Britain doesn’t have a public services crisis, it has a digital one
Britain’s public services are often described as broken. At the heart of this is a simple truth: they rely too often on inadequate digital systems.
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When patient records aren’t shared between services, causing delays in care, and when people are left waiting months for benefits decisions due to outdated and fragmented systems, it doesn’t feel like a technical glitch. It feels like the system isn’t working.
That’s because today, public services are largely digital, and the systems underpinning them shape how we experience the state day to day.
The government’s focus on ‘national renewal’, to modernise public services and drive economic growth, recognises this needs to change. But that won’t succeed unless we rethink how services are built.
For too long, technology has been treated as a support function, delivered through large, one-off projects rather than as a core part of how the country runs.
There is a better way: start small, test what works with real people, and then expand it.
We’ve already seen that this works. GOV.UK replaced thousands of separate government websites by building step by step and improving continuously. During Covid, services were also built and adapted rapidly to meet urgent public needs. But this way of working hasn’t been sustained.
Modern public services depend on digital infrastructure: systems that let us prove who we are, make and receive payments, and access what we need. These foundations are not strong enough.
The pattern is familiar: large programmes designed upfront, handed to suppliers, and delivered years later. Costs rise, timelines slip, and by the time something goes live, it struggles to meet real needs. We see this in early concerns around the NHS’s single patient record programme, and major cases like Horizon.
We’ve seen similar issues in civil service pensions, where delivery failures have had real consequences. Yet the government is now committing £700 million to a new shared services contract covering payroll and payments for hundreds of thousands of staff, risking the same problems playing out again.
Stopping something that isn’t working can feel like failure, but it’s the opposite. Continuing to pour time and money into the wrong approach only makes the problem worse.
The real test is simple: if we were starting again today, would we build it this way? And if not, we should have the confidence to stop and use that time and money to build something better.
The result is frustration, confusion, and a steady erosion of trust, as well as millions in taxpayer money lost to waste and inefficiency. If the service doesn’t work, people assume the system is broken.
The debate around digital identity shows what is at stake. Done well, it could make it far easier for us to prove who we are and access services quickly and securely. Done poorly, it risks becoming another delayed, over-budget programme that fails to deliver.
If Britain wants public services we can rely on, it needs to design and run them differently, back teams who can test, learn and improve, and have the confidence to stop what isn’t working so we can focus on what will.
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Ben Terrett CBE is the CEO at Public Digital
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