Christine Bellamy, the newly named boss of the Government Digital Service, tells techUK event that the organisation’s new departmental home offers an opportunity to have a greater impact on legislation

The recently appointed chief executive of the Government Digital Service Christine Bellamy has hailed the impact and potential of the organisation’s move to a policy-centric department.

Following Labour’s election victory, GDS – as well as its sister agency the Central Digital and Data Office and the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence – were all swiftly moved from the Cabinet Office to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, creating a new “digital centre of government”.

Speaking yesterday during a panel session at the annual Building the Smarter State conference hosted by techUK, Bellamy told attendees that the shift has “has been a really positive experience for our team for some significant reasons”.

Alongside the “really welcoming team” that GDS has joined, the digital unit is now housed somewhere where “there is a clear mandate of what the department does – which is very policy-centric”.

“We were in a different department that did not really play in policy,” Bellamy said. “Now, we can start to make decisions that affect legislation, and that is really powerful. Having capability and delivery in conjunction with policy – that is really important.”

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The GDS head added: “In DSIT, we now need to think about our role [going forward]. But I think it is really positive – not only for GDS, but for DSIT as well.”

While GDS has been at the heart of many “great things that happened in government” since its inception in late 2011 – including the launch of GOV.UK and the creation of consistent service-design patterns for use by departments – since the coronavirus crisis there has been a shift in the demands placed on digital government, according to Bellamy, who took over as CEO in July.

The tech team’s work during the next two to three years will be defined by the objective to deliver cohesive “service transformation across government… [and] anything that starts to think about the individual, rather than the state”.

“We are now at a junction where the expectations of users have changed since the pandemic, [when] we did some brilliant things, but we [as government] also took a moment to say: ‘We could do better’,” she said. “The big change was we thought about how citizens get what they need from the state, and that was all centred around their experience. We did not just ship policy, we thought about how it could impact the citizens and he outcome.”

The new unified One Login system is an exemplar of a service through which “individuals can see the state as one entity, and not individual departments”.

The intended seamlessness of such products are reflective of the strange and counterintuitive remit of digital professionals working in the public, rather than commercial sector, Bellamy said.

“We want to create products people do not want to spend a lot of time with – when most digital products are trying to get people to stay with them longer,” she said. “The most important thing we can do is make products that fade into the background – and that people may not even know exist.”