GDS have been at the forefront of the UK’s response to COVID-19. Over 90 new user facing digital services have been developed as part of our COVID-19 response, with a further 43 in the pipeline, in addition to our existing services. A majority of these services can be found on GOV.UK, which has delivered an extensive programme of activity to host and consolidate all government guidance, tools and live streams of press conferences. Our GOV.UK content team has been working closely with the Prime Minister’s Office to organise the management and improvement of all coronavirus content as well as managing the newly spun up services. At its peak, GOV.UK had 158 million page views in a single week. A lot of the services that have been created have involved working across multiple government departments, as well as with the scientific community, civil society and private sector, many of them built in days using common reusable components to deploy a workable service as soon as possible. These include GOV.UK Notify, the government’s messaging platform, GOV.UK Verify, used to prove identity online and GOV.UK PaaS, a cloud hosting platform that allows departments to deploy applications without infrastructure specialists.

https://www.gov.uk/coronavirus

• United Kingdom

• Youth
• Older persons
• Women
• Indigenous and nomadic peoples
• People with disabilities
• The unemployed
• The poor
• Migrants
• Refugees and internally displaced people
• Remote and rural communities
• Citizens, civil society, businesses

The government’s response to COVID-19 is going to develop and change over time accordingly with our citizens’ needs. However, at its core our services are built on our existing digital infrastructure and existing components which have enabled rapid service delivery in the context of the crisis. With help from our existing service standards and guidelines, the newly spun up services follow the same process and structure as any of our other services. This means that everything that has been done, can be done again, at scale and at pace. Therefore, GOV.UK will remain high profile, not only because of the crucial advice for citizens but because we will likely continue to need to host new services at speed and iterate at speed.

The UK’s digital response to Covid-19 was a result of 10 years of investment in people, governance and technology. The ability to respond quickly and effectively was a result of the existing digital leadership and processes that already existed prior to COVID-19. Because of that, the sustainability of what we have done is grounded in the fact that the bulk of our response has been built from existing digital services, standards, skills and policies (‘digital foundations’). The UK’s COVID-19 response has demonstrated the critical importance of having strong underlying cross-government digital foundations that can be a springboard for innovation and moving at pace in a crisis. The crisis underscored the importance of developing digital capabilities in government, the benefits of user centered design, but also how part of digital resilience is having the right technology to support civil servants. It is also what will enable us to scale back up in the face of future shocks. As a result from COVID-19, we have also learnt new lessons and identified areas for improvement which we have either rectified as we’ve moved along, or identified them for further work in the future.

This project promotes all WSIS values in the community by using digital tools to help more people and to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.