<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" width="620" height="413" src="https://gds.blog.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/60/2026/02/GOVUKNOTIFY_Illustration_LinkedIn-1-620x413.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-94388" srcset="https://gds.blog.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/60/2026/02/GOVUKNOTIFY_Illustration_LinkedIn-1-620x413.jpg 620w, https://gds.blog.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/60/2026/02/GOVUKNOTIFY_Illustration_LinkedIn-1-310x207.jpg 310w, https://gds.blog.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/60/2026/02/GOVUKNOTIFY_Illustration_LinkedIn-1-768x512.jpg 768w, https://gds.blog.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/60/2026/02/GOVUKNOTIFY_Illustration_LinkedIn-1-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://gds.blog.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/60/2026/02/GOVUKNOTIFY_Illustration_LinkedIn-1-2048x1365.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 620px) 100vw, 620px" /></figure> <p>GOV.UK Notify has sent 12 billion messages since May 2016. That’s a major milestone for our team – but it’s not the whole story. It took us 4 years to reach our first 1 billion messages. Then things began to speed up.</p> <p>Just 6 months later, we hit 2 billion. In 2025 we passed 10 billion – and, less than a year on, we’ve added another 2 billion to our total. This kind of rapid growth is only possible if we build and run Notify so it’s sustainable, scalable and reliable.</p> <p>With more than 11,000 public sector services using Notify, and 10,000 users signing in to their accounts each week, staying close to our users is essential. Alongside research, horizon scanning and performance monitoring, our user support channel helps us to understand a wide range of current and future needs.</p> <p>As many of you know, user support is more than just problem-solving – it can be a catalyst for designing and building better services and increasing adoption. We turn support data into insights that drive both iterative and strategic improvements to Notify, keeping it grounded in real user needs and focused on its purpose: helping government services keep people informed.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">How Notify approaches user support</h2> <p>User support is done in-house by the team that builds and runs Notify. We have a rota in place where developers, front-end developers and site reliability engineers handle technical queries, while user-centred designers, product managers and delivery managers answer non-technical questions.</p> <p>We leverage user support to help us:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>scale and learn quickly</li> <li>engage the whole team</li> <li>drive continuous improvement</li> <li>measure progress</li> </ul> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Scaling and learning quickly</h2> <p>User support has played a key role in scaling Notify. For example, when we first let users choose their own email branding, they had to ask us to set it up for them. Having early adopters contact support to do this was a good way to learn about their needs.</p> <p>As our user base grew, so did the burden on support. At one point, branding requests made up nearly 10% of all support tickets. After learning enough from our users, we were able to design and build a new feature that made the whole process self-service, so users no longer had to contact us. These days, support tickets related to branding make up less than 1% of all tickets.</p> <p>We call this approach our ‘maturity model’. The minimum viable product (MVP) for new features (almost) always relies on user support. This means we can launch the MVP quickly, learn how people are using it, and iterate as we go. Once we’re confident that a feature will provide value to users and that we can support it technically, we consider how we can make it self-service.</p> <p>Our maturity model means every new feature will generate quite a few support tickets. Instead of a burden, we see this as a necessary part of building a sustainable, user-centred service.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Engaging the whole team</h2> <p>We realise the value in getting the whole team involved in user support. Understanding our users’ biggest problems helps us all to empathise with them, uncover root cause issues, and stay connected to the impact of our work. Additionally, users receive a personal response to a potentially complex problem, while the team gets valuable exposure to parts of the service they have less experience with.</p> <p>We plan support work into our sprints, run regular retros and gather daily feedback through surveys. We’ve also built a team culture around collaborative support. We crowdsource answers to tricky questions, co-own a support manual that addresses common queries, and keep a wiki to pool technical knowledge.</p> <p>This does have its challenges. On average, we respond to 33 tickets a day – including tickets that are necessary to complete a user’s journey, such as asking to make their service live. This can be time-consuming, but we’re constantly refining how we manage support, and understand that making it a visible, planned part of our work gives the team space to do it well.</p> <p>By building a shared understanding across the team, we’re better at providing a service that works without users needing to ask for help in the first place.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Driving continuous improvement</h2> <p>User support doesn’t stop when we’ve answered someone’s question – it’s a key part of how we learn, improve and plan. We use topic tags to enable a systematic analysis process that measures the frequency of categorised issues and ticket volumes. We visualise this in a dashboard that’s used to identify the biggest issues each quarter. Alongside other data sources, these insights inform our quarterly planning, helping to shape priorities across the team.</p> <p>We often design tactical solutions first. For example, writing a stock answer that explains the solution to a common question. If the same issue comes up a lot, we have to determine if it is worth dedicating resources to designing a more effective solution. We might run design workshops where we consider changing our guidance, redesigning the user interface, introducing new features or even changing our policies and processes to address the root-cause of a problem.</p> <p>One example of this is the work we’re currently doing to improve Notify’s onboarding journey. By analysing topic tags, we identified that a lot of users experience pain because they miss out on some important information when they first create a Notify service. We divided the work into focused, manageable initiatives, each designed to deliver a clear, measurable impact – using support tickets as one of the metrics.</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" width="620" height="413" src="https://gds.blog.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/60/2026/02/Notify-12-Billion-blog-post-second-image-620x413.jpg" alt="Examples of the user support topics used in Notify’s categorisation process. These are ‘Accessing Notify’, ‘Getting Started’, ‘Sending Messages’, ‘Managing Service’, ‘Technical Queries’, ‘Billing’, ‘Accessibility’ and an ‘Other’ category." class="wp-image-94387" srcset="https://gds.blog.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/60/2026/02/Notify-12-Billion-blog-post-second-image-620x413.jpg 620w, https://gds.blog.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/60/2026/02/Notify-12-Billion-blog-post-second-image-310x207.jpg 310w, https://gds.blog.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/60/2026/02/Notify-12-Billion-blog-post-second-image-768x512.jpg 768w, https://gds.blog.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/60/2026/02/Notify-12-Billion-blog-post-second-image.jpg 1209w" sizes="(max-width: 620px) 100vw, 620px" /></figure> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Measuring progress</h2> <p>We use support data, alongside other research insights, to ground our work in real user needs. The data is also used as a metric to help us track how changes are landing and monitor the adoption and impact of new features.</p> <p>For example, we recently introduced a feature allowing users to view Notify services within their organisation and ask to join them. This was previously only possible by sending us a support ticket. Since launching this feature, related tickets have dropped by 55%.</p> <p>Alongside measuring the response to specific features, we can also assess how our overall volumes of support tickets are changing as we scale. Notify has grown to support over 11,000 services over the past year, yet ticket volumes remain steady, even showing slight decreases. This is a positive sign for us that, while Notify is growing, user friction is staying low.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Delivering a service</h2> <p>User support is more than just answering a question or helping users complete a task – it’s a shared responsibility, a source of insight, and a catalyst for improvement when delivering a service. By working closely with users, we’re shaping GOV.UK Notify to be more reliable, intuitive and user-centred.</p> <p>After 12 billion messages, 11,000 services and 10,000 regular sign-ins, we’re still learning.</p> <p>We’d love to hear about similar processes from other delivery teams using support as an integral part of building and improving user-centred services. If you have any knowledge to share or would like to learn more about our support and analysis process, please leave a comment or get in touch with the team on cross-government Slack using the <a href="https://ukgovernmentdigital.slack.com/archives/C0E1ADVPC">#govuk-notify</a> channel.</p> <p>You can keep up to date with upcoming changes and new features on GOV.UK Notify via <a href="https://www.notifications.service.gov.uk/features/roadmap">our roadmap</a>.</p> <div class="highlight"> <p><a href="https://gds.blog.gov.uk/subscribe/">Subscribe to the GDS blog</a> to find out more about our work.</p> </div>

A year ago, GDS launched the ambitious Blueprint for modern digital government. It established a bold plan for the whole of digital government – and just last week GDS published an update on its progress: A roadmap for modern digital government. The Blueprint named the wallet as one of its 5 “kickstarter initiatives” – projects that demonstrate a new era of digital government. GDS has designed the wallet to store government-issued credentials digitally within the GOV.UK One Login app. As well as holding verifiable digital credentials, the wallet will provide a more personalised user experience and access to next-generation public services. Over the past 12 months, GDS has been working hard to make the UK government’s first digital wallet a reality. We have: * built a digital wallet in the GOV.UK One Login app which can store government credentials * delivered the digital Veteran Card in partnership with cross-government colleagues, with more than 15,000 veterans successfully adding their card to their GOV.UK One Login app * engaged with the digital identity sector through an industry kick-off event, and nearly 30 meetings since, as private sector identity providers have a key role in enabling the use of digital credentials in everyday life * developed a set of credential patterns, guidelines and style components for use by other government departments in the future * started private testing for the digital driving licence in partnership with the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) Let’s look at how we managed to achieve this, and what we’re doing over this coming year. ## Strong foundations We have been able to work at pace because we are building on the groundwork already established within the GOV.UK One Login app, an existing GDS product. Across the team, we are using the same agile ways of working that built the GOV.UK One Login app, and that are firmly cemented at GDS. We test, iterate and test again to make sure the product is always delivering for users. And because the digital credentials are accessed in the app, they benefit from all the work done to make sure it meets the highest security standards for government and private sector services. ## Developing credentials The digital Veteran Card was the first credential we issued, and since October, more than 15,000 veterans have successfully added their card to their GOV.UK One Login app. This means we’re providing veterans with a faster and more convenient way to access services they’re entitled to. Then, in December, we began testing the digital driving licence through a private trial with a small group of GDS and DVLA colleagues. This was the culmination of the team’s efforts in building, stress-testing, designing, iterating, as well as speaking to users, all done through partnership with the DVLA. It represents a real milestone in the development of this credential and will help us learn how users interact with it in their GOV.UK One Login app. We’ll continue to test, build and iterate this year, working closely with the private sector (more on this below) to enable the development of secure checking services that are compatible with the credentials stored in the GOV.UK One Login app. Later this year, the digital driving licence will be rolled out more widely, enabling people to store their driving licence on their phone, making it easier and faster to prove who you are and your driving entitlements. By putting the digital Veteran Card live, and testing the digital driving licence, we are paving the way to expand this functionality. Once more credentials have been added, we will move to talk about this as the GOV.UK Wallet. ## Partnering across government Essential to this work has been, and will continue to be, our collaboration across government. With the digital Veteran Card, GDS worked alongside partners at the Ministry of Defence, Office for Veterans’ Affairs and Defence Business Services. For the digital driving licence, we have a close relationship with DVLA. We are collaborating with service delivery teams across other government departments to identify early credentials that will go into the GOV.UK One Login app in the future. ## Close working with the private sector We will continue to work closely and regularly with the technology industry throughout 2026. Our relationships with the private sector are crucial for the roll-out’s next stage, and for enhancing in-person checks and enabling people to share their new digital credentials in day to day situations. Now that we’ve built the foundations for the wallet and introduced our first credentials, the next phase in rolling this out to the wider public will be to enable programmatic verification. This is to verify the authenticity of the document when it is shared. Unlike physical credentials, the security features of digital credentials aren’t visible to the naked eye. Programmatic checking allows whoever is doing the ID check to access these, with a user’s consent, and make sure everything is as it should be. This means reduced fraud, fewer fake credentials, and greater confidence in everyday interactions with your credential, whether it’s in a shop or online. This is where our work with the digital identity sector kicks into gear. The Digital Verification Service (DVS) industry is crucial to enabling programmatic checks. This year, we’ll enable them to test how they will share data from the digital driving licence with third parties, before full rollout later in the year, so they can play their part in making the digital driving licence useful across the range of services where users currently use their physical licences. ## Modern and accessible government Our work on delivering digital credentials into the government digital wallet supports the Blueprint’s vision of transparent, next-generation public services that do the hard work for the public, that are accessible and user-centred. But clearly we are not finished yet. Our efforts continue, so we can support the Blueprint’s ambition that all government services can issue a digitally verified credential alongside any paper/card-based credential or proof of entitlement eligibility. If you’re a veteran, you can download your digital Veteran Card. If you’re a Digital Verification Service, you can view our public documentation and find out more about the open standards we work to.

Our roadmap for modern digital government sets out how every corner of the state is using technology to make government work for the citizens it serves. It’s an action plan for the whole of the public sector, bringing together some of the most important products, platforms and transformation initiatives planned between now and 2030. From building a new careers service to help people into work, to making people’s lives easier by giving them a free, secure way to prove their identity in their day to day lives, this roadmap defines the progress we are making to build a modern British government. It also details the foundational steps we have taken since launching the blueprint for modern digital government one year ago. In that blueprint, we made a clear declaration of intent: to completely reshape public services through digital transformation. Our vision is to unite the entire digital community, reaching out across the public sector to create joined-up services that make a tangible difference to people’s lives. It was an ambitious vision, but one we have already made swift progress against. ## **Progress against our six-point plan** ### **1. Joining up public services** At the blueprint launch in January, then Secretary of State Peter Kyle announced five kickstarters that would underpin a new era of digital government. We’ve made great progress on all of them, including the GOV.UK app, which had been downloaded 316,000 times by the end of December 2025. That’s more than a quarter of a million people – enough to fill Wembley three times – testing a new app in beta, to make their interactions with government easier. Meanwhile, GOV.UK Wallet now houses its first credential – the digital Veteran Card. It’s available to over 2 million former Service Personnel and gives them an easier way to show their veteran status to access everything from housing and mental health support to reduced entry at museums and money off their shopping. We’re already testing the digital Driver’s Licence and will have much more to share next year. Beyond the kickstarters, we’re making big strides towards more joined-up services. GOV.UK One Login has been used by over 13 million people to access more than 120 government services, making interactions with government simpler and more joined-up. In future, products like the GOV.UK app and GOV.UK One Login can support simpler access to local government services too. This is just one of the areas of focus for GDS Local, a new unit that we’ve launched to deepen collaboration between central and local government and to drive improvements in digital services for communities across the UK. This month, we have also launched a whole new team, CustomerFirst, to help transform customer services across government. The team will use AI and service design to rewire how customer services work and help cut wait times and backlogs. They have already started work in partnership with the brilliant team at DVLA and will quickly take what they learn around government. With a huge prize to go after, we’ll need to expand the team rapidly. Initially we’re looking for experienced practitioners with deep expertise in service design, solutions architecture and product management. Register your interest today and learn more about the CustomerFirst mission and upcoming hiring opportunities: https://customerfirst.campaign.gov.uk/ ### **2. Harnessing AI for public good** 2025 was the year our most promising AI tools started to scale, a shift that brought new challenges to technologists across government and one that we’re excited to see continue into this new year. Some of the projects within the Prime Minister’s AI Exemplars programme show just this. The NHS is already using AI to predict demand in 50 A&E wards across the country, helping to keep wait times down when wards get busy. And over 1,000 probation officers are using bespoke transcription in their day-to-day meetings with offenders so they can focus their attention on helping offenders, not doing admin. We also tested AI tools to improve productivity within the Civil Service. For instance, our recent evaluation of Consult – an AI tool that automates the analysis of public consultations – revealed a median time of 23 seconds to review a consultation response, slashing the hundreds of days administrators typically spend sorting responses. As this year progresses, we can expect to see more success stories coming through, and promising ideas shared. Throughout, we’ll keep building out the AI Knowledge Hub, a living repository that now includes the AI Playbook for the UK Government and is designed to support public sector teams in exploring, adopting, and applying artificial intelligence responsibly. Over the last year, we’ve also run two scaled public pilots of GOV.UK Chat – first on the GOV.UK website, and then in the GOV.UK app in the Autumn of 2025. Based on the findings, we plan to roll out public access to GOV.UK Chat, starting with a release in the GOV.UK app early this year. Beyond that, we intend to make it widely available across the GOV.UK website so it’s accessible wherever users need it. ### **3. Strengthening our digital public infrastructure** In June, responsibility for government and public sector cyber security moved to DSIT. This move better integrates the centre’s cyber security responsibilities and expertise within the digital centre of government. We’ve launched the first iteration of our vulnerability scanning service, which is already being used by 6,000 public sector bodies to improve cyber security across government, and we’re designing a set of technology, platforms and processes to join up services, communities and suppliers across government. We’re also working with other organisations to define common API standards that will open up systems and data, making it easier for services to connect with each other. ### **4. Investing in talent** The Prime Minister has set a target for one in 10 civil servants to work in technology and digital roles by 2030. To support this, we’ll be focusing efforts on attracting and growing talented and innovative teams on multiple levels. So far this year, we’re continuing to grow our TechTrack apprenticeship programme, which has received thousands of applications. We’ve also launched an AI accelerator upskilling programme to build crucial expertise across government. In the year ahead, we’ll be investing in the development of leaders across the civil service. This will include new programmes for technical leaders focused on strategic leadership, commercial skills and more, as well as making sure that senior civil servants across government bring with them the digital and data skills they need to build a modern digital government. ### **5. Funding for outcomes,  procuring for growth** Efficiency and value for money remain front and centre if we’re to realise the £45 billion savings and productivity improvements opportunity estimated one year ago in the State of Digital Government review. We’re working with departments to launch new funding models for services, portfolio management, and innovation this summer, moving away from short funding cycles toward continuous funding of persistent, multidisciplinary product teams. In partnership with the Government Commercial Function, we’ve also launched the Digital Commercial Centre of Excellence to get the best from our suppliers and create opportunities for the UK tech sector. Meanwhile, we’re building the National Digital Exchange, a new platform designed to improve the way the public sector buys technology, aiming to unlock £1.2 billion in annual savings. ### **6. Committing to transparency, driving accountability** The scale of change GDS and digital professionals are driving across the public sector is immense: it changes the shape of crucial services to vastly improve people’s day-to-day lives. To do this right, we’re committed to making sure people can see and understand the changes that are taking place, so they can continue to use and trust the services they need. This is essential to ensuring the success of modern digital services and spreading good work rapidly. That’s why we’ve published this comprehensive roadmap, detailing how each corner of government is going to use technology to help the citizens who use those services. It’s also why we launched the new Algorithmic Transparency Recording Standard last year and have now published over 70 records of tools being used across government. These documents, in an easy-to-read format, share openly how algorithms and AI are used in different public services, and how any risks are managed. In the year ahead, we’ll start publishing product roadmaps for major products to further boost openness and accountability. ## **Get involved** We’re committed to working in the open and we need your input. You can: * Join us! Look out for opportunities at GDS and across Government Digital and Data on the profession hub * Subscribe to the GDS blog * Follow GDS on LinkedIn * If you’re a public sector professional, subscribe to the Government Digital and Data bulletin

People with long-term health conditions or disabilities often need support from multiple services – across health, work, and welfare. But the current system can be confusing, repetitive, and hard to navigate. At the Government Digital Service (GDS), the Service Transformation team wanted to test how services could work better together to support people to stay in – or return to – work. This blog shares what we learned from testing a proactive approach to providing support. We built a basic prototype in GDS, and we worked with the NHS and a national patient organisation, the National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society (NRAS), to test it. The blueprint for modern digital government sets an ambitious vision to make public services better and easier to use. Our plan is to create services that are clear, joined-up, and accessible to everyone. In June 2025, we shared our first steps toward making government services work better together – starting with health, disability, and work. Since then, we’ve created a testing version of a tool to help people with long-term health conditions or disabilities find support more easily. We tested this idea with an NHS team in South Tyneside and with NRAS’s patient volunteers. ## Understanding the challenge: why joined-up services matter People with long-term health conditions or disabilities often need help from many health and government services. They have to give the same information again and again. This takes time and can be stressful. One study found that people spend up to **nine working days a year** just doing health admin – **worth £4.3 billion** in work time (source: _Everyday administrative burdens and inequality_). Our own research also showed that some people stop working because the support they get isn’t joined-up or easy to use. ## Why this matters Some people use **more than 43 different health and government services**. When this support is confusing or not joined-up, people can miss the help they need. This can cause stress and wasted time, and can mean people stop working, even when they don’t want to. ## What we wanted to find out We wanted to understand this problem better. Our hypothesis was: > _“People with long-term health problems or disabilities sometimes stop working when they don’t need to or want to. The help they need is hard to find and confusing. If we give the right help at the right time, more people can keep working or go back to work.”_ ## What we did We created a new testing version of an online tool, and worked with the NHS and NRAS patient views representatives (volunteers) to test this. The tool was a prototype, not a live service. It helped people find the relevant support after a healthcare professional gave them a fit note, focusing on people who are employed but may need help to stay in their job. In South Tyneside, people who saw a First Contact Physiotherapist at their GP practice received a text message with a link to the tool. This message was sent only if they were given a fit note. This helped us test if offering support early – soon after someone gets a fit note – could make it easier for them to get the help they need to stay in work. The feedback showed that meeting people where they already are with a proactive message, made people more aware of support that’s available. We found that people spent most time looking at the information about fit notes, sick pay, and returning to work. ## What people told us We spoke to patients and healthcare professionals, and looked at how they used the tool. We heard that: * It’s confusing and hard to get help. * People want clear support and joined-up services. * People know that sharing their information can help, but it’s not always easy. * The tool was helpful – especially for help with sick pay, benefits, and going back to work. * Plain language and well-timed support make a big difference. ## Important lessons Here’s what we’re taking forward to improve services: * People need clear, joined-up help. * Repeating the same information to lots of services slows everything down. * Plain language and timing matter. * Data sharing is essential but needs care. * Working together across healthcare and government makes tools better. ## Next steps We worked with other teams across government and the NHS to share ideas for what should happen next: * Share data better and safely to help people. * Use the NHS app to bring health and government help together. * Keep learning from people to understand their needs better. ## Looking ahead We now understand more about the challenges people with long-term health conditions or disabilities face – and we have ideas to make things better. This work is an important step towards making government services more joined-up, accessible, and focused on the needs of the people who use them. We would love to hear your thoughts on this work, so please get in touch via [email protected].

This month the Government Cyber Action Plan was published. It sets out the importance of improving our cyber defences for digital public services. The vast majority of government services are already available online, providing millions of people with secure and reliable digital access every day. Our focus is not simply on moving services online, but on strengthening and innovating the ways people interact with them. This includes developing new capabilities highlighted in the Blueprint for modern digital government, such as digital wallets and verifiable credentials, which will further enhance how users prove their identity and manage access to services. By continually advancing these features, we ensure that people can use government services with the utmost confidence in both their security and convenience. In this blog post we will share 5 key ways that we are securing access to government services with GOV.UK One Login. ## 1. GOV.UK One Login makes accessing government services easier GOV.UK One Login is designed to be the single, secure way for people to sign in and prove their identity when using government services online. Over 13 million people have already used it to access more than 120 different services, making interactions with government simpler and more joined-up. ## 2. Security and trust are our top priorities The programme is built on the principle that public trust is essential. GOV.UK One Login follows strict security standards, similar to those used in the private sector, to protect users’ data and privacy. Security is our top priority and the team is constantly working to deliver a smooth and secure user experience. ## 3. GOV.UK One Login is run by expert teams, with independent oversight A dedicated team of security experts, including architects and engineers, design and operate the system. Their work is regularly reviewed by independent bodies and government partners to ensure high standards are maintained. The GOV.UK One Login programme also conducts regular independent security testing, including red team exercises that simulate real-world attacks. These exercises ensure our security systems remain robust and identify any potential vulnerabilities. The programme benefits from ongoing advice and support from national cyber security authorities, and we are working closely with them to align GOV.UK One Login to the government’s new Secure by Design standard. ## 4. How we protect user data and privacy GOV.UK One Login is fully compliant with UK data protection laws. Only the minimum necessary data is collected for verification, and there is no central database linking user information across government. Users’ information is kept secure, and third parties working with the programme must also meet strict privacy standards. ## 5. Security measures are always evolving The Government Cyber Action Plan talks about how government will rise to meet the growing range of online threats. Security is not a once and done. In the GOV.UK One Login programme our security model involves multiple lines of protection, such as monitoring for threats, controlling access to systems, and keeping detailed logs. We regularly review and update these measures to stay ahead of any new risks. We carry out regular, independent security testing as our users rightly expect, taking swift action whenever possible vulnerabilities are identified. We have strong security measures in place to keep the programme safe, and to ensure that GOV.UK One Login continues to provide a secure and trusted way for millions of people to access government services.

At the Government Digital Service (GDS), we’ve always been passionate about delivering public services that work for _everyone_ , including people who aren’t confident online or who can’t afford or access the right technology. As part of the services pillar of the Digital Inclusion Action Plan, we’re working to remove barriers to accessing digital services by improving the standards, guidance and tools that help service teams build with inclusion in mind. This post shares what we’ve done so far this year, what we’ve learned, who we’ve worked with, and where we’re heading next. This post also highlights how GDS is leading the Services pillar of the Digital Inclusion Action Plan to deliver Point 1 of the blueprint for modern digital government: joining up public services to improve digital access and support the digitally excluded. ## **What  we’re aiming for ** Our Inclusive Services work has three main goals: * To update the Service Manual and Service Standard with clearer, more practical guidance based on learnings from across government service delivery. This will help teams design and deliver services that remove barriers to digital access. * To develop a consistent measure of whether digital services are reaching and working for the people who need them. * Build a cross-government community of practice to join up digital inclusion initiatives and share knowledge and best practice Together, this will help ensure public digital services are designed and built for the full diversity of users across the UK. ## **What  we’ve done so far ** ### **1. Digital Inclusion Action Plan:** Released in February 2025, the _Digital Inclusion Action Plan:  __First Steps_ outlines the government’s vision for improving digital inclusion across four pillars: **skills, access, services, and trust**. GDS leads the services pillar, working to ensure government services are accessible, inclusive, and easy to use. Digital Inclusion Action Plan. We're making sure everyone can be included in our digital world. ### **_2._ Discovery phase:** To inform our approach, we mapped digital inclusion initiatives in the UK and internationally. We explored what already works, where the gaps are and how others measure success. This helped us understand how services are (or are not) meeting the needs of people who are digitally excluded, and where guidance and best practice could better support teams. We found that many local authorities and third-sector organisations deliver effective inclusion initiatives, but challenges remain around sustainability, affordability, rural connectivity and long-term impact tracking. International examples, such as Singapore’s community-based hubs, provide useful models of strong leadership and inclusive design. ### **3. In-depth research sessions:** Building on the discovery work, we carried out a series of in-depth research sessions with government service teams tackling inclusion challenges first hand, from veterans' services to asylum seekers. These honest, reflective conversations showed what it’s like to build for inclusion in practice. Some clear themes emerged: * The need for more _practical_ , _real-world_  blueprints and guidance, not just principles * A desire for _shared language_  around digital exclusion * The importance of _case studies_  that reflect complex, overlapping needs ### **4. Cross-government workshops:** We also brought together service teams from across government for two workshops. These sessions gave designers, researchers, policy specialists, and others space to share experiences, test ideas, and explore how we can make services more inclusive. Discussions focused on practical topics such as doing inclusive user research, understanding impact and designing effective alternative pathways for those who cannot use digital channels. We’re now analysing the findings to inform the next stage of our work. ## **Next  steps:** Over the coming months we’ll: * Reflect what we’ve learned in refreshed Service Manual content and iteratively develop the GOV.UK Service Manual, with clearer, practical guidance to support the design and maintenance of inclusive services. * Develop a shared way to measure whether services reduce digital exclusion and track progress over time. * Continue building the cross-government community of practice to support collaboration and knowledge sharing We’re committed to building services that work for everyone and will continue to share our progress. ## **Spotlight:  support for care leavers:** A great example of creating services that work for everyone comes from the Department for Education (DfE), who launched the Support for Care Leavers website. It brings together advice and support for the 88,000 care leavers in England and those who support them - including local authorities, charities, agencies and individuals. Key to the design of the service was understanding the needs of diverse user groups. This included young people leaving care, unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, and those in custody. The team also considered the needs of support workers and professionals who help care leavers navigate services. To ensure the service was inclusive, the team undertook extensive user research. This included: * Printable content for users without digital access, so support workers could easily share key information * Simple, clear language to improve comprehension * Translation options for users who do not speak English * Face-to-face research in trusted community spaces, tailored to each participant’s needs The team worked closely with gatekeepers and community organisations to build trust and ensure participants felt safe and comfortable. In some cases, this meant offering warm food and peer support in familiar locations to encourage engagement. Research was always voluntary, and participants were given clear information about how their input would shape the service. This approach led to a thoughtfully designed service that offers real, usable guidance for young people transitioning out of care — and for those supporting them. If you’d like to learn more about inclusive service design and the government’s approach to digital inclusion: * Read the** ****Digital Inclusion Action Plan** to understand the four pillars and how we’re working to make services more accessible. * Explore the **Service Manual** for current guidance on designing and delivering inclusive services. We’ll keep sharing updates as this work progresses. If you have examples, challenges, or ideas to contribute, join our cross-government Slack community. Alternatively, reach out to us directly or you can contact us via email at [email protected]. Together, we can make services that work for everyone.

When we launched GOV.UK Pay back in 2016, its goal was simple: to offer a quick and easy way for public services to take card payments online. Since then we have helped more than 570 public sector organisations process over 120 million individual transactions through more than 1,500 services. Recently, we’ve also surpassed the £8 billion milestone in payments processed for public sector services. These are all big, and impressive numbers, but there’s a lot more granular data informing decision-making behind the scenes. ## **We use numbers big and small** Data such as how users choose to pay for their services, the types of services using GOV.UK Pay through to how easy it is for end-users to complete their payment, all inform some sort of decision-making in our team every day. It is all recorded so that any decisions we make to the product can be benchmarked, evaluated to see if they are a success and tweaked as needed. What that means is that we’ve been able to support everything from applying for or renewing a passport through to paying for green waste bin collection with your local council. We have over 600 local council services - including Penzance and The Orkneys - using GOV.UK Pay already. We take millions of payments for some services each year, while also catering for services that only need to take a handful of transactions. ## **Objectives and measuring success** The team managed this by laying out 6 objectives: * diversify payment types * enhance the paying users’ journey * improve the public sector users’ experience of managing card payments * make it easier for the GOV.UK Pay team to improve the product * run a resilient, scalable, secure and cost efficient service * improve our knowledge of procurement and suppliers These objectives are set against clear, reliable data created from the services that allow the team to benchmark success well. Our decisions should then reflect these objectives. Aside from these, we also have a number of additional objectives and key results (OKRs) that are used. These make sure we are able to prove that any additional changes we make to the product have data points against them so we can show the impact. For example, we can see that recent changes we made to the GOV.UK Pay admin tool have made it quicker for service users to get things done: with people spending 2 minutes less on average in our 'Settings' section. ## **Future growth** With the amount of information that is available we are also able to forecast the future with a high degree of confidence. Because of the consistent growth of services joining GOV.UK Pay we can see that we are likely to get around a 25% increase year-on-year in services taking a payment. Our transaction growth (the number of payments that we process) is expected to increase 18% year-on-year. That's because we already have a number of large services on the platform, that take millions of payments, so as a percentage we’d need more very large services or a large number of smaller ones to make up the difference. GOV.UK Pay’s transaction growth had been steady until 2020 when a mixture of large services joining up on GOV.UK Pay and the rush to move online saw growth increase by more than 70% year-on-year. At the time a range of services across local government, NHS, Police and central government departments came on board to use the service during the coronavirus pandemic. The graph shows GOV.UK Pay's growth since 2016 including a large spike in growth coinciding with lockdown. ## **What we're doing next** Moving forward there is a roadmap that shows what we're planning, including introducing more ways for people to pay for things. We also released a procurement so that users will be able to pay by bank (also known as open banking) and there are more improvements on the horizon. By using clear objectives and driving decision-making through data, GOV.UK Pay has been able to onboard more and more services, now almost 1,600 in total. We’ve done this while continuing to provide an easy and reliable platform for users to take payments. More than 120 million individual transactions have been made on GOV.UK Pay, all through a quick and secure means of taking online payments. You can find out more about GOV.UK Pay and the services that use it on our performance page. There’s more information about how GOV.UK Pay works and what’s next for the service on our product pages.

In July, GDS released the first version of the GOV.UK app, available for anyone in the UK to download. It was a big moment - for the first time, we’ve enabled people to have a more customised and persistent GOV.UK experience. The release was the culmination of months of user research, product design and technical expertise, so it was very exciting to see it out in the wild. As of early October, there had been 140,000 downloads of the app. That number jumped to almost 260,000 as of 24 November, highlighting the great progress we’ve made in such a short space of time. We’ve been spending these last few months carefully monitoring how the app is being used to make sure it meets user needs. This blog post sets out some of those insights, and how we’ll be building on them for the next stage of product development. ## Kickstarting a new era of digital government Before we dive into the data, let’s look back at how we got to this point. The Blueprint for modern digital government, published in January, named the GOV.UK app as one of its 5 kickstarter initiatives. The kickstarters are intended to show our progress on delivering next-generation public services - with the app a central part of this, demonstrating how we will enable more personalised experiences for our users. With over 60% of users to the GOV.UK website visiting via mobile devices, our data told us that users increasingly want and expect a mobile-first public service delivery, in line with other industries and indeed other governments around the world. After positive feedback from users in a private beta in spring, we were ready for a public launch. ## Meeting users’ app-etite The current version of the app in public beta is already delivering a more personalised, persistent and proactive experience. It enables each user to easily tailor their homepage with the topics that matter most to them, and AI-powered search gives them the most relevant results. Because people are logged in, the GOV.UK app remembers the pages they have visited and what they’ve searched for previously, getting them quickly to the content they care most about. Users can also access their local council services quickly by entering their postcode, and can opt in to receive push notifications to stay informed of real-time updates and alerts. ## What we’ve learned so far The public beta release marked the transition from development to larger-scale, real-world testing. Over the last 5 months we have seen strong organic growth, with the app downloaded nearly 260,000 times. We’ve been learning about how these users are engaging with the GOV.UK app, gathering insight on how this first version is working, and what we can do to make it even better. We’ve been using Google Analytics to see how consenting users are interacting with the app, alongside an in-app survey. ### Personalisation Our personalisation features are really popular: over 80% of users have customised their homepage since launch, including adding their local authority. One piece of feedback even said: “Was much simpler to set up than I originally thought, love you can choose what’s relevant to your own circumstances.” We see that return users are increasingly taking advantage of features we designed to give them shortcuts to get to content that is relevant to them, such as Previous Searches (22%) and Pages You Viewed (16%). This is an early validation that the features we have designed offer value to app users. The content that returning users are coming back to the most includes Universal Credit, (re)booking Driving Tests and applying for apprenticeships. One respondent to the in-app survey said: “Easy to navigate through app. Very user friendly designed”. Whilst accessing web content in the app is working well in many places, we’ve also seen that there are some areas where this is limiting the experience for users: “I don’t like how the app mostly just links to web pages at the moment”, so we’ll be exploring how we get this balance right. ### Positive response to nudges We’ve seen some exciting results from both internal and external nudges such as in-app notifications or news about topical issues. Travel content prompts sparked interest and usage indicating they were timely and relevant. While external nudges, like articles on government topics such as pension articles and Companies House registrations, show that users are actively searching for the app as an alternative channel. Seasonal trends play a part too, with noticeable upticks around student services at the end of September. ## What’s next We are using all of this information to be data driven as we plan our next steps on the product to make sure we’re meeting user needs, delivering utility and value. In 2026, we will be: * increasing the ways in which people personalise their experience based on the areas that matter most to them beyond web based content - so far this means we’ll be focusing on driving, benefits, local and travel * working with a range of departments to identify services where there is an opportunity to natively deliver transformational experiences * working with GDS Local to realise the ambition of making more GDS products and platforms actively available to local authorities * we will also be building on a pilot we ran earlier this autumn, bringing the ability for users to ask questions in their own words and get answers though our AI-powered GOV.UK Chat As we build out our capabilities and connect with government departments, we will continue to focus on providing frequent, incremental value through ongoing app releases. Onwards! The GOV.UK app is live in app stores. Download it now. Subscribe to the GDS blog to get the latest updates about our work.

On 22 November we launched GDS Local: a new specialist unit in the Government Digital Service (GDS) focused on working with and alongside local government to deliver the ambitions we set out in the blueprint for a modern digital government. Historically, there has been limited engagement between GDS and local authorities in transformation efforts. The blueprint for a modern digital government represents a new chapter - one that recognises digital transformation must work across all levels of government to truly serve citizens. That’s why GDS Local is focused on digital collaboration between central and local government, ensuring local needs are reflected in national digital strategy and delivery. ## **The challenge for local government** Local authorities deliver services that people use day in and day out. When people interact with the government, it's very often through their local council. People’s expectations of services are rightly high. However, councils are limited by a local government technology market that doesn’t support their needs. Local councils across the UK are demonstrating the power of digital innovation by using AI tools and creating services that deliver better outcomes for residents. For example: * Hertfordshire has developed a robot that repairs road damage before potholes form, working with the University of Liverpool; * North Yorkshire’s use of AI to help social care workers manage case notes, forms and assessments * Swindon uses AI to make complex documents accessible for people with learning disabilities; * Westminster’s ReportIT service identifies fly-tipping and other street issues from photos in under 60 seconds. Other councils are harnessing data to protect residents: * Northumberland’s Flood AI provides early flood warnings; * London’s scaled deployment of sensors in homes to take swift action on damp and mould * Maidstone and Kent’s platform predicts homelessness risk months in advance, cutting cases by 40%; * Newham is partnering with the University of East London to improve temporary housing management. These approaches are ready to expand to other regions and, with the right support, could transform communities everywhere. The State of Digital Government Review found £45 billion per year of unrealised productivity benefits across the public sector, with a substantial portion in local government. ## **The opportunity for transformation  ** Our engagement with over 300 local government digital practitioners between January and April 2025 confirmed the desire for digital transformation and leadership across local government, but also the need for the right platforms, partnerships, and support. The Local Government Association’s successful AI network already demonstrates the power of collaboration and shared expertise. GDS Local will be the strategic link between local government and the digital centre, working with the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) - building on the foundations already laid by the Local Digital team and the new Artificial Intelligence Directorate - and the Local Government Association (LGA) to give local government teams the support they need to focus on what they do best: understanding local needs and designing services that work for their communities. This isn't about imposing central government solutions, but about collaboratively extending proven platforms and expertise: bringing in the invaluable skills and experience local government teams bring to the table and addressing problems at scale that individual councils cannot resolve alone. Alongside this, we are already strengthening collaboration through initiatives like the Government Digital and Data Hub - a new online space bringing together learning, careers, collaboration and community for digital and data professionals across the UK public sector, including in local government. The Hub provides access to world-class learning opportunities, from cutting-edge AI courses to insightful webinars and certifications that build skills and confidence - including flagship programmes such as Get Tech Certified. It supports our shared ambition to grow a more connected, capable and confident digital workforce across central and local government, improving services for the people we serve. The newly established GDS Local will address specific challenges in 3 critical areas: 1. **Developing a strategic vision for local government technology:** We’ll work with the MHCLG, the LGA, and local government practitioners to co-create a vision for local government technology that includes shared products and components. This will create the foundations for a new, joined-up approach to buying, including IT market reform, and building technology that aligns with the goals of the blueprint for modern digital government. 2. **Unlocking local data potential:** In collaboration with partners, we'll work to break down barriers to data sharing across services. This means teams can better access the data they need to make informed decisions, identify trends and demonstrate impact. Picture housing teams having seamless access to relevant health and social care data to better support vulnerable residents, while maintaining appropriate privacy safeguards. 3. **Making GDS products available** : We are starting the journey of making more GDS products and platforms actively available to local authorities. This brings opportunities to simplify access to services through GOV.UK app and GOV.UK OneLogin, as well as other GDS components. This could mean residents using a single sign-on and identity verification service to access both central and local government services, dramatically reducing form-filling and repeat verification. ## **What to expect in the coming months** This new team, working closely with the LGA, MHCLG, and councils will help identify future needs and ensure local government is part of our innovation pipeline. We've already started with pilots of Minute and Extract in i.AI, MHCLG's discovery work on GOV.UK One Login, and by the end of the year we’ll start work with councils to identify the top use cases for GOV.UK app. This will mean a more seamless way for citizens to access local services directly. We’ll also be hosting webinars and workshops to engage with councils and technology vendors, co-designing a strategic vision that will act as a template for a local government technology stack capable of delivering modern public services, which you can read more about here. We strive to be collaborative, innovative, and catalytic in tackling real challenges faced by citizens. Our approach includes a range of initiatives, such as engagement forums and hackathons, to generate solutions in real time. Building on the success of our first local innovation hackathon earlier this year, we are excited to hold a second event on 26–27 November, focused on homelessness, rough sleeping and temporary accommodation. When GDS and local government work together effectively, we can overcome individual technical barriers, giving local teams more time to improve the vital services communities rely on. ### **For local councils** If you work for a local council and want to get in touch, contact us at [email protected]. Alternatively, you can register your interest to hear more by completing this form. Find out more about GDS Local on GOV.UK.

Today marks an important milestone in the government’s digital transformation journey as the digital Veteran Card is launched. This represents more than just a new digital product; it’s the first step in delivering on our vision for a modern and accessible government that works better for everyone, as set out in the Blueprint for Modern Digital Government, published earlier this year. It’s also an important step towards testing and learning from the credentials we’ve developed to pave the way for future functionality. ## Putting veterans first The digital Veteran Card allows those who have served our country to prove their veteran status from their smartphone, giving them a faster and more convenient way to access the services, discounts and recognition they’ve earned. For the nearly 2 million veterans across the UK, this means: * quick and easy verification of their veteran status from their smartphone * greater flexibility and choice in how they access their services * confidence that their personal information is protected in their secure GOV.UK One Login account And there are benefits for departments, service providers and taxpayers too, as this digital transformation reduces administrative burden, offers quick checking of veteran status, and makes access to services more efficient – ultimately saving taxpayers’ money. ## Now, next, later We’ve worked alongside partners at the Ministry of Defence, Office for Veterans’ Affairs and Defence Business Services to develop a digital Veteran card which will work alongside the physical card. When it is first rolled out, the card will be used for in-person transactions only. This means, for example, a veteran could get access to healthcare services, other local authority services and discounts at selected museums and attractions by showing their digital Veteran Card at the ticketing office. We will introduce ways to use the digital Veteran Card online, and enhance in-person verification through automated digital checks, or ‘programmatic checking’ next year, as we add more credentials over time. It’s all part of our approach to deliver value quickly for our users, while building better digital services. ## Building the foundations for digital government The digital Veteran Card is the first digitised credential to be stored and shared from the GOV.UK One Login app. It allows users to securely store government-issued documents on their smartphones and use them easily when needed, which represents our vision for a more accessible, user-centred government. As the first digital document to be stored in the GOV.UK One Login app, this paves the way for us to add more credentials over time, and as we expand this functionality we will move to talk about it as the GOV.UK Wallet. Each addition brings us closer to our vision of reducing bureaucracy and creating public services that are more responsive to people’s needs, and it begins with veterans. As the digital Veteran Card is rolled out across the UK, we’re committed to continuous improvement through user testing and feedback. These insights will directly shape future digitised documents, creating an increasingly seamless experience for users. ## Get involved For veterans who want to try the digital Veteran Card, go to gov.uk/veteran-card for more information. If you’re an organisation who accepts the physical HM Armed Forces Veteran Card and wants more information on accepting the digital Veteran Card, visit https://www.gov.uk/guidance/champion-the-digital-veteran-card-in-your-organisation. **The future of government is digital, secure and accessible – and it’s beginning now.** Subscribe to the GDS blog to find out more about our work.

### **Using Privacy-Enhancing Technologies to Enable International Cancer Research Collaboration** Over the last year the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) has piloted the use of novel Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) to enable NHS England’s National Disease Registration Service (NDRS) and the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) to study ultra-rare childhood tumours, securely, lawfully and at speed: protecting patient privacy and keeping NHS data under NHS control. The pilot builds on experience from the 2022-23 UK-US Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) prize challenges. This blog explains why the pilot matters, how it works, and what it tells us about the future of digital innovation in government, and the commitments in the Blueprint for Modern Digital Government. ### **The data-scarcity problem** Data on cancer is gathered by disease registries at national or subnational scale. Every childhood cancer subtype is rare; some affect fewer than two children per million each year. Pooling data over a larger geography helps researchers to better understand these diseases and improve patient outcomes by enabling more robust analyses and providing clinicians and patients with accurate statistics for prognoses. The need to protect patient privacy to comply with regulatory requirements and maintain public trust can make large-scale export of patient-level data slow, costly and, in some cases, impossible. A better technical approach is needed. ### **A PETs-led solution** Our pilot utilises the Duality platform to keep data in place and moves the code, not the records. It enabled researchers to perform collaborative analyses _without_ moving non-anonymous data outside of NHS systems. Our implementation combines three complementary PETs and several information governance techniques: ●    Federated querying: Executes approved scripts simultaneously inside NDRS and NCI firewalls; returns only site-level aggregates. Queries include counts, means, crosstabs, histograms, survival pre-sets (stratified by population data). ●    Trusted Execution Environment (TEE): Decrypts and sums site aggregates inside a secure enclave so that neither side sees the other’s raw numbers, and ensures remote attestation at both sites. ●    Differential privacy + cell suppression: Adds Laplace noise to achieve differential privacy with ε = 1 to each combined cell and hides any result < 5 (these values were informed by manual testing with dummy data and expert input from US National Institute of Standards and Technology). The technologies we implemented built privacy preservation into the solution researchers were using, reducing friction in performing their research. After the completion of the pilot, we plan to share more information on why we chose this combination of PETs to mitigate the privacy risks we identified. ### **Outcomes** Analysts were able to write and run simplified, no-code queries from a centralised interface and results were returned in tables specific to the computations performed. The queries permitted were similar in nature to those researchers were already familiar with, often used to query single datasets on a national level. Real-world statistics produced using the PETs implementation will be generated towards the end of the year as researchers continue performing collaborative analyses. Our use of emerging PETs significantly shortened the information governance journey. For example, NDRS were able to work through a process that typically takes over a year for international collaborations in roughly two months. Reducing the lead time for data release also meant we had more time to focus on meaningful research. This process involved several robust cycles of information governance and cybersecurity checks and tests, coupled with several analytical assurance procedures. We found the ICO guidance on PETs incredibly helpful in guiding this process. ### **Lessons for digital government** This pilot successfully demonstrated the potential of novel PETs for generating value from underutilised datasets. Notwithstanding, there are many learnings we can take away from this project and apply to a multitude of UK and international public sector opportunities; future and current. ●     PETs turn governance into a design choice, not an after-thought. By baking privacy guarantees into architecture, we reduced the need for bespoke legal agreements. ●     Trust modelling beats trust transfer. A trusted execution environment allows each partner prove that code will run exactly as specified, so institutional trust can remain local. ●     Parameter transparency matters. Publishing our ε value, k-filter and suppression rules allowed information governance teams and boards to reason about privacy risks in concrete terms. ● Iterate with dummy or synthetic data first. Building the pipeline with dummy data lets analytics teams, information governance officers and cyber reviewers work in parallel. ### **What’s next?** This work highlights the potential of PETs to facilitate better collaboration on data without compromising on privacy, treating privacy as a design target and ultimately strengthening and expanding research capability, creating: ●     Improved quality of life and better patient outcomes, through new areas of epidemiological research and streamlined access to harmonised international data, supporting evidence-based decision making in a clinical setting. ●     Faster growth and innovation, by learning how to effectively harness a novel set of highly impactful technologies. ●     Smarter cross-governmental collaborations that cut lead times for meaningful research and increase productivity and efficiency across the board. Over the next year we aim to highlight our findings, using our learnings as a blueprint for future cross-government initiatives. In doing so we hope to evaluate areas for improvement, potential policy outcomes and synergies, as well as guidance-style pieces capturing our lessons and achievements, and support partners in evolving the pilot into an enduring, expanded service to researchers globally. ### **Get involved** If you manage a registry, hold paediatric cancer data or simply want to discuss the pilot in more detail, we would love to hear from you: contact [email protected].

Yesterday, Technology Secretary Peter Kyle announced a suite of new artificial intelligence (AI) Exemplar products across a range of government departments. Sponsored by the Prime Minister as an initiative to revolutionise our public services, the AI Exemplars Programme will explore new ways for services like justice, education and the NHS to make best use of emerging technology by embracing a test and learn culture with AI. Background on the products already announced as PM’s AI Exemplars can be found here. ### **Embracing a test and learn culture** The Prime Minister’s AI Exemplars Programme represents a fundamental shift in how the public sector approaches innovation. Rather than only pursuing a single, high-stakes technological solution, we've deliberately adopted a portfolio approach that acknowledges an important element of innovation: not everything is guaranteed to scale to production, and that's by design. Numerous potential AI use cases across government were identified, then a subset of Exemplars that represent the most promising opportunities were selected. This diverse Exemplar portfolio spans various levels of maturity, technology types, and delivery approaches, allowing us to: * progress multiple use cases simultaneously * learn quickly from both successes and failures * adopt responsibility while maximising potential return on investment * allow teams across the public sector to share learnings  on AI adoption * create opportunities to scale AI rapidly across the public sector. The portfolio focuses on improving public services in practical ways: helping doctors discharge patients from hospitals more quickly while maintaining clinical oversight, speeding up planning decisions to improve consistency and reduce bureaucracy for homeowners. ### **Scan > Pilot > Scale: A structured approach to innovation** We're following the "Scan > Pilot > Scale" approach outlined in the AI Opportunities Action Plan. This plan recommended the digital centre of government should support public sector partners where needed to “move fast and learn things”. Our approach identifies promising AI technologies, tests viable solutions through targeted pilots, and scales successful initiatives across government. We continuously monitor emerging technology, quickly halt underperforming projects to manage risk, and document lessons to create reusable components—balancing innovation with pragmatism. This approach has been shown as the best way to accelerate innovation. ### **_The role of GDS: catalyst and enabler_** GDS plays a crucial role as the digital centre for government, we’re here to support as a delivery agent and a catalyst for wider innovation. ### **What GDS brings to the portfolio** GDS is the digital centre of government that has been brought together in the Department of Science Innovation and Technology (DSIT). To support our work in successfully and safely scaling AI, we have set up a Public Sector AI Adoption Unit. This acts as a focus for bringing support to Exemplars, including: 1. Technical expertise: Deep specialist knowledge in digital service design, AI implementation, and responsible innovation 2. Rapid prototyping capability: The mindset of GDS's AI Incubator (i.AI) has been to "move fast and learn things" – building 22 AI prototypes with 11 now at Alpha or Beta stage, all within the last 12 months (read more on the Incubator for AI blog) 3. Cross-government perspective: The ability to identify opportunities for reuse and scale across departmental boundaries 4. Common enablers: Working with other central functions to accelerate critical work on procurement models, recruitment, training, security assessments, and responsible AI frameworks ### **Three delivery models:** The programme deliberately employs multiple delivery approaches to match the needs of each use case: 1. Department-owned: Innovation closely responsive to departmental service approach, supported by digital centre expertise but ultimately owned and operated by its home department. For example, the Department of Education is building a content store to support AI tools for teachers. 2. GDS collaboration: "Build once, use many" products and components supporting multiple services or public bodies, delivered either fully by GDS such as GOV.UK Chat or as a collaboration with other departments for example ‘Extract’  AI toolset to digitise planning documents in partnership with MHCLG’s digital planning programme. 3. Industry collaboration: Innovation arising from the private sector in response to or adapted for public sector needs, bringing ideas which may be harder to invent from within. For example, working with platform providers, the Department for Health and Social Care’s Discharge Summaries uses AI integrated into the NHS Federated Data Platform which was developed with industry partners. The tool automates the drafting of these critical documents by extracting pertinent data from a patient’s electronic health record. ### **Learning as we go** The programme will drive adoption of high-performing, trustworthy AI at scale and build our collective capacity to maximise AI's potential for better outcomes. Key aspects include: * Documenting successes and failures: capturing insights from all Exemplars, whether they succeed or not * Identifying patterns: understanding which approaches work best for different types of challenges * Building communities of practice: creating networks across the public sector to share knowledge and best practices * Evolving our approach: using what we learn to refine both our portfolio and our methods * Measuring outcomes: monitoring and evaluating the value delivered across the different use cases and technologies. ### **Leading by exemplar  ** By taking this portfolio approach to AI innovation, we're not just developing individual technology solutions – we're building the capability, confidence and culture needed to transform public services for the better. The Prime Minister’s AI Exemplars Programme doesn't promise that every project will succeed. Instead, it promises something more valuable: that we will learn quickly, adapt accordingly, and progressively build our collective ability to harness AI for public good. Want to be kept up to date on the Prime Minister’s AI Exemplars? Join the AI Community or subscribe to the monthly Government Digital and Data bulletin. Both are only available to public sector workers. Outside the public sector? We’ll be sharing progress regularly on this blog.

The Blueprint for Modern Digital Government sets an ambitious vision for the future of public services. Our plan is to create public services that are clear and easy to use for everyone. ## The problems we see with public services at the moment * Services are often hard to use because they are not designed around people's needs. Many services are designed without strong connections between policy and digital teams. This makes it harder for people to get the help they need — and harder for the government to deliver the outcomes the service was designed for. * Some services are not fully available online. Many still rely on paper and manual processes, making them slower and harder to access. Some services can be accessed online, but have underlying processes that are manual. This makes it more difficult for staff to manage the process and makes it slower for people to get what they need. * Some services do not work well together. People often need to use multiple services and when you combine this with the above, it results in a confusing, disconnected experience. ## What the Service Transformation team are doing The new Service Transformation team within the Government Digital Service (GDS) includes colleagues with extensive experience designing and building services, and solving complex policy problems. We are all passionate about making services better for everyone. As a team, we are primarily focusing on the following areas to: * **Make it simpler to   interact with government**** **We’re working with organisations/other government department to understand how people use services from start to finish. We’re exploring how we can improve joinup between services to make it simpler for people to interact with government. * **Improve service quality** We will refresh standards and guidance for teams designing and building public services, and will provide ways to check how well services are working. We’ll design clear, consistent metrics that teams can use to understand the health of their service. * **Change the system** Change how services are funded in line with the recommendations in the Performance Review of Digital Spend we published with HM Treasury, and ensure legislation and policy is ‘digital ready’ so services are set up for success. ## Focus on health, disability, and work We're piloting a new way of connecting services that puts people (our users) first, rather than forcing them to navigate separate government systems. In most cases, interacting with the government doesn’t begin and end with one service. People often need to use many services and interact with multiple organisations to get the help they need. Teams across the public sector and in GDS have been working for a long time to make services joined up and proactive. Our aim is to share this best practice and increase focus on proactive, personalised services that meet people where they are. We are focusing on helping people find or keep a job while managing long-term health conditions or disabilities. Currently, 2.8 million people are economically inactive due to long term sickness, an increase of 675,000 compared to 2019.  In many cases people are keen to return to work with the right support but find it difficult to access this support due to lack of awareness, and complicated application processes. We found that people with a health condition or disability may need to use more than 40 services from 9 different organisations. These include things like: * Getting to and from work, such as a Blue Badge or Disabled Bus Pass * Financial support, like Personal Independence Payment or a Council Tax Reduction * Healthcare services, like Talking Therapies or a service specific to their condition like diabetes prevention Many of these services make it possible for people to work. During our research people told us that it is hard to find these services. They also said that services often ask for the same information many times. Our goals are to: * improve health and productivity outcomes by making it simpler for people to get the right support at the right time. * reduce the administrative burden on people managing a disability or health condition. We are testing new ideas to join up and transform this journey, working with colleagues in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), the NHS, and other organisations across the public sector. We plan to test some short-term improvements this month, while we also work on bigger problems like sharing data and updating legacy systems. This will help us move towards personalised, proactive services that focus on the person. We’re working in the open as much as we can, with show and tell sessions available to teams across government, and regular updates to teams working in this area. We'll share what we're learning, and how small changes could make a big difference for people trying to get the support they need. We would love to hear your thoughts on how we could improve this work so please get in touch via [email protected].

In January, our Secretary of State, Peter Kyle set out a vision for a modern digital government focussed on improving people’s experiences when accessing the public services they need, and making Government work better. GOV.UK Wallet is one of the 5 kickstarters delivering against the Blueprint which sets out a vision for modern digital government to deliver on 5 outcomes for the public: 1. Easier lives: delivering transparent, next-generation public services that do the hard work for the public, can be accessed and used by everyone who needs them, and are designed around the user. 2. Faster growth: helping businesses start and scale by delivering services that work as well as they do for citizens. 3. Firmer foundations: securing public services so they are trustworthy and resilient. 4. Smarter organisations: changing how delivery is done to embed the right ways of working, moving at the same pace that people’s lives do, and working as agile, user-centred, multidisciplinary teams by default. 5. Higher productivity and efficiency: saving public money, delivering outstanding public services at a price we can afford, and enabling front-line workers to focus on delivery. The announcement generated significant interest in how the GOV.UK Wallet could work, where it could be used, and how we'd make good on the government’s commitment to work with industry. Top of mind has been how we can meet such an ambitious timeline - to build and make usable a digital wallet for government along with an early set of credentials in a single calendar year. **Today marks the start of our formal engagement with the technology sector,** with an event unveiling the working principles of the GOV.UK Wallet we’ve been developing until now. The aim of this event was to give private sector identity providers an update on the government's proposals and help them prepare for the critical role we want them to play in this work. ## **Our challenge to technology providers  ** At the event, we set a challenge to the private sector identity providers in the room. The GOV.UK Wallet opens the door to two clear use cases for the private sector to innovate. **To create an orchestration service to facilitate data sharing:** This means simply orchestrating the data flow between the information in your GOV.UK Wallet, and the retailer trying to check you are eligible to buy an age restricted product or service. This is about providing information from digital credentials stored in the GOV.UK Wallet to the people who need to see them in a secure and reliable way. It’s similar to how card payment services connect your bank account to retailers and facilitate the information exchange which lets you buy things. End users might see this model if using their digital driving licence to prove their age in a shop. **Identity or holder services:** Just as identity services can take information from scans or photos of physical documents as the basis to offer a range of products, they’ll be able to take this information from digital credentials in the GOV.UK Wallet if the user chooses to share them. These private sector services can then add value, for instance attaching other information. They might also create a reusable ‘derived credential,’ which is a new credential that would allow users to prove things about themselves, without going back to the GOV.UK Wallet. ## **Building on strong foundations** We’re building on strong foundations, using the already established GOV.UK One Login, which allows users to safely and securely confirm their identity. This technology means only the user of the GOV.UK Wallet will be able to store, access and use the digital documents within it, reducing fraud. We’re kicking off engagement with the technology sector to build on our established  foundations, enabling future collaboration as we change the way users can prove information about themselves. And it’s no small task. We’re building the UK’s first government digital wallet, enabling multiple private sector organisations to build the technology to check and share information from it. Important to remember is that we're following in the footsteps of some fantastic examples. We're applying learnings from Australia, Estonia, Ukraine and some states in the USA who have all rolled out digital wallets to improve the access and convenience of digital services. ## **What’s next?** Our ambition is to see the first credential in the GOV.UK Wallet live this summer with the launch of the digital veterans card in partnership with the Office of Veterans’ Affairs and Ministry of Defence. Later in the year, we will begin the initial roll out of the digital driving licence which in time could be used for everything your physical one can do - with the benefit of quick access to your government credentials in your pocket. Importantly, this is not about replacing paper documents - it’s about allowing people the choice to use digitised credentials where it works better for them. Alongside the build of the GOV.UK Wallet and preparing for the first two credentials, our team is engaging across government to identify more potential credentials from other government departments as part of our Blueprint commitment to require services to issue a digital verified credential alongside any paper or card based credential or proof of entitlement eligibility by the end of 2027. This is opening the door to a world where an array of government-issued documents can be easily stored in your phone, in one place. Digital Verification Services can use our technical documentation to find out about the open standards we are working to, and provide feedback.**** We will add further documentation to GOV.UK as the product develops. This is the first step, and we are starting further collaboration opportunities. Providers will be able to take part in a technical engagement, as we work to understand their needs and how we can make the GOV.UK Wallet a success together.**** It marks the something truly transformative, and we’re proud to be a part of it.

## **Background** GOV.UK One Login lets users sign in and prove their identity so they can access government services quickly and easily. User-centred design (UCD) is at the core of our work, ensuring we meet real user needs while tackling complex inclusion and accessibility challenges. To help government services integrate with GOV.UK One Login, their service teams need to understand how it works. This can be challenging, as our service isn’t a single, linear journey but a multi-channel journey that involves a collection of triage pages and interrupted journeys. It also evolves constantly, with frequent updates to meet diverse user and service needs. This pace of change can make it challenging for other government department service teams to stay up to date and understand what they need to integrate with. ## **Challenge** Our challenge was to maintain a single source of truth that offered enough detail to guide our service teams. While we share user journeys through tools like Figma and presentation slides, these can be difficult to follow for those unfamiliar with our service. Keeping them updated also takes considerable effort, meaning they don’t always reflect the latest version. Service teams can explore GOV.UK One Login in our integration environment, but this requires technical expertise and includes field-level validation, making it difficult to navigate quickly. Internal tools like Mural and our staging environment offered some support but faced similar challenges with usability and maintenance. Additionally, teams—including those who directly support users—need a clear understanding of the journey. To address this, we needed a solution that was easy to explore, kept pace with our evolving service, and provided teams with a clear, up-to-date view of user journeys—helping them stay aligned with minimal effort. ## **Our approach** Our goal was to make our service visible and help service teams and our internal teams interact with it. To guide the work and keep a holistic perspective, we started with 3 principles: **Make it realistic** - create an experience that looks and behaves like the real thing. **Keep it simple** - make it straightforward to use and update, so it’s accessible to everyone. **Start small and iterate** - begin with key features and improve gradually as the service evolves. Based on these principles, we decided to build an HTML prototype using the GOV.UK Prototype Kit. This approach offered several benefits: * easily adding components and patterns from the GOV.UK Design System * showing different pages based on user input * sharing the prototype via a web browser * making it easy for others to contribute or reuse in their own projects We started by building the primary user journey through the service and gathering feedback. This helped us add secondary journeys and make incremental improvements as the service evolved. To make sure the prototype was effective and easy to work with, we: * made only essential branching questions mandatory * simplified navigation for frequent users * structured our code to be easy to update and use progressive enhancement > _“You’ve clearly not just emulated a user prototype. It’s really evident and very helpful, the content is obviously built for us.”_ > > **(Usability session participant feedback, Senior Product Manager)** ## **Designing the solution** This wasn’t just about building a prototype. We wanted others to explore and understand how the service works without confusion about what is and isn’t part of the live journey. We approached this by: * designing a clear visual language to distinguish the live journey from the tool, avoiding misinterpretation * offering flexible navigation options, including scenario-based exploration and a page index for jumping to specific points * providing contextual guidance through instructions, highlighting channel shifts and alternative routes, with interstitial pages to help users absorb key details * creating accessible HTML versions of the iOS and Android app journeys, with a responsive mobile frame to reflect the app experience for desktop users * adding a user journey library, allowing teams to quickly explore scenarios where things don’t go as expected when using GOV.UK One Login To keep it up to date, we set up a simple maintenance process. Teams can report issues via a feedback form, and updates follow a federated model, allowing anyone with prototyping skills to contribute. Changes are reviewed through pull requests, guided by a runbook. We have used GitHub not only to host the prototype but also to serve as living documentation through release notes, making it easy for anyone to track the evolution of the service. > _"This tool has been a game-changer for our engagement with service teams. It makes complex journeys much easier to understand and gives teams the confidence to see how GOV.UK One Login fits into their service."_ > > **Lead Product manager, GOV.UK One Login** ### ## **Delivering value  ** The tool has soon become an essential resource not only for external service teams but also internally for our user-centred design colleagues, product teams and most importantly, our Contact Centre. For example: * contact centre staff use it for onboarding and training, helping them understand the journey and resolve queries faster * internal product teams use it as a cross-referencing tool, which has helped identify service inconsistencies and gaps, driving a shift toward pattern-based design * designers use it to build their own research prototypes, speeding up their process and ensuring they use the latest designs during research * technical colleagues use it to quickly test ideas and build proofs of concept * user researchers use it to gain deeper insights during cross-channel research, particularly when testing web-to-mobile handovers, as it provides a more realistic experience than tools like Figma or TestFlight > _"The tool has transformed how we train and support staff. It’s reduced the time it takes to resolve user queries, helped us deliver better service overall, and enables our Agents to guide users through their journey independently, mitigating fraud risks associated with co-browsing."_ > > **Contact Centre Lead** The tool has evolved into a vital resource for delivering a joined-up user experience and as GOV.UK One Login continues to grow and change, the tool will evolve alongside it — adapting to meet the needs of teams across government. If you’d like to explore the tool, you can request access via https://www.sign-in.service.gov.uk/documentation/end-to-end-prototype/identity-journeys

The recently published blueprint for a modern digital government was the result of many weeks of researching, sketching and prototyping, by teams working as part of the Digital Centre Design team in GDS. We were keen to explore what the ideas in the blueprint might look and behave like, when they inevitably bump up against the rough edges of the real world. We spent some time thinking through not only a vision of the future, but what making that vision true would require of us, and colleagues in the public sector. ### Pragmatism, not pipe dreams We wanted to understand what a modern digital government would feel like if you were a citizen, a public servant, front line worker or a business owner. We looked at the joins between services. We came up with the idea of making them more like _furrows_ and less like _obstacles_. We spent as much time thinking about trust and transparency of services, as we did about technology. In traditional GDS fashion, this was best done by thinking and working as openly as possible, using a wall, and taking people through our thinking as much as possible. We took temporary ownership of a tiny ‘pod’ in one corner of the GDS office in Whitechapel, and began covering its walls with assumptions, principles, sketches, case studies and concepts. The beauty of working on walls is that they instantly turn into presentations when you need them to. So when colleagues passed by, or when helpful visitors turned up, we were able to talk through our thinking, and literally point at thoughts and the connections between them. Even though we’re big supporters of remote and flexible working, it was, we have to admit, a refreshing reminder of the benefits of working together in the same space at the same time. We were lucky to have guidance from the digital centre's advisory panel, convened to support its thinking. They checked in our early thinking, helping to keep us honest, refine the messages, and join the dots. They pushed us to be ambitious and to keep people at the heart of the vision. ### Being bold The more we showed early versions of our thinking to teams in other departments and the wider public sector, the more we found that in many cases, they were already thinking along the same lines, and even had examples of exploratory work which pointed broadly towards the same direction. That helped us feel more confident that we were going in the right direction. We began to develop what we ended up calling “the materials of digital government” - the various parts that get used to assemble a service. That’s not a new concept - GDS was thinking similar thoughts a decade ago - but we were trying to make use of everything that’s been learned in those intervening years. We know more now than we did then. We know that the things that join the component parts together are as important as the parts themselves. (Digital credentials - ways of proving facts about things - are an essential part of this, and still very much in their infancy in UK digital government services.) We know we need a downward flow of permission, from the highest levels, to assure colleagues that the big changes necessary are changes they’re allowed to make. And we know that the scale of the task is enormous, stretching out far beyond the remit of central government - which in turn adds more complexity, and needs more courage from teams and their leaders. This is bold stuff. ### Showing things to think out loud Throughout this process, we were showing things we’d come up with to all those advisors, helpers and colleagues. We made simple scenarios with words and pictures, which morphed over time into slides we used to help us explain our thinking to ministers and civil servants. We discussed ways that services could ‘do more’ for users, by making inferences and suggestions. What might that look like? The plan for the future is “test and learn”, and that’s exactly the approach we used while researching and writing the blueprint. We began thinking about how some of these scenarios might play out in reality - and we built a handful of very rough digital prototypes, to just check our thinking and show it to others: At one stage, we tried turning the materials we’d started working with into a set of models, and assembled them on a mini website to share case studies internally: These are just a few snippets, snapshots of something much more detailed. There will no doubt be much more to share as the plans from the blueprint for a modern digital government start to take shape. We’re looking forward to many more conversations and input from colleagues in central and local government, the NHS, and other public sector institutions.

## **Starting from zero** I started work at GDS in February 2022, joining the GOV.UK Pay team. I initially came in and met the team for a week and then I went away to Makers Academy. There I learned to code from zero; from the ground up. It was a very intensive experience. Before that I did a lot of different things, like biomedical science. After that I worked for a bit in a lab but I didn't really like it. And then lockdown happened. That's when I really started getting interested in coding. At first I was considering a bootcamp, but then a friend of mine told me about Civil Service Jobs. I came across the GDS apprenticeship, which offered much better opportunities for me than anything else I could have done. For the first 2 months I was just doing specific things that were earmarked for me. After that I needed to take on a project. It was creating a task list for onboarding with one of our payment providers. The team came together and thought, "this would be something good for you to work on", to enable me to get the experience I needed. Before that I'd been doing a mix of front-end and back-end work, but mainly front-end. ## **Time for learning** I had every Friday for my own independent learning, supported by my line manager who knew exactly what I needed to help me. He gave me a few independent tasks, so that I could do work on something I was struggling with, for example Cypress testing. I then used Mountebank, which we use in combination with Cypress. I'd been struggling with those 2 technologies and he got me to make 2 applications; microservices that talk together. Then I was able to work on the task list properly. ## **Apprenticeship project** I carried on with my apprenticeship, doing some complex infrastructure work. Then I started working on an apprenticeship project. As part of a GDS apprenticeship you get to work on a project that has a business need — something that the team is going to use. And one thing we needed was a button in an internal tool we use called Toolbox that would allow us to reverse refunds. ## **Challenge and progress** Later a position came up in GDS for a junior developer role, which I applied and successfully interviewed for. The experience has been really, really good. It was very challenging to begin with because I came from a non-coding background. But I had a lot of support. I was quite lucky with the team I was placed in as they helped me a lot and made it a very good experience: challenging but definitely enjoyable. Find a Civil Service apprenticeship or sign up to be alerted when new apprenticeships are advertised that match your skills and experience.

## **Life before GDS** I started my career in teaching and moved gradually into the corporate world. I had worked as a software tester but when I came to the UK I had to give up my job for family reasons. I was a stay-at-home mum for quite some time before I joined the workforce again. ## **DevOps bootcamp** I realised when I got back into software testing that things had changed quite a lot since I first worked in the field. So I thought it would be good to try something different. That's why I joined the DevOps bootcamp in July 2022, where I achieved AWS cloud practitioner certifications over 12 weeks. Following this, I applied for a role at GDS  as a Junior Site Reliability Engineer on GOV.UK Pay. ## **Gradual learning** At the beginning everything was new including writing git commands. I completed a lot of self-learning using training videos, and the support of my team. It would have been impossible to be where I am today without them! In the early days I mostly worked on package updates but in the background I was learning basic but essential skills: using git, how to push code to github, how to use the command line interface - it seems simple now! Gradually I  took on more challenging work including creating dashboards for metrics in the Prometheus tool. The team has always asked, "what would you like to do next?" and "how much more would you like to try?" encouraging me to push myself and giving me the support that I need to succeed. ## **Moving to a more senior role** As part of the rotation for my programme, I then moved to GOV.UK Forms. Moving to a more senior role wasn't straightforward as I had to develop a set of skills to be able to develop into a mid-level role, but the team’s work always gave me scope to learn something different. ## **The future** In future I'd like to get involved in more challenging projects to develop my skills and opportunities further. At the moment I'm also doing the senior leadership apprenticeship so I am practicing those skills in my current role. It’s a really broad programme covering finance, change management, and leadership over a 2-year period. ## **Challenge and progress** I think GDS is one of the best places I've ever worked. Although I found things challenging when I first arrived, my team were brilliant. Their help and patience was so important in helping me to settle in. I would recommend anybody who is thinking of a career in the UK government or GDS to apply. You can find available junior engineering and development roles on civil service jobs.

Today, Technology Secretary Peter Kyle has launched the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Playbook for the UK Government to provide departments and public sector organisations with accessible technical guidance on the safe and effective use of AI. AI is at the heart of the UK Government's strategy to drive economic growth and enhance public service delivery - it offers significant opportunities to reduce costs and enhance public service delivery across government, as highlighted in the State of Digital Government Review 2025. However, we must remain mindful of both the technology's constraints and potential risks. ### **Who the playbook and learning resources are for  ** It is crucial for civil servants to gain an understanding of what AI can and cannot do, how it can help, and the potential ethical, legal, privacy, sustainability and security risks it poses. The AI Playbook can be freely accessed by everyone on GOV.UK and it is designed to support government departments, arm’s length bodies and public sector organisations. Different chapters cater for the needs of civil servants working both within and outside the digital and data space and with varying levels of digital knowledge. The AI Playbook updates and expands on old guidance to offer help on a wider range of AI technologies in addition to generative AI, including machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, computer vision, speech recognition and more. The guidance contained in the Playbook is complemented by a new series of AI courses on Civil Service Learning and off-the-shelf training on Government Campus. These resources were made available in collaboration with several leading tech firms and the Government Skills unit. The AI Playbook is an important element of the government's bigger goal of putting AI to good use - making things run better, encouraging fresh thinking, reducing the time spent on repetitive tasks, and giving the economy a boost. ### **What the playbook includes** To meet the needs of a wide and diverse audience, the AI Playbook includes accessible explanations on AI technologies, sample use cases, and corporate guidance for policy professionals and decision makers, as well as technical advice on how to buy, implement and use AI solutions for digital and data professionals. The playbook is organised in five parts: 1. **10 principles:** this section summarises the key principles that all civil servants should follow when using AI in government. 2. **Introducing AI:** this introductory section explains the foundations of AI (including generative AI), its applications, capabilities and limitations to all civil servants. 3. **Building AI:** this section is designed for a variety of roles working on AI projects and contains both corporate and technological guidance. It offers advice on topics such as how to understand if AI is the right tool for the job, what use cases should be avoided in government, how to conduct user research on AI, how to build an AI team and acquire the necessary skills, and how to buy, procure and implement AI products. 4. **Using AI safely and responsibly:** this section focuses on a wide range of legal, ethical, security and governance aspects of AI projects that team leaders and senior decision makers should consider when working on AI, discussing topics such as bias, privacy, copyright, data protection, and cybersecurity. 5. **Appendix with AI use cases in the public sector:** the appendix collects a series of case studies on the development of several AI and generative AI solutions across the public sector written by the teams who developed these products. Each section contains a checklist with practical recommendations to consider and actions to take when developing AI projects. More technical aspects of AI are discussed in our new series of AI Insights articles. ### **How we developed the playbook** The creation of the AI Playbook was a collaborative effort involving over 50 experts from GDS and the wider Department for Science Innovation and Technology (DSIT), contributions from over 20 government departments and public sector organisations, as well as insights and peer-review from industry and academic advisors. ### **What’s next** AI is a broad and fast-paced field and we’ll update the AI Playbook regularly. We’re also launching a series of AI Insights publications to cover more specific aspects of AI whose in-depth discussion was not possible in the playbook. Join the Artificial Intelligence community of practice to connect with people interested in AI across government, attend the monthly meet-ups and receive newsletters with all the latest AI news from across government. Enrol in our free e-learning courses on Civil Service Learning to learn how to implement and use AI solutions safely and effectively.