Month note?

You may have noticed my week notes have been absent for the past month. That was partly intentional, waiting for this week to happen.

There’s so much to note about that you may as well consider this a month note.

Work

Digital Information and Smart Data Data (Use and Access) Bill

Third time’s the charm, eh?

Legislation to underpin our programme is back again. This time with some new ideas, revamped clauses, another new name and – if I dare say – a fresh determination to stick the landing.

You can find the draft bill on the Parliament website.

It’s been a tough few months preparing for the introduction of this legalisation alongside everything else.
I certainly can’t take even a significant proportion of the credit. There have been loads of people involved. I will take a tiny chunk though.

I’ve been directly involved in at least 4 bills now¹. This one though is the first bill that contains stuff I’ve instructed on directly. There are clauses in this Bill that are only there because I had some (evidence-led) opinions. That feels like yet another Civil Service bucket list activity ticked off.

The Bill was introduced to Parliament in the House of Lords on Wednesday, where it had its First Reading. The hard work of justifying it starts now!

Office for Digital Identities and Attributes

As of yesterday, I now work for the new Office for Digital Identities and Attributes.

We gathered about 80 or so of our stakeholders opinion-havers in a room yesterday to tell them all about it.²

Not often you get to be there on day 1 of a whole new thing in government; so this feels really exciting! And judging by my LinkedIn, a lot of other people are excited about it too.

Whilst my role hasn’t changed compared to last week, I do have a revamped job title. I’m now the Assistant Director, Market Oversight and Integrity. Which is code for “all the hard stuff”!

An actual blog!

We finally have a blog! If I told you how long it has taken me to get this blog, and how difficult it has been, I think you might laugh at the total insanity of it.

But anyway, it exists. We have 6 blog posts on it already; one of which is explicitly by me and some that are ghost written by me.

We are ready to start showing how the humbugs are made. Can’t wait.

Thanks Giles for giving us the courage to do it, and thanks to Graham for being my blogging buddy as we’ve gotten this rolling.

Private beta… works?

The new register of digital identity and attribute services went into private beta testing this month. I’ve week noted³ about this before.

This new register will soon replace the fine but very flawed method of maintaining this information via a spreadsheet we publish as often as we can.

We have now had around half a dozen services go through the end-to-end journey to test if it works and… it seems to work! Many, many bugs and edge cases to fix, but it gets the job done better than the current thing, and that’s what matters for now.

We’ve also submitted ourselves for an assessment against the Government Service Standard this month too. We hope to find out the outcome next week.

All of the hiring

Recruitment for 3 new roles in my team is now well underway. We’ve appointed one, and she starts in just over a month. The two other roles are out now on Civil Service Jobs, and are open to existing civil servants.

Not work

Whilst all of that has been going on, I’m dealing with an almighty amount of life admin.

I live in a leasehold block of flats. Having exercised our legal Right to Manage, we are currently deinstructing our current, abysmal property management company, FirstPort, and onboarding a new, already dramatically better company. I am one of a few leaseholders in the building that is comfortable taking on the intricacies of this (having managed multi-million pound programmes, managing a £30,000 property should be a piece of cake, right?!), so that’s causing a lot of work.

On top of that, we’re in dispute with the same company over what I can only describe as the biggest clusterfuck of financial mismanagement I have ever encountered. We’re knee-deep in multiple thousands of pounds worth of issues at the moment that will very likely mean we’re going to court soon.

And on top of that, we’re also in the middle of buying the freehold from the current freeholder who are largely just as useless as FirstPort. Due to the timing, we’re doing that through two separate legal entities as well, so that’s causing even more of an admin headache.

Bleurgh!

To top it all off, I think I have a leak in my roof. But it isn’t raining enough to know yet, so it might be something else. Given how straightforward everything has been so far with this new build, I cannot wait to have to navigate the warranty process! </sarcasm>

Is that enough?

That feels like enough of a week month note to me.

I’m off to play games and shoot zombies!