Illustration: gov.uk
Big Four firm Deloitte received a public contract worth up to £50 million for a new application, aimed at streamlining admin when accessing government services. Since its launch, the GOV UK app has been criticised for its limited capabilities at launch.
In late July 2024, the Government Digital Service (GDS) picked long-time supplier Deloitte as the partner to fulfil its delivery of the new GOV.UK App. An accompanying procurement notice at the time explained that Deloitte would be expected to deliver “services to support, maintain and improve [the] existing GOV.UK ID Check mobile app for iOS and Android”.
The news built on a previous £5 million deal signed by GDS and the consultancy in 2022 to assist with the creation of the identification app. That app supports the operation of One Login – a platform for which Deloitte was also awarded a £10 million agreement.
In this case, the two-year deal runs for up to £42 million, plus VAT, taking the amount spent by the government on the contract to a total potential value of £50.4 million. At a time when Prime Minister Keir Starmer has pledged to cut back on public spending for private consulting work, that is a hefty price tag.
And questions of value for money have emerged since the GOV UK app went live earlier in the year. While the app has been touted as a way for users to “cut life admin”, as it has been offered for free download by millions of UK citizens, its functions at launch are limited to steering users to existing web pages – while an AI chatbot, notifications and digital driving licences are said to follow.
Speaking about the app as it went live in beta form, the cabinet minister in charge admitted that “the design is not as we would like it to be.” Peter Kyle, the secretary of state for science and technology, added that users would still be able to “do things faster,” and “find services where in the past you would have given up because it’s a pain in the neck getting there” – but did concede that “what I don’t want to do is say that we are fully where we want to be in terms of the service right now.”
The launch of the app came at the stage described internally as “minimum viable product”, according to reports in The Guardian. The app is speculated to eventually be linked to a digital wallet, which will include a digital driving licence by the end of the year – with Kyle telling the paper that this could include “digital ID card functions, the age-verification functions that go along with the offline version of the driving licence”.
A generative artificial intelligence chatbot trained on 700,000 pages of the GOV UK website is meanwhile not ready yet. However, it is expected to deliver personal notifications such as when car MOTs are due and when citizens need to register to vote. Warnings about hot weather could be tailored geographically if the user enters their postcode – powered by US AI company Anthropic. Officials stated that data from citizen queries would not be accessible to the tech giant.