GDS have been at the forefront of the UK’s response to COVID-19. Our existing services have been in high demand. They are ensuring citizens remain informed and able to access vital services. Across the digital, data and technology function across government, 39 user facing digital services have been developed as part of the COVID-19 response, with a further 40 in the pipeline. Examples of our existing services operating at scale and at pace include: GOV.UK, the place to find government information and services online, is supporting the design of a range of new products (for example their latest is gov.uk/ask, where citizens can ask questions at the daily press briefings). The GOV.UK content team is also working closely with the Prime Minister’s Office to organise the management and improvement of all coronavirus content. Visitors to GOV.UK per week have gone up over 600%. https://www.gov.uk/ask GOV.UK Notify - the government’s messaging platform, has been used for National Health Service (NHS) text message support for the extremely vulnerable and those isolating at home; business continuity messaging for public sector staff; and FCO travel alerts. Over 250 local authorities and 173 services use Notify. At its peak, over 8 million SMS messages were sent using Notify, compared to a daily average of 150,000. GOV.UK Verify, used to prove identity online, has also seen a serious increase in usage linked to the unprecedented demand for government services (in particular Universal Credit). Verify is receiving approximately 500% more traffic from certain services, and this has risen to up to 900-1000% at its peak. GOV.UK PaaS is a cloud hosting platform that allows departments to deploy applications without infrastructure specialists. PaaS has been used to support the build of key services such as the Extremely Vulnerable People Service.

https://www.gov.uk/coronavirus

• United Kingdom

So much of the UK’s COVID response effort is layered onto years of hard-learned lessons and battles for funding of common components and standards. The UK’s experience demonstrates that investing in getting the basics right is what can ultimately strengthen countries’ abilities to build effective and resilient digital projects in the long term. The UK’s COVID-19 response highlights that good digital projects are based on much more than just technology, but on strong digital policy, services and standards and embedded digital, data and technology skills across the public sector. We’ve found that digital-ready teams have proved significantly more resilient during the COVID period - for example, adapting to remote working and the challenge of joining up across government. 51 new digital services have been stood up in the last two months by the UK Government with 50 more currently in development. 40 of those are using GDS' GOV.UK platform across 13 departments. GOV.UK Notify has been used on 3 new NHS services communicating key messages to vulnerable people and those self isolating at home. 7 services are hosted using GDS' Platform as a Service.