Tom Loosemore

Back in 2012, a printout of the page above was stuck on a wall next to the team making GOV.UK. It captured the team’s desire to join up government, making public services radically simpler, clearer and faster for citizens.

I’m proud of GOV.UK, but it remains a thin veneer of superficial consistency spread across hundreds of siloed public services. Joined-up government it ain’t – that dream of remains as elusive as ever.

Today, on GOV.UK you’ll find the start pages of nearly 400 public services, plus nearly 5,000 forms. If you share your information with one such service, the very strong likelihood is that it won’t be shared with any of the others.

Where services do get joined up to make like easier for citizens – for example, the excellent Tell Us Once service that helps the bereaved – it requires teams to go against of the grain of their departmental incentives.

The phrase ‘joined up government’ has never been more popular, but UK public services are so far behind. We have digitised paper-based public services.

Sadly, I fear joined-up government will remain a dream until we see fundamental institutional reform of the UK civil service and new forms of ministerial and parliamentary accountability that shift such incentives away from siloed services and towards a properly joined-up government. Don’t hold your breath.

But what if it’s not government itself that joins up government?