Gov.uk

Last updated
GOV.UK
Gov.uk logo.svg
Screenshot
Screenshot of gov.uk dated 2023-05-02.png
Screenshot of gov.uk's landing page as of 2 May 2023
Type of site
Government information
Available inEnglish and Welsh
Owner HM Government
Created by Government Digital Service
URL gov.uk
CommercialNo
RegistrationNo
Launched1 February 2012;11 years ago (2012-02-01)
Current statusOnline
Content license
Crown copyright
Open Government Licence

gov.uk (styled on the site as GOV.UK) is a United Kingdom public sector information website, created by the Government Digital Service to provide a single point of access to HM Government services. The site launched as a beta on 31 January 2012, [1] [2] following on from the AlphaGov project. The website uses a modified digital version of the Transport typeface called New Transport. It officially replaced Directgov and the online services of Business Link on 17 October 2012. As of January 2023, GOV.UK is the second-most-used government website worldwide, after Russia's Gosuslugi. [3] [4]

Contents

The website was planned to replace the individual websites of hundreds of government departments and public bodies by 2014. By 1 May 2013, all 24 ministerial departments had their URLs redirected to gov.uk. As of March 2022, GOV.UK hosts pages for 23 ministerial departments, 20 non-ministerial departments, and over 410 agencies, public corporations, and other public bodies. [5]

History

The first ministerial departments and other organisations moved to the Inside Government section of gov.uk on 15 November 2012. [6] On 12 December 2012, a further three departments migrated, bringing the total of ministerial departments to six out of a total of 24. [7] By 1 May 2013, all 24 ministerial departments, as well as UK embassies around the world, had transferred to gov.uk. [8]

On 16 April 2013, gov.uk won Design of the Year 2013 at the Design Museum awards. [9] The Government Digital Service has also won a D&AD "Black Pencil" award for their work. [10] In 2019, gov.uk won a D&AD "Wood Pencil" award for its Step-by-Step digital design pattern. [11]

In 2018, the Government Digital Service introduced the GOV.UK Design System, with the intention of having styles, components, and patterns in a centralised location to support government departments in utilising GOV.UK. [12]

Alphagov

Alphagov was the project name of the experimental prototype website built by the Government Digital Service, which was launched on 11 May 2011 by the Cabinet Office. [13] [14] The website was open for public comment for two months in order to judge the feasibility of a single domain for British Government web services.

Launched in response to the report by Martha Lane Fox, Directgov 2010 and Beyond: Revolution Not Evolution, [15] published in November 2010, Alphagov sought to act as a proof of concept for the way citizens could interact with the government through a series of useful online tools that were more useful than published content alone.

As well as improving the 'citizen experience' of using government web services online, the project also identified the potential for £64 million in yearly savings on the central government's annual £128 million web publishing bill. [16] The initial consultation period was completed in June 2011. A beta version was then created, which led to the launch of GOV.UK. [17]

See also

Related Research Articles

Ukonline was a "portal" website of the Government of the United Kingdom linking to public sector information, and was originally called me.gov. The site was launched in 2001 and maintained by the Office of the e-Envoy. It replaced the earlier single online government website, the Government Information Service (GIS) hosted at open.gov.uk, which had been established in November 1994. The need for an updated single government website had been identified in a 1999 Portal Feasibility Study prepared by PA Consulting for the Central IT Unit (CITU) in the Cabinet Office.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cabinet Office</span> Ministerial department of the UK Government

The Cabinet Office is a department of the UK Government responsible for supporting the prime minister and Cabinet. It is composed of various units that support Cabinet committees and coordinate the delivery of government objectives via other departments. As of December 2021, it had over 10,200 staff, mostly civil servants, some of whom work in Whitehall. Staff working in the Prime Minister's Office are part of the Cabinet Office.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Department for Culture, Media and Sport</span> Ministerial department of the UK Government

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is a department of His Majesty's Government, with responsibility for culture and sport in England, and some aspects of the media throughout the UK, such as broadcasting.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Francis Maude</span> British Conservative politician

Francis Anthony Aylmer Maude, Baron Maude of Horsham, is a British Conservative Party politician who served as Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General from 2010 to 2015. He also served in several posts while the Conservatives were in opposition, notably as Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, Shadow Foreign Secretary and Chairman of the Conservative Party. Maude was Member of Parliament (MP) for North Warwickshire from 1983 to 1992 and then for Horsham from 1997 to 2015.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The National Archives (United Kingdom)</span> Repository of archival records

The National Archives is a non-ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom. Its parent department is the Department for Culture, Media and Sport of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It is the official archive of the UK Government and for England and Wales; and "guardian of some of the nation's most iconic documents, dating back more than 1,000 years." There are separate national archives for Scotland and Northern Ireland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BBC Online</span> Brand name and home for the BBCs online service

BBC Online, formerly known as BBCi, is the BBC's online service. It is a large network of websites including such high-profile sites as BBC News and Sport, the on-demand video and radio services branded BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds, the children's sites CBBC and CBeebies, and learning services such as Bitesize and Own It. The BBC has had an online presence supporting its TV and radio programmes and web-only initiatives since April 1994, but did not launch officially until 28 April 1997, following government approval to fund it by TV licence fee revenue as a service in its own right. Throughout its history, the online plans of the BBC have been subject to competition and complaint from its commercial rivals, which has resulted in various public consultations and government reviews to investigate their claims that its large presence and public funding distorts the UK market.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Directgov</span>

Directgov was the British government's digital service for people in the United Kingdom, which from 2004 provided a single point of access to public sector information and services. The site's portal was replaced by the new GOV.UK website on 17 October 2012, although migration of all services to GOV.UK branding took several years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Central Office of Information</span> UK government PR agency

The Central Office of Information (COI) was the UK government's marketing and communications agency. Its Chief Executive reported to the Minister for the Cabinet Office. It was a non-ministerial department, and became an executive agency and a trading fund, recovering its costs from the other departments, executive agencies and publicly funded bodies which used its services.

Jadu is a provider of low-code Web Experience Management software, specialising in Web CMS, Forms, Portal and Customer Case Management tools for the enterprise.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Government of the United Kingdom</span> Executive authority of the United Kingdom

His Majesty's Government is the central executive authority of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The government is led by the prime minister who selects all the other ministers. The country has had a Conservative-led government since 2010, with successive prime ministers being the then leader of the Conservative Party. The prime minister and their most senior ministers belong to the supreme decision-making committee, known as the Cabinet.

Guvera was an online music and entertainment streaming service founded in 2008. Guvera had agreements with the music labels in the regions where the product was available, which allowed for legal free music streams. As of May 2017, Guvera has shut down all operations across all remaining Asian markets.

Crown Copyright has been a long-standing copyright protection applied to official works, and at times artistic works, produced under royal or official supervision. In 2006, The Guardian newspaper's Technology section began a "Free Our Data" campaign, calling for data gathered by authorities at public expense to be made freely available for reuse by individuals. In 2010 with the creation of the Open Government Licence and the Data.gov.uk site it appeared that the campaign had been mostly successful, and since 2013 the UK has been consistently named one of the leaders in the open data space.

The Public Services Network (PSN) is a UK government's high-performance network, which helps public sector organisations work together, reduce duplication and share resources. It unified the provision of network infrastructure across the United Kingdom public sector into an interconnected "network of networks" to increase efficiency and reduce overall public expenditure. It is now a legacy network and public sector organisations are being migrated to using services on the public internet.

The Government Digital Service is a unit of the Government of the United Kingdom's Cabinet Office tasked with transforming the provision of online public services. It was formed in April 2011 to implement the "Digital by Default" strategy proposed by a report produced for the Cabinet Office in 2010 called 'Directgov 2010 and beyond: revolution not evolution'. It is overseen by the Public Expenditure Executive. GDS is primarily based in the Whitechapel Building, London. Its CEO is Tom Read.

The UK Government G-Cloud is an initiative targeted at easing procurement by public-sector bodies in the United Kingdom of commodity information technology services that use cloud computing. The G-Cloud consists of:

The Open Identity Exchange (OIX) is a membership organisation that works to accelerate the adoption of digital identity services based on open standards. It is a non-profit organisation and is technology agnostic. It is collaborative, and works across the private and public sectors.

The UK Government Web Archive (UKGWA) is part of The National Archives of the United Kingdom. The National Archives collects records from all UK government departments and bodies creating records defined as Public Records under the British Public Records Act. This includes on-line records. These are captured, preserved, and kept accessible by the UKGWA, in conjunction with an external service provider. Initially, and until July 2017, this was the Internet Memory Foundation. The current provider is MirrorWeb.

GOV.UK Verify was an identity assurance system developed by the British Government Digital Service (GDS) which was in operation between May 2016 and April 2023. The system was intended to provide a single trusted login across all British government digital services, verifying the user's identity in 15 minutes. It allowed users to choose one of several companies to verify their identity to a standard level of assurance before accessing 22 central government online services.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Global Accessibility Awareness Day</span> Day focusing on digital accessibility

Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) is an awareness day focusing on digital access and inclusion for the more than one billion people alive today who live with disabilities or impairments. It is marked annually on the third Thursday of May.

Ben Terrett is a British designer. He was the first Royal Designer for Industry elected for Service Design and has won the Design Museum's Design of the Year, a D&AD "Black Pencil" and is in the Design Week Hall of Fame. Terrett specialises in large digital projects and is most well known for his work designing the GOV.UK website.

References

  1. "Gov.uk service portal opens for public testing". BBC News Online. 1 February 2012. Retrieved 17 September 2012.
  2. "Introducing the beta of GOV.UK". 31 January 2012.
  3. "Портал государственных услуг Российской Федерации". www.gosuslugi.ru. Retrieved Jan 25, 2023.
  4. "Website Rankings". www.similarweb.com. Retrieved Jan 25, 2023.
  5. "Departments, agencies and public bodies". gov.uk. Retrieved 17 March 2022.
  6. Heywood, Jeremy. "Launching Inside Government". Government Digital Service. Retrieved 15 November 2012.
  7. "The new home on the web for FCO, MOD, BIS and AGO". Government Digital Service. 12 December 2012. Retrieved 31 December 2012.
  8. Williams, Neal (30 April 2013). "24 departments later". Government Digital Service. gds.blog.gov.uk. Retrieved 22 April 2022.
  9. Wainwright, Oliver (16 April 2013). "'Direct and well-mannered' government website named design of the year". The Guardian. Retrieved 16 April 2013.
  10. "Writing for Design / Writing for Websites & Digital Design". D&AD. Gov.uk.
  11. "GOV.UK step by step journeys". D&AD. dandad.org.
  12. Noakes, Alice; Hupe, Amy (22 June 2018). "Introducing the GOV.UK Design System - Government Digital Service". gds.blog.gov.uk. Retrieved 2022-03-17.
  13. "Government launches single government website prototype". Cabinet Office . Retrieved 3 July 2011.
  14. Warman, Matt (30 March 2011). "Work begins on Alphagov single government website". The Daily Telegraph . London. Retrieved 3 July 2011.
  15. "Directgov 2010 and Beyond: Revolution Not Evolution". Cabinet Office . Retrieved 3 July 2011.
  16. Rawlinson, Kevin. "New government web domain to save £64m, but at what cost?". The Independent . London. Archived from the original on 2011-07-16. Retrieved 3 July 2011.
  17. "Alpha.gov.uk to become beta". The Guardian . London. Retrieved 3 July 2011.