Back in January 2024 I asked,
does the Service Standard work for local government.The answer appears to be no.
A combination of co-organising a workshop, co-creating a survey (both with the Local Government Association (LGA)), reviewing the qualitative research of others, running un-conference session, and having conversations with local government colleagues, civil servants, and suppliers over the last six months has led me to this conclusion.
In that time I've not found a single council that fully uses the Service Standard.
My key findings as to the reasons behind this are:
- Lack of resource: Most councils don't have, and some will never have the multi-disciplinary teams needed to implement the Standard on their own. It's just not economically viable to employ a Service Owner or Product Manager, User Researcher, Lead designer, Technical Architect or Lead Developer, and a Performance Analyst in some councils, particularly smaller districts where digital teams might only consist of a handful of people.
- Buying not building: Councils buy in many of their digital services, and I haven't found one supplier that fully follows the Standard, which isn't surprising as the Standard isn't built into councils' procurement processes. As a result at present it's unfeasible to implement the Standard for procured digital services, which constitute the majority offered by councils.
- Ain't no body: There isn't a process or body for independently assessing local digital services. The relationship between the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) and other government departments doesn't exist between CDDO and councils, except for assessing website accessibility. Provision of digital services and information can form part of an inspection, for example by Ofsted, but this is very different to service assessment using the Standard.
- Waterfail: Many councils don't use agile as part of their project management methodology. This means that the phases of Discovery, Alpha, Beta, and Live don't exist, and as such assessments can't be completed at those stages. It also means that every service would fail Point 7 which says that "governance arrangements that are consistent with the agile governance principles" should be in place.
- Overload: Whilst there are 12 points fewer in the existing Standard compared to the first version of the Digital Service Standard, it's still too unwieldy, especially for lower volume local public services. As mentioned above, Point 7 doesn't really fit in with how many councils work, and Point 12, "write code in the open from the start" and "keep ownership of the intellectual property of new source code", doesn't really work with the procurement of services.
So what steps could we take to improve this?
- Scale up a new delivery model: I've covered this in previous posts, including a local digital tripartite. In short there's already a model being used successfully including by Open Digital Planning and LocalGov Drupal that greatly reduces duplication across councils whilst allowing them to tailor digital services to local user needs. Rather than creating a Local GDS which has been discussed for over ten years now, we need Open Digital Highways, an Open Digital Education, and so on, bringing together central and local government departments and digital teams.
- Incorporate the Standard into procurement: Whilst (1) will improve the way many digital services are delivered, they'll always be a need to buy in products. As part of procurement there's an assessment process built around a set of rules; so are Service Standard assessments. It should be relatively easy to incorporate a standard into existing procurement processes within councils. This may even favour more forward thinking suppliers, will improve digital services, and perhaps even disrupt what can be a fairly stagnant market in terms of choice for the buyer for some services.
- Create a peer-review process: Even in the new delivery model described in (1) an individual or small group of councils need to create new services to be re-used by others. This will happen when the resources and timelines of specific council service delivery teams, council digital teams, and government departments are all aligned. This happened in an unstructured and limited way when the Local Government Digital Service Standard was in place but worked well, and could again on a larger scale with better administration.
- Become more agile: Whilst this may not be to the liking of Agile project management purists, councils need to become more agile without necessarily wholey adopting the discipline. This is partly for the reasons described around resource, but also unpicking the whole governance process of an organisation is a lengthy and resource intensive process, and in some cases, for example large capital projects such as building a road or school, waterfall works fine.
- Revise the Standard for local government: Form follows function, so to instigate the four points above we need a simplified Standard that keeps the essence and intentions of the current version, but works for the variety of services and types of local authority.
So this is about more than the Service Standard, it's about how we can fundamentally improve local public services offered online from the smallest district to the largest county by doing things differently , but to do this we all need to be working to a common set of outcomes.
I believe the five steps above are key to doing that and if you do too, please let me know.
