INTRODUCTION

The UN's E-government Survey 2018 placed the United Kingdom at number four in providing government information and services through the Internet (UN 2018). Arguably, part of the UK's success is associated with the steady growth of e-government in delivering public services for well over two decades (Coleman 2004; Roberts 2014). Since 2011, for instance, the UK government has been keen to introduce Agile ICT development in the public sector. Briefly, Agile is based on the belief that working software can be applied in the public sector so that those working in public services can respond quickly to changes in society, collaborate with public service ‘customers’ and ‘citizens’, and, in the process, reduce the need to publish documents (Michaelson 2013: 296–7). Agile is predicated on applying both digitised labour (or automation) and the digitisation of labour in UK public services.

There are currently a number of illustrations of Agile at work in the UK's public sector. University College Hospital in London has started to employ artificial intelligence to analyse appointments for MRI scans, with the intention to detect 90 per cent of patients who would fail to attend hospital appointments. Failure to keep hospital appointments, which then disrupts clinical management and other resources, currently costs the NHS £1 billion per year. An algorithm has therefore been developed that computes non-linear and complex interactions between many variables concerning hospital data. Machine-learning is thus coupled with large-scale complex and rich data, which can be applied to the specific case of hospital appointments. ‘Complex models’, according to Nelson et al., therefore ‘not only predict attendance, enabling targeted intervention, but also prescribe it by matching detailed appointment and patient characteristics’ (Nelson et al. 2019: 1). A more controversial example of the use of Agile in the United Kingdom has been the introduction of Universal Credit (UC). Aiming to bring a raft of existing benefits in the United Kingdom, such as unemployment benefit and housing benefit, under one payment system in order to make the benefit system more streamlined and to give greater incentives to those on benefits to get back into the workplace, the introduction of UC has fallen way behind its intended introduction into the welfare infrastructure. Rather than its intended roll out in 2017, it is now estimated that it will be eventually fully working by 2022 (Butler, P. 2018).