UK Treasury drafts new business case guidance for digital projects to ‘realise agile approach’; US feds set for 2% pay bump: news in brief
Global Government Forum’s weekly roundup of public service news
- UK Treasury drafts new business case guidance for digital projects to ‘realise agile approach’
- UK AI Safety Institute sets out safety cases plan
- US federal government officials set for 2% average pay increase
- Governments urged to ‘show leadership on the impacts of climate change adaptation’
- This week on Global Government Forum
UK Treasury drafts new business case guidance for digital projects to ‘realise agile approach’
Jack Aldane
The UK Treasury published new guidance on developing business cases for digital and agile projects.
The guidelines aim to “realise the potential of the agile approach to produce better systems more quickly and cheaply than conventional IT planning and project management”, according to the Treasury’s statement.
Government departments are advised to take what was described in the guidance as a “light-touch” approach to planning such projects, particularly those that require their own dedicated business cases. This is intended to avoid traditional detailed IT planning documents that can hinder agile, responsive project management.
The guidance is a small part of a bigger transformation initiative, in which approvals for such projects fit within a wider governance structure. That means business cases would not in most cases be made or approved via dedicated business case processes.
“They should focus on user needs, business outcomes, costs and milestones within the context of a wider programme business case,” it adds. “This project approval process should be agreed as part of the wider management plan of the wider programme business case. We recommend that management review meetings should use digital service demonstrations and agile artefacts (e.g. burn charts, backlogs).”
The guidance stressed to departments that “agile projects are frequently part of wider business programmes to be delivered for reasons of either business transformation or business continuity”. It added that “even before discovery and alpha [names given to phases of an agile project] departments should have a clear justification for why such scoping is financially and strategically worthwhile”.
Also included in the guidance is a schedule and timeline outlining the steps departments are expected to follow to comply with spend-control and service-assessment requirements for each stage of an agile project.
‘Quite a major transformation’
Improving the agile approach to digital projects in government is a long-standing aim of government. Joanna Davinson, the former executive director of the Cabinet Office’s Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO), said in 2022 that it was working closely with the Treasury to review how central approval for digital projects is provided.
Speaking at the launch of the then-UK government’s Digital, Data and Technology Playbook – which called on public sector organisations to adopt agile development for digital and technology projects but acknowledged that “we are not always successful at doing this in practice, particularly where the detailed requirements are unclear, but the desired outcome is known” – Davinson said that there is an understanding of the need for change.
“I think there’s an understanding that that is needed. There’s certainly an understanding amongst the digital communities across government, and there is an understanding within Treasury to move and change. We are working quite proactively with Treasury on what and how and what timeframe.
“That’s quite a major transformation, but I think we’re at the point of understanding that something needs to change – and even an understanding of some of the ‘what’ that needs to change, but we are still working on the ‘how’.”
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UK AI Safety Institute sets out safety cases plan
Jack Aldane
The UK AI Safety Institute (AISI) is set to begin work on “safety cases” for frontier AI systems.
In a statement published on 23 August, the AISI also said it would act as a hub for research on safety case “sketches” combining three key themes. These included “direct research on potential structures for frontier AI safety cases…collaboration, advising, and discussion forums to support and share safety case research…and informal evaluation and red teaming of safety case sketches”.
It added that safety cases – which the UK Ministry of Defence defines as “a structured argument, supported by a body of evidence, that provides a compelling, comprehensible, and valid case that a system is safe for a given application in a given environment” – were becoming more central to the work of AI developers. Frontier developers such as Anthropic and Google DeepMind had included these in their own sketches while working on “high-capability” AI models.
Though existing AI models do not yet capabilities required to pose certain “severe risks such as irreversible loss of human control” ASIS stressed that different arguments and evidence could be needed to understand future risks as the technology evolves.
“One way to accommodate for this is for AI developers to build safety cases tailored to their specific technical and deployment contexts,” it said.
“We expect safety cases for AI systems to combine a variety of types of evidence, including empirical, conceptual, and mathematical arguments for why methods work, negative evidence such as the failure of a well-incentivised red team to break safety methods, and sociotechnical evidence about the deployment context, potential harms, and organisation within the AI company.”
ASIS said that general understanding of AI safety is still in its infant stage, meaning that it is not yet possible to build “full safety cases that scale to risks posed by models significantly more advanced than those of today”.
US federal government officials set for 2% average pay increase
Richard Johnstone
US president Joe Biden has confirmed that federal government employees will receive an average 2% increase from January 2025.
The president announced the settlement in a statement last week, where he confirmed that the pay increase set under terms of the Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act of 1990.
Under the rules of the legislation, pay would be increased to a level that is “equitable and comparable” with similar work in the private sector unless the president concludes that a “national emergency or serious economic conditions affecting the general welfare” require him to set the level.
In the statement, Biden said he was “transmitting an alternative plan for pay adjustments for civilian federal employees covered by the general schedule and certain other pay systems in January 2025”.
Biden said that the pay increase was needed to “attract, recruit, and retain a skilled workforce with fair compensation in order to keep our government running, deliver services, and meet our Nation’s challenges today and tomorrow”. The increase also acknowledges the “wage growth in the labour market and fiscal constraints”, the statement said.
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Governments urged to ‘show leadership’ on climate change adaptation
Richard Johnstone
A UK think-tank has set out a number of ideas for government to boost progress towards net zero, with steps including developing adaptation targets across the economy.
In a report for its UK 2040 project, Nesta said that while the UK has a strong track record of leadership on net-zero targets, the country risked “veering substantially off-track” on its carbon budgets unless decarbonisation progress “massively accelerates”.
The report set out ten ideas to do so, including greater leadership on the impacts of climate change, including developing adaptation targets.
The think-tank said that introducing adaptation targets for regulated industries should be “a step towards the introduction of primary legislation to place adaptation targets on a statutory footing akin to carbon reduction targets”.
The report highlighted that adaptation strategies was vital as countries are already experiencing the impacts of climate change.
“On the trajectory to 2040, the UK can expect more heatwaves, more flooding, more water scarcity and drought, and more extreme weather events such as storms… Regardless of whether the UK delivers on its own net-zero targets by 2050, it will need to respond to climate changes resulting from emissions already produced and from the level of progress made by the wider global community by 2050. To reduce the severity of climate impacts, mitigation measures are the priority, but to enable people to live comfortably and healthily with those climate impacts, adaptations will be needed.”
However, Nesta said that adaptation is difficult to prioritise and act on, and the UK’s progress on adaptation is “slow, poorly coordinated and poorly funded”, and called for the development of adaptation targets to incentivise and guide action.
There should also be five-yearly ‘budgets’ for adaptation.
As well as show leadership on the impacts of climate change through adaptation, the other ideas for how government can make progress are:
- Bring citizens into the key issues: launch a national engagement campaign on net zero
- Support an effective market for green products and services: increase information transparency for consumers using green subsidies
- Explore an alternative delivery model for home retrofit: coordinate household decarbonisation street-by-street
- Increase centralised planning for major infrastructure: make NESO a system architect
- Increase efficacy of land use for environmental outcomes: develop a national rural land use framework and use it to underpin farming payments
- Make better use of carbon pricing mechanisms: expand the scope of the UK Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS)
- Harness the market power of state funding: amend government procurement to require net-zero carbon construction materials to reduce embodied emissions
- Change incentives and increase innovation in energy markets: reform the structure of the energy retail market to support household decarbonisation
- Incentivise households to decarbonise when they’re moving house: reform Stamp Duty Land Tax to become an energy-saving stamp duty
This week on Global Government Forum:
About Richard Johnstone
Richard Johnstone is the executive editor of Global Government Forum, where he helps to produce editorial analysis and insight for the title’s audience of public servants around the world. Before joining GGF, he spent nearly five years at UK-based title Civil Service World, latterly as acting editor, and has worked in public policy journalism throughout his career.
