Weeks notes

I’ve neglected to ‘weeknote’ for the past couple of weeks, so consider this some “weeks notes”. Notes about the past three weeks.

Meet the parents

The interruption to usual weeknoting service was caused by a week of annual leave. This week of leave was notable as my other half met my parents for the first time. We travelled down to Somerset to see them, and Matt – bless him – took his life into his own hands and allowed me to drive the hire car.

I don’t think Matt was quite prepared to meet the menagerie of animals at my parents’ house or for the general level of chaos that is my family, but it all went fine (it was always going to be). That’s my allocated summer visit ticked off the list.

The car was also returned without a bump or scratch on it, which I am taking as a personal achievement given:

1. I haven’t driven a car properly in years
2. I have an unfortunate track record of cars going wrong when I borrow them¹
3. this was all taking place during Bank Holiday traffic

Back to school

Which brings me to the two weeks since I got back from “holiday”.

It’s that time of year where the corporate channels are talking a lot about everyone coming “back to school” and reminding us that the hard yards start now; as though we hadn’t been working our arses off throughout August anyway.

This wasn’t what I had in mind!

As if to double down on “working my arse off”, this week I’ve been unexpectedly flying solo in charge of the team.

My (very good, actually quite brilliant) boss, Hannah, has been unwell this week. That’s not normally a huge personal problem for me expect the rest of our SMT have also been off this week on annual leave. That’s left me feeling like the Donkey in Shrek.

When I told Hannah that I felt like I was ready for promotion to Deputy Director: this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind!

Anyway, nothing’s on fire. Everything is under control.

Aside from the endless stream of “can you take a look at this?”-type activities that I’m used to dealing with, I ended up engaging in a little more corporate nonsense than usual and, more importantly, a ministerial briefing on our work that I think went pretty well.²

I am pretty cream-crackered after all of it though; thankful that the rest of SMT is back from leave next week and hoping that Hannah is feeling better too!

Fixing our content

In amongst all that we’ve finally started to address the gaps in the information about our programme on GOV.UK.

Our first – mostly gone-unnoticed³ – step was taken in June, during the election.

We publish a list of certified and registered digital identity and attribute service providers. We do this to make it easier for businesses that need to do Right to Work, Right to Rent and Disclosure and Barring Service checks to find services that enable compliance with Home Office and DBS regulations.

This list used to be a table that was buried in a guidance document. We’ve now replaced it with a standalone page and as a downloadable CSV file so that you can download, chop and change it if you need to. This page will soon get replaced by our digital service; but an improvement over what came before it, nonetheless.

But this is now one of two lists we maintain. If you’re a provider of digital identity services, and you want to appear on our list of providers one of the things you have to do to is get your service certified. There are currently only 4 organisations that we permit to certify a service against our rules; but we never published a list of them.

So our latest, small, incremental step is to publish a new list of approved conformity assessment bodies.

To service assess, or not to service assess?

That is the question we have been grappling with for a couple of weeks, and we now have the answer: not to service assess. Kind of.

We’re building a digital service to replace the list of providers – and associated manual processing – that I mentioned above. It consists of 3 services (yep, it’s services all the way down):

1. a submission service – that conformity bodies use to submit certificates and applications to be on the register
2. a review service – that civil servants use to check the applications are above board
3. a public-facing register service – a much more sophisticated than a CSV file list that businesses and individuals can use to check if their digital identity service is real and safe

We previously achieved a “met” in our alpha service assessment, way back in December, and have been working on the private beta since then.

Despite having sat an assessment in full for alpha, the powers-that-be in the opaque governance structures of the digital functions of government have now decided that our digital service isn’t service-y enough to warrant a full service assessment. So now we’re having a “desk based review” of the service before we move into public beta.

Part of me is a bit disappointed about this. Whilst service assessments are a lot of work, I kind of wanted the glory of having passed the beta assessment in the proper way.

The other part of me is leaping for joy at a light-touch review that will still tell us if we meet the standard, but gives us a lot more flexibility about how and when we do it. And, to be honest, I’ve got enough on my plate without panicking about that already!

Is that enough?

That feels like a lot to write about for one weeknote (even if it is weeks worth of notes). Time to get back to the copious amounts of life admin that’s stored up this week.