By Velian Krav - 18/09/2026
One Citizen, One Government: What Public Services Can Learn From Each Other
Modern government is increasingly digital. We apply for benefits online, pay taxes electronically, prove our identity through apps, receive official correspondence digitally and update personal circumstances without visiting an office.
Yet there is an important difference between digital government and integrated government.
A public administration can have excellent websites, sophisticated databases and secure online accounts while still requiring citizens to understand which department holds which information, which benefit belongs to which system, and which agency must be notified when something in their life changes.
For many people this is manageable. For others — particularly elderly citizens, people with limited digital skills, those with disabilities, people experiencing stress or crisis, and immigrants working in a second language — it can become overwhelming.
The question therefore should not be which country has the “best” political system.
A much more useful question is:
What practical ideas can countries learn from each other to make ordinary interaction with government simpler?
From digital services to integrated services
Consider a very ordinary event:
A person starts a new job.
From the citizen's perspective, only one thing has happened.
From the government's perspective, however, that event may be relevant to taxation, unemployment benefits, income-related benefits, housing support, pension contributions or other services.
In a fragmented administrative model, responsibility is effectively transferred to the citizen.
The citizen may need to understand:
Who needs to know? Have I informed the correct department? Does one department automatically tell another? Do I need to report the same change twice?
This creates what might be called an administrative knowledge burden.
The individual is expected not merely to provide accurate information, but to understand something about the architecture of government itself.
There is another possible philosophy:
The citizen reports the life event once; government determines internally which authorised services need that information.
Several countries have developed interesting versions of this idea.
Estonia: tell government once
Estonia provides perhaps the clearest conceptual example.
Its X-Road infrastructure allows otherwise separate public-sector information systems to exchange information securely. Estonia describes its approach through the “once-only” principle: citizens should provide information once and government bodies should securely reuse information already available to them rather than repeatedly asking the citizen for it.
Importantly, integration does not necessarily mean constructing one enormous government database.
Different authorities can continue operating their own systems while interoperability allows those systems to communicate where legally authorised.
That distinction matters.
The objective is not simply:
centralise everything.
It is:
make separate systems work together from the citizen's perspective.
Denmark: one recognisable digital relationship with government
Denmark offers another useful model.
Its digital public infrastructure gives citizens common mechanisms for identifying themselves and communicating with public authorities. Rather than requiring citizens to learn an entirely different digital identity for every interaction with the state, common infrastructure provides continuity across services.
The underlying lesson is straightforward:
Government departments may be separate organisations, but they do not necessarily need to feel like separate digital worlds to the citizen.
This becomes especially valuable for people who interact with several public services simultaneously.
Russia: a unified portal for public services
Russia's Gosuslugi system is another model worth examining on its practical merits.
The Russian Government describes the Unified Portal of Public and Municipal Services as being designed specifically to make interaction between citizens and government easier, providing a common portal through which government and municipal services can be accessed electronically.
Whatever one's political opinions about Russia — positive, negative or neutral — they are irrelevant to this particular administrative question.
A useful public-service design should be evaluated as a useful public-service design.
The concept of presenting numerous government functions through a recognisable common environment is therefore worth studying independently of politics.
China: organise government around the event — and design it around the person
China provides an especially interesting administrative concept.
Chinese government policy has promoted integrated handling of matters that would traditionally require interaction with multiple departments. Its approach commonly described as “one matter, one handling” attempts to combine related administrative procedures from the perspective of the citizen or business.
This represents an important change in perspective.
Traditional administration asks:
Which department owns this procedure?
Citizen-centred administration asks:
What is the person actually trying to accomplish?
A birth, death, retirement, new job, loss of employment, change of address or creation of a business is one event in a person's life even when it creates responsibilities for several government agencies.
But another aspect of China's approach deserves attention because it is remarkably practical: digital government should adapt to elderly citizens rather than expecting elderly citizens simply to adapt to digital government.
Chinese national policy has explicitly recognised the difficulties some older people experience when essential services move online. The response has included not only training and assistance but changes to the technology itself.
Government guidance has called for elderly-friendly websites and applications incorporating features such as larger fonts, larger displays, higher contrast, simplified interfaces, voice assistance, spoken content, clearer operating prompts and easier navigation. Technical specifications have gone considerably further, including minimum font sizes for elderly-oriented interfaces, sufficiently large clickable areas, alternatives to difficult visual verification methods, compatibility with screen-reading technology and voice-reading functions.
This is a small design detail with a large philosophical implication.
Instead of asking:
“Why can't this elderly person use our application?”
the better question becomes:
“Why was our application designed in a way that makes it unnecessarily difficult for this elderly person to use?”
China has also recognised that not every problem should be solved by forcing people online. National guidance has required important offline channels to remain available for services frequently needed by older citizens, including healthcare, social security, telecommunications and utility payments. It has encouraged staffed service points, assistance for elderly visitors and one-stop services. It also provides for authorised assistance by relatives or others for older people who do not use, or cannot comfortably operate, smartphones.
That combination is particularly interesting:
digital where digital helps, human where human help is needed.
The approach has continued to develop. In July 2026, China introduced its first national standard specifically for elderly-friendly government service platforms. The framework emphasises usability, inclusiveness, accessibility and security, and recommends dedicated elderly-service areas, scenario-based navigation, integrated one-stop services and a combination of independent online use, authorised assistance and coordinated online-offline services.
This deserves recognition.
Large text may sound trivial compared with national databases, digital identities and interoperability standards. To a 78-year-old citizen with deteriorating eyesight, however, the size of the text may determine whether the digital state is accessible at all.
The same applies to a larger button, a spoken instruction, an uncomplicated screen or the ability to ask another person for assistance.
Good digital government therefore cannot be measured only by technological sophistication.
It should also be measured by a much simpler question:
Can the people who actually need the service use it?
There is no reason for another country to reproduce China's entire administrative model in order to learn from this principle. Britain, Denmark, Estonia, Russia or any other country can examine a successful accessibility feature and ask:
Would this make life easier for our citizens too?
If the answer is yes, its country of origin should be largely irrelevant.
The United Kingdom: strong digital services, but an unfinished integration journey
Britain should not be portrayed as technologically backward. That would be inaccurate.
GOV.UK itself was an important development in presenting government information through a common public interface, and the UK is now expanding GOV.UK One Login, intended eventually to provide one secure way of accessing central government services online.
By February 2026, the government reported that more than 200 services were accessible using One Login, with HMRC beginning its transition as well.
The government has explicitly described the older landscape as containing siloed and duplicate sign-in methods, with central government services intended to move onto One Login.
This is significant progress.
But a common login and an integrated administration are not quite the same thing.
Even with a single digital identity, responsibility for information can remain distributed between departments. The UK government's own explanation of One Login makes clear that individual departments remain responsible for much of the personal information associated with their services.
There are good reasons for this, including privacy, security, legal responsibility and data minimisation.
The challenge is therefore not simply to create one giant database.
It is to achieve interoperability without sacrificing appropriate boundaries.
The hidden cost of fragmentation
Administrative complexity has consequences beyond inconvenience.
Imagine an elderly person, someone with limited English, or simply somebody dealing simultaneously with unemployment, housing problems and financial stress.
They notify one government service of a change and reasonably believe that they have “told the government”.
Another part of government may nevertheless require a separate notification.
The person may then accidentally receive money to which they are no longer entitled or have money incorrectly deducted elsewhere.
What began as an administrative misunderstanding can become an overpayment, repayment demand, investigation or considerable anxiety.
The citizen may have acted entirely in good faith.
This suggests that accessibility should not merely mean making a website compatible with a screen reader or writing instructions in plain English.
Administrative simplicity itself is a form of accessibility.
A possible principle: report once, distribute lawfully
The strongest features of these different systems could potentially be combined without copying any country wholesale.
A future public-service model could follow several principles:
One secure digital identity for interaction with government.
One recognisable citizen portal showing relevant services, correspondence, applications and notifications.
Life-event reporting. Instead of asking citizens to understand departmental structures, allow them to report events such as “I started work”, “I lost my job”, “I moved home”, “I had a child” or “I retired”.
Once-only information. Government should not repeatedly ask for information that another authorised public body already holds when it can lawfully and securely obtain it.
Interoperability rather than indiscriminate centralisation. Agencies can retain appropriate responsibility for their databases while exchanging necessary information through controlled interfaces.
Transparency. Citizens should be able to see which authority received their information and, where appropriate, which government bodies accessed or used it.
Human alternatives. Digital integration should simplify government without making smartphones compulsory. Telephone, assisted-digital and face-to-face routes remain essential for people who need them.
Clear responsibility. When a citizen reports a change successfully, the system should explicitly tell them whether any further action is required.
The final point may be the simplest and most powerful.
Imagine reporting:
“I started employment on 1 September.”
The system could respond:
Information received. This change has been shared with the following relevant services: A, B and C. You do not need to contact them separately. You must contact D because legislation requires a separate declaration.
The citizen now knows exactly where they stand.
Government should absorb complexity, not export it
Every modern state is complicated.
Taxation, welfare, healthcare, pensions, local government and employment regulation cannot realistically be compressed into one administrative department.
But organisational complexity inside government does not necessarily need to become complexity for the citizen.
Banks demonstrate this principle routinely. Customers do not need to understand every internal database, compliance system and settlement network involved when transferring money. The organisation absorbs much of that complexity and presents the customer with a comprehensible service.
Public administration can increasingly aspire to the same principle.
Estonia's interoperability, Denmark's common digital infrastructure, Russia's unified public-service portal, China's integration of cross-departmental life events and Britain's developing One Login programme represent different approaches to aspects of the same problem.
None needs to be copied uncritically.
None needs to be rejected because of the country in which it originated.
Public administration should be pragmatic enough to recognise a good idea wherever it exists.
The objective is remarkably non-political:
make government easier for ordinary people to navigate.
A citizen should not need to understand the organisational chart of the state simply to tell the state that something in their life has changed.
Perhaps the best measure of successful digital government is therefore not how many services have been moved online.
It is how little knowledge of government bureaucracy an ordinary person needs in order to use them correctly.
The technology should understand the structure of government so the citizen does not have to.
Learning without ideological borders
Perhaps there is a broader lesson here.
Countries do not need to agree politically in order to learn practically from one another.
A useful administrative idea does not become less useful because it was developed in China, Russia, Denmark, Estonia, Britain or anywhere else. Equally, no country should assume that its own system has nothing to learn simply because it is technologically advanced or institutionally different.
China can develop an excellent elderly-friendly digital feature. Estonia can demonstrate effective interoperability. Denmark can provide lessons in common digital infrastructure. Russia can offer useful experience with a unified public-service portal. Britain can contribute its own strengths in digital service design and continue developing greater integration through GOV.UK.
These ideas are not mutually exclusive.
The sensible question is not:
“Which country should we copy?”
It is:
“What has each country learned that could make life easier for our citizens?”
Progress has always depended partly upon societies observing one another, adapting successful ideas and improving upon them.
Public administration should be no different.
If another country has found a better way to help an elderly person access a government service, reduce unnecessary paperwork, prevent citizens from reporting the same information repeatedly or make a complicated process understandable, studying that solution should not require political agreement with that country.
It requires curiosity.
Perhaps one of the simplest principles for future digital government should therefore be:
Take good ideas wherever they are found, test them honestly, adapt them carefully, and judge them by how well they serve people.
A truly digital government is not one that forces every citizen to become digitally sophisticated.
It is one sophisticated enough to remain simple for the citizen.