Only 20 GDS services will go live by deadline

The Government Digital Service (GDS) has admitted it will miss its deadline to have digitised 25 key public services by March 2015.

Just 20 of the 25 ‘digital exemplar’ services will be live or in public beta by that time, the GDS revealed in a quarterly update this week, with both online passport applications and the troubled Universal Credit welfare scheme delayed until as late as May next year.

GDS director Mike Bracken wrote in the update: "At the end of September, 6 services were live. By the end of March 2015 we expect to have 20 exemplar services being used by the public, in live or public beta."

In addition to the six services currently live, the GDS expects to push through six more before Christmas, including its identity assurance programme, Verify, which will go from private to public beta.

But Land Registry, personal independence payments and a tax dashboard for tax collectors will not be publicly available until during the next parliament, which ends in 2020.

Bracken said that Whitehall departments will benefit from the digital transition, however.

"We want to make sure we learn from this transformation work. We’re looking at how organisational structures and culture need to adapt and staff skills improve," he wrote.

"Departments are working with GDS to pilot new guidance on governance for agile service work, to cover principles, processes, case studies and a range of resources like documents."

He added that departments are using what they have learned to transform a wider range of services, but did not mention what these were.

The quarterly update comes after Ministry of Justice chief digital officer, Paul Shetler, admitted his more than 100-strong digital team was having to lend a hand to staff whose own IT teams were understaffed.

He said: "You have to have your own in-house capability. You have to have the ability to deliver, your own designers researchers, your own product managers. If MoJ had not had that we would not have been able to deliver, it just would not have worked. That has been abolutely essential to our success."