The Home Office has outlined eight strategic shifts to guide efforts to transform digital services and deliver improved outcomes over the next five years in its 2030 Digital Strategy. In particular, its focus is on using AI and automation, investing in systems and platforms, cyber security, use of data, and digital skills.
For tech investments and platforms, the Home Office looks to using open and accessible tools, cloud technology, and creating digital systems and services to support shared service models across the organisation. It states the importance of careful selection of tech and services to improve efficiency, regular testing, and responsible, sustainable service growth. Resilience is key to meet new challenges and to respond efficiently to crises, with more to be done around collaboration and agile working, securing tech and storage to ensure availability during unplanned events, and using industry standard frameworks to deliver flexible services that can manage change.
Cyber security will become “everybody’s responsibility”, the Home Office states, whilst following the government’s Secure by Design Framework, working with third parties, and continued investment in new tools and capabilities, will allow the organisation to stay ahead of emerging threats. Data will be organised to make it “as available, but secure, as possible” for Home Office staff and those using it as part of its services, and access will be provided through “single, reusable data sources” which can be shared across government. This better use of data will also enable new opportunities with tech such as AI and machine learning, it continues.
For AI and automation, the Home Office’s plans for 2030 are to have “frictionless” UK border crossings with minimal need for human checks, also employing AI to check freight to reduce illegal imports and human trafficking. To do this, AI technologies such as automated number plate recognition will be used to inform the need for investigation of people or vehicles, and crime data from local intelligence sources will be combined with international sources to identify risks of trafficking or organised crime. It also highlights uses in reducing complexity of everyday tasks, in promoting collaboration, and in automating the ability to share data securely across government.
Elsewhere, the Home Office commits to creating new funding models to support innovation, more clearly defining the strategy it follows to work with suppliers, reviewing supply chains, offering training and development opportunities to help staff learn how to “make the most of digital and data in their role”, and embedding data and digital learning into the organisation’s performance and development standards. New apprenticeships and early career talent programmes will be used alongside retraining to increase the number of people in digital and data roles, whilst the Digital Leadership Programme will help support senior civil servants in improving their understanding of digital, data, and technology.
Data and digital strategy from across the health and care system
The Data Use and Access Bill has formally entered into law, in a move the government hopes will cut NHS bureaucracy and accelerate innovation in science and tech. The bill states the intent for interoperability, for real-time access to health information such as pre-existing conditions, appointments, and tests, across different care settings “no matter what IT system they are using”. The government estimates that enabling data sharing across platforms will save NHS staff 140,000 hours per year in admin.
A review commissioned by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care into six organisations overseeing the safety of care has been completed, with Dr Penny Dash publishing ten main findings and a total of nine recommendations. Headline findings include that despite a shift toward safety and “considerable resources deployed”, relatively small improvements have been seen; that tech, data and analytics should play a “far more significant role” in supporting quality of care; and that insufficient use is currently being made of NHS data resources.
