The time when 'the digital economy' could be considered a separate thing should be long gone. Today every business is, to some extent, a digital business. Digital, in one form or another, is the way businesses operate.

The opportunities for digital to grow the economy are huge, but realising them will require an expansive, bold vision for how the UK can be a digital economy, rather than have a digital economy. An economy that runs on digital principles, rather than part of its economy that is digital.

To ask the question ‘how can digital help grow the economy?’ is not to ask what contributions technology companies can make to that ambition, but rather to ask how digital can help every business in the country operate with less friction and spend more time creating value. How can businesses trust each other when interacting digitally? How can the digital infrastructure and data infrastructure the country needs to build to enable its public services, also support private services?

Since the creation of GOV.UK in 2012, the UK has won plaudits for its public-facing digital services. The focus of over a decade of digital effort has primarily been on the public. Paper forms are still required in exporting, commercial land transactions and environmental permits.

Where digital, government services for business are often digital versions of paper processes. VAT and company registration certificates, for example, are issued as PDFs. Before starting work on a construction project, businesses must visit the Health and Safety Executive website and complete a digital version of ‘Form F10’ which again generates a PDF.

There have been bolder attempts at business-facing digital services, such as HMRC's tax account, while Companies House put many of its services online decades ago. But these services don’t join up with each other. Users still have to visit multiple different services just to keep their businesses operating legally.

A single, joined-up service for starting a UK company is an idea that has been kicking about for a long time, but never been realised. The UK should definitely pursue that, but in 2025 it should go one step further and create the best user experience for starting and managing a business in the world.

Such a service would help an entrepreneur create their company, register for taxes and licences, then provide a single account for filing tax returns, and update company details. They would be able to manage and apply for licences from central, devolved and local governments. Licenses and tax registrations would be available as digital credentials that can be stored in the GOV.UK Wallet, rather than PDFs and bits of paper.

The reason it hasn't happened is institutional inertia. Each department has its own priorities and little incentive to work together. The HMRC app - currently the closest thing the UK government has to a relational digital service for businesses - for example, only handles tax.

The diagram below shows what would need to happen in the central government context to make a single account a reality. Different departments would need to make their data available to the account via APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). The business rules of each department would need to be made available as code - again via APIs. There would also need to be a wholesale effort to digitise and standardise business credentials so they could be issued by the app.

The HMRC app represents a great starting point for this. Rather than a tax-focused app, it should be pivoted into a small-business app. The government should split the team off from HMRC and make it directly accountable to the Cabinet Office or the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology with a clear focus on the growth mission. That team should then be expanded to include key digital practitioners from digital teams in other departments (Companies House, the Department for Business and Trade, the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs etc). A sort of acquisitions and mergers approach to digital government, if you like.

The sole aim of this new team should be to identify and realise opportunities to use digital to remove administrative burdens for business. Over time that might include things like posting a vacancy to job centres, being automatically notified of grants, or even tracking exports over the border. The exact functionality will become clear as the team gains greater visibility of the real economy and a direct relationship to understand what businesses really need from government.

The ambition should not end there though. Estonia actively markets its ‘start a business’ service to overseas entrepreneurs through its e-Residency service which promises a quick and simple experience for doing business in Estonia. Estonia is, in effect, deploying user experience as a competitive advantage over other countries.

The UK’s current answer to this is a web page where businesses interested in expanding to the UK sign up for emails containing official guidance. By expanding the single business account to overseas users, it can change from ‘sign up for information’ to ‘click here to start or expand a company’.

In comparison with paper records, data can be easily reused and remixed. However, the institutional context of government means that data tends to remain tightly coupled to the services that collect it. Land registration data is maintained for facilitating the sale of land (and HM Land Registry lacks a mandate to prioritise other uses). Postcode data is maintained for delivering letters (and businesses have to pay to access it for other purposes). Planning applications are maintained for the purpose of assessing planning applications (often an impenetrable mix of spreadsheets and PDF documents).

As the diagram below shows, those datasets obviously have value beyond those immediate uses - for example, construction companies deciding where to build, property intelligence companies scoping locations for startups, and fintech companies providing loans and insurance.

This is not exactly news - stating that data is critical to the economy is so over-stated that it's become background noise. That doesn't mean it isn’t true, but we do have to ask why, given the clear consensus that it is important, like fusion energy, the future always remains stubbornly 5-10 years away. The current buzz around AI has again (and rightly so) highlighted the importance of data. But current clamour for access to data risks repeating the mistakes of the past.

The lessons from the open data movement of the early 2000s is that it is not enough to publish open data. Data needs to have custodians with accountability and a mandate to make data available for broad uses. There also need to be ways to access, not just open data, but shared and closed data. Access to shared and closed data needs very effective governance to maintain public and institutional trust.

The real value of data to the economy will remain hypothetical until there is systemic action to maximise reuse. Building data infrastructure takes time. India and Estonia both have decades-long programmes to create data infrastructure (Estonia’s X-Road did not really take off until it had 50 datasets connected to it).

The UK, by comparison, has seemingly had a new data programme every two years for the past decade. The vagueness around the National Data Library, which is currently everything to everyone and delivering nothing to anyone, risks adding to the inertia as every other data project across the public sector waits for something to appear.

The answer lies not in ‘big bang’, but rather delivering incremental value one dataset at a time. Luckily, a template for how to do this already exists in the UK central government. The planning.data.gov.uk team at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) have been systematically redesigning, standardising and publishing data that supports house building - everything from brownfield sites to tree preservation orders. They have created a process for working with policy leads to agree data standards and with proptech companies who benefit from the data. MHCLG have made other moves to enable reuse of data - for example activating to remove licensing restrictions on the reuse of UPRNs (Unique Property Reference Numbers) which are used to join together many property-related datasets.

The growth mission should emulate the approach of planning.data.gov.uk in other sectors, repurposing the technology and the processes that the team have created. The new team (or teams) should have a mandate to identify the datasets that are foundational for businesses and, one by one, make them available in a way that meets the needs of businesses. That might include datasets whose use is currently commercially restricted (such as the postcodes) or datasets that might generate new business models (for example in exporting). The aim should be to make them available one by one, based on genuine needs.

It's a feature of modern digital systems that they operate in real time. Cars are shown moving on a map in ride-sharing apps, and prices change based on demand. If you want to buy something online, you can see immediately if it’s out of stock. Making payments using a mobile wallet triggers an instant notification that the transaction has taken place. But the average businesses' interactions with government, or with each other, do not tend to be real time.

While the Making Tax Digital agenda has pushed companies towards the digital quarterly reporting of VAT and other taxes, invoicing between companies in the UK is a digitised version of a paper process.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the government found it had no trusted way to communicate with businesses to understand if they met the eligibility criteria for grants and loans. The resulting fraud bill was described as ‘eye-watering’ by a parliamentary report.

Between companies, PDF invoices are sent backwards and forwards by email. Definitive data about how much it costs for a British company to process an invoice is hard to come by (which is a problem in itself), but the figure of between £4-£25 is often quoted, in part because much of it remains manual or semi-manual.

By comparison, France is implementing a programme of 'dématérialisation' - digitising tax reporting and invoicing. To support real-time trade, Finland, Estonia and other Northern European countries are also beginning to support cross-border invoicing and logistics reporting in real time.

India’s Goods and Services Tax Network maintains a set of APIs for companies to pay taxes to central and state governments and is also introducing standards for e-invoicing. Also in India, the government created the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) a publicly-owned, digital first fulfillment platform that connects microbusinesses together at lower cost than commercial rivals.

The UK should follow the lead of Finland and Estonia, who have both created real-time economy units. The UK’s real-time economy taskforce should prioritise initiatives across government that support more real-time exchange of information between businesses and between businesses and government.

Things the taskforce should consider include: digital identity for companies, digital credentials, e-invoicing and cross-border data exchange.

On digital identity, the taskforce should also advocate for GOV.UK One Login and the GOV.UK Wallet prioritise business users earlier. It should also create a framework to prioritise the digital credentials that will most benefit businesses so those can be delivered earlier. HMRC and the DBT currently have a consultation open on e-invoicing, so there is clearly some movement on that already, but it should be further prioritised.

All three of the interventions in this essay have one thing in common: creating teams outside of the normal trappings of Whitehall departments with broad remits to deliver change across the system. This is critical because, as mentioned in the first essay, digital is not just about changing how something is delivered - a question of channel shift - it is inherently about changing how the work of government is organised. Get that right and the rest will follow.

Richard Pope is the author of Platformland: An anatomy of next-generation public services