Digital transformation in the UK
Mike Skelton, Deputy Director of GOV.UK and the UK Government Digital Service (GDS), highlights the work being done as part of the UK Government’s digital transformation agenda.
Mike Skelton says that “there is a lot of transformation that has to be done around digital government in the UK”, before stating that it “requires a lot of organisational change”.
The plan for the digital transformation of the UK Government is guided by the Blueprint for Modern Digital Government.
According to Skelton, the blueprint asks “how do we make citizens’ lives easier? How do we create economic growth, firmer foundations, and smarter organisations? How do we bring this to government to benefit essentially the whole nation?”
Skelton highlights that substantial work has already been done that has focused on increasing “personal value”, which he describes as “helping citizens get the outcomes they want with the least effort possible”.
Digital projects
In November 2025, GDS Local was launched, which focuses on digital collaboration between central and local government to ensure that local needs are reflected in digital strategy and delivery.
Skelton says: “This is an acknowledgement of the fact that right now central government does not necessarily do the best job of connecting with local and devolved administrations. There is a lot of duplication and needless redundancy of effort.”
Therefore, the dedicated local unit of the GDS “is thinking about problems in a holistic way, both at national and local level, because from a citizen perspective, there is not necessarily a distinguishing factor whether you are dealing with central or local government”.
This holistic approach has been adopted across the UK Government’s digital services, with Skelton noting that “traditionally, we would build a lot of our services in isolation”. This, he adds, resulted in “failure demand generated by things going between the cracks, between navigating between services”.
Skelton notes that one example of this holistic approach are service components, saying: “What we are trying to do is solve problems once. There is no need for every different bit of government to figure out a different mechanism to take payment for services.”
GOV.UK website
A key aspect of the Government’s digital transformation agenda has been centred on the recent development of the GOV.UK website.
Skelton contextualises that, 10 years ago, GOV.UK was made up of over 2,000 websites, resulting in a “poor user experience because things were organised and set up in lots of different ways”.
He says that there was “a big conscious step change that was made to say this is not the best way of organising for people”. “So, tonnes of effort was put into unifying GOV.UK and making sure we have one way of doing things”.
There has also been a recognition of the desires of citizens to interact with digital services in different ways. Skelton says: “Expectations are shifting about how they want to interact with organisations or with government, and we have got to reflect that.
“We made a very clear and strategic change to say, GOV.UK is not going to just be a website anymore.”
This has resulted in the UK Government increasing its social media presence, which Skelton says allows for “more freedom in terms of tailoring and tweaking the message so we can really resonate with people, particularly younger audiences”.
Skelton believes there was a need for the UK Government to “really get out that message and convey information to people in different ways”, noting that “we live in a time of misinformation, which means there is jeopardy for citizens and users of government”.
This desire to engage with citizens also resulted in the launch of the GOV.UK app in July 2025 which Skelton says “is designed to be personal from the outset” and will “get to know you as an individual and how you access services and then bring things together in a more proactive and joined-up fashion”.
Another recent innovation has been the introduction of the OneLogin authentication system, which is a single tool used to prove your identity and access government services digitally.
The system has a high standard of identity validation which Skelton says, “gives government as a whole, citizens, and taxpayers confidence that we are reducing fraud and waste in the system”.
Future transformation
Skelton says that the approach to future developments is to “scale using standardised tech approaches across government” such as AI chats, agents, and app notifications.
This approach, Skelton says, reflects that “people now have different expectations of how they want to interact with government”.
Skelton says it is vital to “ensure we have these kinds of experiences within the GOV.UK ecosystem so people can interact with government in this way”.
Additionally, Skelton asserts that government must “make sure that we are providing accurate, reliable, and trusted content to these platforms, so people are not potentially being misled or seeing hallucinations”.
Skelton says that “there is a lot that we can do to build confidence for citizens by building secure environments so they can do what they want to do”.
He adds that “there are also lots of opportunities for us to collaborate with big tech on these sorts of problems as well”.
Concluding, Skelton highlights the scale of the digital transformation ahead as well as the progress already being made: “There is a lot of work to do, but central government certainly is trying to deliver a step change in how it actually handles some of these things and how it is trying to build towards the government of tomorrow.”
