Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 20
20
Accepted
Majority of government digital services fail to meet 'great' standard by 2025.
Conclusion
In June 2022, CDDO published a Roadmap which set out a common cross-government vision for digital and data by 2025. It contained a set of challenging commitments across six strategic areas known as missions, which CDDO told us all departments signed up to and had agreed to meet out of their own budgets. For example, in the Roadmap, CDDO stated that it was working with departments to ensure that at least 50 of the top 75 highest priority customer services across government reach a “great” standard by 2025.42 CDDO told us that, of the services it had looked at so far, only 10% qualified as great. CDDO explained that, while this was not “a super starting point”, it did mean that there were substantive opportunities to improve existing services, which in its experience would lead to “very significant upsides in terms of efficiency and payback”.43 It anticipated that this work would allow departments to set out a strong case for digitalisation, which would contribute to their discussions about funding with HM Treasury.44
Government Response Summary
The government agrees the recommendation is implemented, stating Defra is modernising services by using best practice techniques to identify problems and inform service roadmaps. Defra commits to focusing on its nine services in the CDDO’s Top 75 to achieve a 'great' standard by 2025, prioritising digital service improvement in future Spending Review bids, and ensuring clear service ownership.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Recommendation implemented. Defra is modernising its services and putting users at the heart of developing service improvements. Defra will use best practice techniques such as user research, business process mapping, service baselines and service assessments to identify problems and costs faced by users of its services (aligning with the methodology used by CDDO to assess the standard of digital services). These will inform agreed roadmaps for Defra’s services, which will set out planned service improvements from user, accessibility, and efficiency perspectives. Defra will focus initially on the nine Defra services in the CDDO’s Top 75 transactional digital services list, with the aim of getting these a ‘great’ standard by 2025 (in line with the corresponding commitment in the CDDO Roadmap). Defra will ensure that its next Spending Review bid continues to prioritise improvement of its digital services – both in continued development of existing priority services and in addressing other services not yet prioritised for improvement. Defra will continue to make sure that all services have clear service ownership, with service owners having appropriate training.