This may not go down too well, but it is an opinion I heard and I personally agree with (having worked in UK gov institution and that far from GDS):
GDS is wasting taxpayer money, spending way too much attention on minute details like apostrophes, CSS and stuff.
Given that most of *.gov.uk are standardised now, it works out to literally millions of GBP per line of CSS.
In an ideal world we'd have fully accessible web, progressive enhancement, responsive layouts etc, but any real business has to say stop - this does not improve our services that much anymore, whereas GDS are free to to redesign their CSS over and over, just because no one else in the government understands technology.
No, GDS are tremendous value for money. If you think it's expensive you should see what would happen if it were oursourced to Capita.
> millions of GBP per line of CSS
This is a silly metric, because quite a lot of the effort is spent in reducing the amount of CSS. And that's how other projects get screwed up: silly metrics.
The government is also under a statutory obligation to be accessible.
If we want to provide Government services via the internet, which is far cheaper than other forms of delivery, then a setup that doesn't ignore 0.9% of your user base who can't run JS is worthwhile. They should also be caring about accessibility, something that most business give zero thought to (despite legal requirements) because they're the Government, it is their job to work for all citizens not just ignoring the ones that are difficult.
There are some good tech people working in UK Government, there are also some utterly terrible ones. I'd far rather have GDS spending the odd million to provide a baseline of what we should expect from Government IT than put up the culture that has foisted every other Government IT disaster on us.
What about the time saved simply through the use of information in terms of phone calls and interaction with the government? Gov.uk is so easily traversable and it's very easy to find information. You guys are so lucky. My governments website is nothing like that and I struggle with where to find anything. Simple things such as the use of the word 'etc' to describe things needed on an application or the use of wording which is difficult to understand.
This is the UK. We have a wide variety of terrible national level IT projects provided by private companies.
There's the post office stuff, where errors made it look like sub-postmasters were stealing stuff. Several of those people died by suicide; others went to jail, before the company accepted their software was wrong. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23233573
My initial reaction to the post was similar - but remember that government aims are different from the business world and funding works in a very different way. I've also worked in government and it does sometimes feels like money is being wasted everywhere, which I found frustrating - but I've not managed to come up with a valid argument against the way they do things. I think setting up a behavioural comparison between businesses and government is a false opposition.
I definitely get the sentiment but the government has different imperatives than business, and that includes making services available to a small fraction of users at greater expense than "normal" users.
