Perhaps we’ve been wrong to frame public service digital as a way to save money

I write this post with some trepidation. Let me begin with the incantation that this is my personal view and not government policy in any way. So why trepidation? Because I fear I may be treading on some dearly held assumptions that have been core to much work and countless business cases over many years.

Still, let me give this an airing because I know many colleagues feel frustrated when their work in public service digital (or DDaT, or tech or data science, you get the idea) is seen as a cost rather than an investment. They risk becoming relegated to ‘back office services’, or ‘overhead’ in business planning conversations.

When that happens I fear this is a category error – confusing digital work with the likes of estates and audit, with no disrespect for those important professions intended! It is perfectly rational to have a conversation about estates as a cost centre, an organisation could have smaller, cheaper offices or change its desk ratio to reduce their spend on estates. Doing so doesn’t however fundamentally change the core business.

With digital, by coming in hard on the “we can save money through channel shift/reducing paper use/improving accuracy” type arguments we have pigeon-holed ourselves in the same boat.

Do we really think that since the 1950s the public sector has actually saved money through the introduction of digital technologies? Billions are spent running and building these systems. In an alternative world, with no transistors, what would those billions be spent on? I suspect the money would be spent on delivering and administering core public services and the cost of non-digital administration would not have hugely grown. In our reality our spend on digital services, support and all the associated stuff is a major and growing part of public spending. Is that a bad thing? No, because I would argue it is enabling ways of serving the public that were never previously possible. But they aren’t necessarily cheaper.

To put it another way, as Benedict Evans does eloquently in his recent essay on automation, the introduction of spreadsheets did not reduce the amount of accounting or analysis done. Indeed we have more accountants and analysts than ever before, and the spend on them is consequently greater. Similarly in collecting more structured data in public services, whatever we’ve saved on clipboards and pencils, is dwarfed by the growth in data scientists and tools to support them. I would happily argue this is a great investment to better inform decision-making and continuous improvement, but it is undoubtedly costing more money.

I’ve sat on drafts of this post for quite some time, because in some ways it feels heretical to say this when so much of the narrative has been “faster, better, cheaper” and I’ve previously leaned on that rhetoric too, don’t get me wrong. Sometimes there are savings to be made in a tactical sense – with some channel shift here or on-demand printing there. But zoom out and I feel we’re missing a trick if we don’t move away from “efficiency” to the more vital question, what can we do today for the public benefit which wasn’t possible before?