.

Maude used the example of Apple's App Store to illustrate how he sees government digital services evolving in future.

"Together, government-as-a-platform, greater transparency and more and more open data will enable others to play a more active role in the delivery of public services in the same way that the open nature of Apple's IOS store harnesses the innovative potential of small app makers," he said. "We want government-as-a-platform to offer the same opportunities to anyone with a bright idea on how to improve public services."

Maude concluded his address by conceding that much more needs to be done in this area.

"Over the last five years we've focused on driving down cost in government while improving the standard of services to the public.

"Digital will continue to play an essential role in this and we know that our work is only just starting."

TechUK recently slammed the government for creating confusion over IT procurement.