We know what good looks like, but we organise work to prevent it

Every morning at a busy council office in Manchester, Sarah, a dedicated service designer, finds herself grappling with unexpected challenges due to the absence of a seamless notification system, such as GOV.UK Notify. As people queue up in reception, with an inbox already inundated, she navigates frantic phone calls and missed appointments, juggling outdated processes that create confusion and inefficiency. This frontline struggle captures a stark reality: We know what good looks like, but we organise work to prevent it.

When people talk about good service design in the UK public sector, it’s often in relation to GOV.UK Notify is often one of the services they reach for.

Not because it is visually impressive, but because it works in the way public services are supposed to work. It solves a clear problem that many teams shared. It was shaped through sustained engagement with the people who would rely on it under pressure. It evolved through use rather than assumption. And its success is measured less by what it looks like than by the thousands of services that quietly depend on it to function.

What made it good was not a single method or moment of brilliance. It was the accumulation of decisions made close to real need, over time, by people who understood that the service extended well beyond the interface: into operational realities, organisational constraints, and the everyday pressures of public-sector delivery.

Most experienced service designers recognise this pattern immediately.

There is usually an early phase in work like this where something shifts. Sitting with the people who will actually use the service, often under conditions that are far from ideal, the problem reframes itself. What first appeared to be a design challenge becomes a policy constraint. What looked like a usability issue reveals itself as a handoff failure, an eligibility rule, or an assumption embedded deep in how the system operates.

Nothing dramatic happens. There is no breakthrough artefact. But the shape of the work changes. Decisions feel heavier. Trade-offs become explicit. The solution that emerges is often messier and slower, but it is undeniably better.

There is no shortage of agreement about what good service design looks like.

We know that designing with the people most affected by a service produces better outcomes than designing for them. We know that understanding problems properly takes time, iteration, and exposure to real conditions. We know that services are systems, not interfaces, and that the consequences of design decisions play out long after delivery milestones are met.

None of this is controversial anymore. Within the profession, there is close to a consensus.

And yet, most of the systems we work in are organised in ways that make these things difficult, fragile, or impossible to sustain.

This is the contradiction I want to sit with.

Public-sector service design is often framed as a problem of capability or maturity. If only teams understood user-centred design better. If only leaders trusted the process. If only we had the right skills in the room. These explanations are comforting because they imply that progress is a matter of learning and goodwill.

My experience suggests something else is going on.

If we want to improve how public services are designed, we need to be more honest about where the friction actually sits. Not in the absence of frameworks or capability, but in the conditions that shape what kinds of work are possible in the first place. One of the most consequential of those conditions is how public services are funded.

In the UK, public services are funded through periodic Spending Reviews set by HM Treasury, which determine departmental budgets and priorities over a fixed period. We are currently part-way through a five-year Spending Review1 aligned to the life of the current Parliament. From a political perspective, this creates stability. From a service-design perspective, it creates a narrow window in which change must be specified, justified, and delivered.

Spending Reviews fund policy intent, not services as evolving systems. Money is allocated against commitments, pledges, and projected efficiencies, not against learning or adaptation over time. Once funding is agreed, the dominant incentive is to deliver what was promised within the period available. Success becomes a question of compliance rather than consequence. Consider a scenario where a team dutifully meets all project milestones and achieves promised deliverables on paper. However, in doing so, they overlook crucial on-the-ground feedback from users, leading to a service that technically functions but frustrates users and fails to meet actual needs. Such adherence satisfies compliance, but the real consequence, a frustrated citizenry left without effective service, reveals a disconnection between policy and practice.

This is materially different from commercial contexts, where services are sustained; however imperfectly, through some relationship to use, performance - financial or otherwise, or viability. Most public services are not funded because they are successful. They are funded because they are required: to meet a policy aim, to honour a government pledge, or because they are expected, often theoretically, to reduce cost elsewhere in the system.

The effect is predictable. Design activity is front-loaded, because that is when change is fundable. Learning that emerges later, often when services meet reality, struggles to find a home. Under these conditions, organisations rationally optimise for delivery certainty. Designing with people over time becomes fragile, not because it is undesirable, but because it is difficult to justify within the financial logic of the system.

One consequence of this is rarely stated plainly: long-term, compensated participation by the people most affected by a service is extremely difficult to fund.

Embedding people with disabilities as paid collaborators across the full lifecycle of a service, from problem framing through to live operation, rarely fits within a Spending Review; this has been significantly more challenging and impossible to achieve during the period 2019-2021, where multiple factors caused the Government to operate 1-year spend reviews. The costs are modest in absolute terms, but awkward in kind. They do not map neatly to delivery milestones. They cannot be time-boxed into discovery. They often extend beyond the programme boundaries and policy rationale that secured the funding in the first place.

As a result, participation is compressed into short phases, treated as consultation rather than collaboration, or reliant on voluntary contribution. When priorities shift or programmes stall, as they inevitably do, these relationships are among the first to be dropped. Not because they lack value, but because they lack a durable financial footing.

The outcome is familiar: insight without continuity, involvement without influence, and a quiet erosion of trust.

This is not a call to nostalgia for some purer form of practice, because that never really existed, nor an argument that service design is uniquely constrained. It is an attempt to name a structural reality that is easy to normalise and hard to challenge.

Service design, at its best, is not neutral. It shapes what is seen as legitimate, whose knowledge counts, and where responsibility sits. When the conditions around it constrain those shifts, the discipline does not simply become less effective; it risks becoming complicit in maintaining the status quo, albeit with better language and more refined artefacts.

For those of us working inside public-sector systems, this creates a quiet, persistent tension. We are fluent in the language of good practice, but we operate in environments that make that practice precarious. We can see where compromises are being made, and we usually understand why they are being made. Over time, that understanding can slide into accommodation.

This blog exists to resist that drift.

Over the coming months, I will return to these tensions deliberately and repeatedly. Not to offer neat solutions, and not to rehearse arguments we already agree on, but to give clearer language to the things many of us already recognise: the trade-offs we accept, the compromises we justify, and the costs that are often borne elsewhere.

Knowing what good looks like is not the hard part.

The harder question is why we keep organising ourselves to make it so difficult to achieve.