Industry

Government and public services

Public services cannot select their users. The person with the oldest device, the slowest connection, the least confidence and the most urgent need is exactly the person the service must work for — and every decision the service makes has to be explainable to that person, to an auditor and potentially to a tribunal.

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Workflows

The work that actually happens here

Named the way practitioners in this sector name them, because that is the vocabulary a delivery team has to learn before it can be useful.

Eligibility assessment and entitlement: Determining whether a person qualifies for a service, with the criteria applied consistently, the reasoning recorded, and a route to challenge the outcome.
Case management: A case moving between officers and teams over weeks or months, with status visible to the applicant and a complete history retained for audit and appeal.
Assisted digital and channel shift: Supporting people who cannot complete the service themselves — through a caseworker, a phone line or a face-to-face route — without those channels producing a different record.
Statutory reporting: Periodic returns to central bodies with defined formats and deadlines, where the data must reconcile with the operational system.
Freedom of information and subject access: Locating everything held about a person or subject across the estate within a statutory deadline, with redaction.

Constraints

What changes the architecture

These are the reasons a design that works elsewhere would be wrong here.

Accessibility is a legal obligation

Public sector bodies in the UK are required to meet WCAG 2.2 AA and publish an accessibility statement. This is a build requirement and an audit exposure, not a quality aspiration.

Decisions must be explainable and appealable

Automated decision-making with legal or similarly significant effect carries specific obligations. Any scoring or automation must expose its components and preserve a human route.

Procurement shapes delivery

Framework agreements, spend controls and service assessments impose their own sequencing. Delivery plans that ignore procurement lead times fail on the calendar rather than on the code.

Records retention is statutory

Retention periods are set by legislation and records schedules, not by product preference. Deletion must be implemented and evidenced.

Legacy integration is unavoidable

The system of record is frequently decades old with no modern interface. The integration approach, not the new front end, usually determines the programme.

Integrations

Systems we would expect to meet

GOV.UK Notify for email and SMS
GOV.UK Pay or equivalent payment routes
Single sign-on via Entra ID or a national identity provider
Legacy line-of-business systems via database replicas, file exchange or bespoke APIs
Document and records management systems
Statutory reporting endpoints and data returns

Trust considerations

What users and regulators need here

Users cannot opt out of a public service, so consent is rarely the lawful basis — the basis is usually statutory, and the privacy notice must say so precisely.
The service must work on old Android devices, on metered connections and in assisted contexts.
Publishing an accurate accessibility statement, including known non-conformances, is a legal requirement rather than a reputational choice.
Audit trails must survive staff turnover and system replacement.
Data sharing between public bodies needs a documented legal gateway, not an assumption of common purpose.

Architecture

A shape we would actually propose

A starting sketch, not a template. Discovery is what turns this into a specific design with recorded trade-offs.

Front end: Progressively enhanced, server-rendered pages that work without client-side JavaScript for the critical path.
Identity: Separate citizen and staff identity domains, with staff access requiring stronger authentication and regional or caseload scoping.
Case store: Postgres with row-level security, an append-only event log per case, and retention rules applied per record class.
Integration: An anti-corruption layer in front of legacy systems so their data model does not leak into the new service.
Assisted channels: A caseworker interface writing to the same case record as the public route, so the record is channel-independent.

Outcomes

What good looks like

Higher completion rates on the digital route, reducing assisted-channel load
Consistent, recorded eligibility decisions that survive appeal
Statutory reporting produced from the operational record rather than reassembled
A published accessibility position that is accurate

Where to go next

Service

A government and public services project starts with the constraints

The Project Architect asks sector-specific questions about data, regulation and integration before it asks about features.

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