Westminster has had a turbulent few weeks. But while the public eagerly tracks every political development, civil servants will inevitably be focussed on the crucial business of keeping government, and the country, running. And when it comes to achieving that, there is no bigger challenge than improving how government delivers digital services.
Every department is being asked to do more with less. Ministers want faster delivery, better public services and billions in efficiency savings. Success depends on whether the civil service has the capability to design, run and continuously improve the services people rely on every day.
For decades, the answer has been to bring in outside help.
As public services have grown more complex and technology has moved faster, reliance on external contractors has deepened. The debate around the NHS’s contract with Palantir highlights a wider challenge facing government. Whatever questions emerge about a supplier ecosystem, the same issue sits underneath them: does the organisation have enough internal capability to act as an intelligent customer, challenging decisions and retaining control of its own future? Too often, the answer is unclear.
Anyone who has spent time in and around Whitehall will recognise the pattern. A department commissions a service. A supplier delivers it. The contract ends, the team moves on, and much of the knowledge goes with them. A few months later, the department needs to make a change, respond to a new priority or improve the service - and finds itself bringing external support back in. The cycle begins again. Not through any failure of will, but because the model was never designed to do anything else.
The Public Accounts Committee recently highlighted just how deeply embedded this problem has become. Its report warned that government’s ambition to reduce consultancy spending is in doubt, with departments unable to provide a consistent picture of what they actually spend on external support. Depending on who is counting, the bill is somewhere between £1.36 billion and £2.23 billion a year.
The issue is not the amount government spends on external support. It is whether that investment leaves departments better equipped to deliver services themselves in future.
Darren Jones has correctly identified capability as one of Whitehall’s central challenges. Delivery units in every department, a new National School of Government and a push to strengthen skills across the Civil Service all point in the right direction. But they will only succeed if government changes how it buys expertise in the first place.
Government is successful at measuring what has been built. It is less successful at measuring whether it can stand on its own two feet once the supplier has gone. That is the difference between transformation and dependency.
Katie Carruthers, managing director of Tecknuovo
At Tecknuovo, we call the answer Zero Dependency. Success should not be measured by what a supplier delivers - it should be measured by what a department can do once that supplier has left, and we are committed to setting the standard for how this is done.
Working with departments including HMRC and DESNZ, we have seen what breaking that cycle looks like. Civil servants are involved from the start, working alongside delivery teams rather than waiting for a handover at the end. Departments understand how their services operate, can make changes themselves and have the confidence to keep improving platforms and products long after a project has finished. The result is lower costs, less reliance on external support and organisations that are stronger than they were before.
If Whitehall wants better delivery, it needs to think differently about how and what it buys - and what it keeps.
Capability transfer must become a contractual requirement, not an aspiration buried in a tender document. Suppliers must be judged on whether they leave departments stronger than they found them. And success must be measured not just by what gets built, but by what government can own and operate independently once the work is done.
Political change is inevitable. What will not change is the challenge: how to do more with less, ensuring the public truly gets the services they value and trust. At Tecknuovo, we believe the solution lies in fixing the model - transferring capability and knowledge to civil servants delivering services now - no matter what turbulence is going on around them.