The Government is going all in on digital services. Under a new plan launched this week, Ireland is set to fully digitalise public services by 2030.
That is being carried out under the remit of the Minister in charge of digitalisation, Jack Chambers, and the Minister of State with responsibility for Digitalisation and eGovernment, Emer Higgins.
The Digital Public Services Plan 2030 is a roadmap to make all key government services available online, and ensure 90 per cent are accessed digitally.
It centres on a “life events” approach: becoming a parent, starting school, retiring.
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We should wish them luck; they might need it.
They are saying all the right things: putting people at the centre of public service delivery, harnessing digital innovation, building trust.
But this assumes that everything works as it should. Personal experience tells us this might not go to plan.
Many digital public services already require a verified MyGovID account to access. This is designed to be a single sign-on for government services, from social welfare to Revenue. With one login, you can access almost all the information you need about your tax affairs, apply for childcare subsidies or benefits, and renew a driving licence.
But there are two tiers: a basic account and a verified account. The latter gives you access to more services, but you need to prove your identity with a Public Services Card. Although many people will have them – the Department of Social Protection has issued them to more than 3.6 million people – there are quite a few holdouts, some because they have never needed one before, and others because of the controversy surrounding the card’s implementation. The phrase “not compulsory but mandatory” has followed former minister for social protection Regina Doherty in the years since.
Digital isn’t always the best option, if one family member’s fairly recent experience with the current MyGovID system is anything to go by. Although the person in question had signed up for a basic account months previously, the particular service they wanted to access required an extra level of identity verification. Like many people of a certain age, they didn’t have a Public Services Card, having never seen the need. So began the journey.
You can now, in most circumstances, try to get a PSC and verified MyGovID account through yet another online service. It requires (you’ve guessed it) a smartphone and the MyGovID app, and an Irish account for Google or Apple. That is assuming that you can get it to work, which, going by some of the comments and negative reviews on the app stores, is not guaranteed. You would hope the systems to support the 2030 plan will be better designed than this.
There are some definite bonuses to the Government’s new plan, if it is fully implemented. I would have welcomed the ability to digitally register the birth of both of my children, rather than having to drag myself, exhausted, to Lombard Street in Dublin city centre to do it within the required time when I was still in the pyjamas stage of proceedings. I would also appreciate the ability to digitally respond to periodic requests for information from various government departments without getting drowned in paper.
But my experience and needs are not everyone’s. While an easier way to access important services online is welcome, it shouldn’t completely remove the human element.
And while there is no suggestion that online access will completely replace in-person services – remember that 90 per cent target – bitter experience tells us that it is inevitable that it will become more difficult to conduct these tasks in person. It is supply and demand: the more we go online for things, the fewer staff will be needed to deal with people face to face, making it more difficult to do it in person, and the spiral continues.
But digital skills and access are still uneven across the population. The most recent household digital consumer behaviour data from the Central Statistics Office lays it out more clearly.
Last year fewer than half of internet users said they accessed information stored about them by public authorities or public services – checking pension entitlements or seeking out health records, for example – while almost 60 per cent said they had accessed databases on their tax, social welfare records, property and land registers, and so on. People are also moving online to make appointments with public services such as the Passport Office, or hospitals. And 44 per cent said they had reviewed or edited their tax information online through Revenue’s MyAccount or ROS online service, or with their employer or tax adviser.
Digital services are becoming more commonplace. But there is still a significant gap between the people who can access it and the people who do.
When split by age group, the results were almost predictable. Younger people under the age of 44 were more likely to use online e-government services, although the 60-74 age group were also fairly active.
But for those aged 75 and over, engagement with these services was significantly lower. This doesn’t include the internet non-users – and there are still some out there.
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There is also the other element to consider: that digital services can and do falter, particularly when we are dependent on a small number of service providers to provide the technology that props them up. The recent outages by Amazon and Microsoft, which caused chaos across everything from government services to commercial airlines, should be a warning about relying too heavily on technology and the importance of having a backup in place.
Closer to home, the property tax portal faltered in recent weeks when the looming valuation deadline had owners of more than 2.2 million properties scrambling to file returns. The portal, groaning under the strain, randomly locked people out of the system. The deadline was eventually extended, and a close watch was kept on the portal to make sure it was operating as expected.
Which leads us back to the important issue of occasionally having the option to deal with humans. While an easier way to access important services online is welcome, it shouldn’t be the only viable way to do so.
