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Blog posted by: Roxane Heaton – Director, Digital Data and Technology Functional Strategy, 22 February 2021 – Categories: GOV.UK Notify, GOV.UK Pay, Government as a Platform.

Government as a Platform (GaaP) products make it easy for service teams to design and host services, send messages and take payments, making it quicker and cheaper to create the essential services the public need. This has been more important than ever during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This month we’re celebrating milestones on 4 GaaP products:

• GOV.​UK Notify is now sending messages for 4,000 public service teams - from nearly 1,000 different organisations - right across the UK public sector;  in the last 12 months alone, we've sent more 1.6 billion messages to users of these services
• GOV.‌UK Pay has taken 7.1 million payments in 2020 (2.8 times more than in 2019), which helps more than 160 organisations across the public sector who use Pay
• GOV.UK PaaS recently connected its 100th organisation, and services are running and scaling on GOV.UK PaaS from more than 40 public bodies
• GOV.UK Design System just released a cookie page pattern and a cookie banner component, which helps services build their own banner to display information about cookies to secure user consent.

As Director of Digital Data and Technology (DDaT) Functional Strategy and Senior Responsible Owner (SRO) for the GaaP Programme, it’s really exciting to be able to help shape the roadmaps and see how we’re meeting user needs, and hearing about the impacts and outcomes our products enable across the country and beyond.

Our GaaP product teams are lean, agile and inspiring. They work across the public sector from central to local governments constantly striving to improve their products. They are the unsung heroes: they aren’t the flashy websites or products you may know, but they underpin every department.

The “Build Once, Use Many” nature of GaaP products enables organisations to reduce wasted effort, increase pace and agility, increase value for money, reduce technical friction for increased interoperability and resilience, and most importantly create consistent and trustworthy user experiences.

As always with digital services, that means more 24/7 self-service and less load for public sector colleagues from shuffling back end paperwork, meaning they’re better able to serve the needs of our communities. We recognise that the emotive benefits are as valuable as practical and financial: making services simple to use is good for everyone’s wellbeing, civil service and public alike.

I am truly excited about the future for GaaP, providing solutions to common problems which we can deliver with pace to address even more user needs and create better outcomes. We value our partnerships and relationships across government, helping inform and deliver everything we do, and I know we can go further together.

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