The environment department creates the Digital Express Toolkit, which is designed to work in concert with the generic GOV.UK Forms tool in order to meet the organisation’s ‘quite specific requirements’

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has developed a platform to help digitise over the coming years almost 600 paper forms that are currently used in the organisation’s citizen services.

Defra conducted an audit last year and identified 579 paper forms, all of which were then assessed and rated by “complexity and functionality”, according to a new blog post from Jenny Taylor, lead product manager for the Defra Forms project.

The department found that some of these manual documents are “straightforward enough to be digitised using the GOV.UK Forms builder” – the cross-government system developed by the Government Digital Service to help departments build and implement online forms.

But Defra typically “has quite specific requirements for forms”, and “most required additional features not yet available” via the GDS tool.

An example of this kind of extra functionality is the ability for processes to include tailored questions based on a user’s response. The department also requires the option for users to securely attach files to submitted forms, as well as a customised validation process to verify that information has been provided in the necessary format.

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To enable these functions, the environment department has thus developed its own Digital Express Toolkit (DXT) “to use in parallel with GOV.UK Forms” in its efforts to reduce its reliance on paper documents.

The short-term goal is to digitise one in five of these processes by next year; this would equate to cutting out about 115 forms.

Taylor said that paper forms have remained so prevalently used across Defra until now “because there [hasn’t been] a quick, accessible, and standardised way to create accessible online forms and collect data from our users at Defra”.

“Policy and operational teams routinely engage with our Digital, Data, Technology and Security colleagues to deliver new digital services to replace forms, but this can be costly, time-consuming and often unnecessary for simple processes,” she said. “ Digital Express Toolkit… can be used to create standardised forms quickly and easily. Forms builders are software that people without coding or design skills can use to ask questions and capture data from users.”

Taylor added: “[This] will accelerate the delivery of our goals by offering a central solution that can be used flexibly to meet a diverse range of needs… using this approach to delivering a common capability also helps us to save time and money so that we can react quickly to urgent changes in legislation or disease outbreaks that require interaction with members of the public.”