A tenet that people should not have to provide details more than once will be implemented throughout Whitehall departments and across core data, before expansion into the wider public sector

Government will implement a rule mandating that citizens should not have to provide information more than once – with discrete agencies and services empowered to share data across departmental boundaries, a minister has indicated.

A tenet of “once-only” will initially be applied across Whitehall, to the most common and easily shared kinds of data. But, in due course, the intention is to enable the sharing of a widespread range of information – across the breadth of the public sector, according to digital government and artificial intelligence minister Feryal Clark.

“The government will establish a ‘once only’ rule, so that if people have provided information to one service, it can be reused by others with appropriate safeguards,” she said. “It will start with central government services and commonly reused data, but be designed to scale over time to the broader public sector and more information.”

The minister – who was answering a series of written parliamentary questions from fellow Labour MP Sarah Hall, concerning integration and consolidation of government tech and services – also stressed the importance the planned Digital Backbone.

First trailed in the Blueprint for modern digital government policy paper published earlier this year, the centralised tech platform will support coordination efforts such as “exposing, creating, processing and maintaining APIs across the public sector”.

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The Blueprint added that government ultimately plans to “to open up the Backbone for industry to publish services and products for use across the public sector, providing a streamlined way to consume services from the market”.

Clark added: “The government has also committed to introducing a Digital Backbone: the integration, orchestration and instrumentation technology needed to share capabilities and build true end-to-end journeys.

The minister also pointed to the common platforms delivered by the Government Digital Service, and Whitehall’s nascent tech-focused procurement unit as key ongoing initiatives to support greater standardisation and replication of good practice.

“The government is committed to delivering more joined up public services, reducing duplication, and developing modern digital public infrastructure that will make public organisations more integrated,” she said. “Thousands of teams across the public sector are already using our world-leading digital components such as GOV.UK Notify, Pay and Design System.”

Clark added: “The government has also committed to launch a Digital Commercial Centre of Excellence, which will negotiate whole-of-public-sector agreements and contracting once for a limited number of high value cases, including platform services such as cloud.”