It’s been a minute since my last weeknote. Consider this a six-weeknote. This one is full of self-adulation; apologies in advance.
Work stuff
One major reason for my radio silence over the past month or so has been that work is, and has been, full on. There are lots of things that, as ever, I can’t talk about but luckily there is also plenty that I can!
Over the past few weeks, my team has been preparing to kick off an alpha for building out machine-readable infrastructure to underpin our DVS register web service. We finally got the team started with Sprint 1 on Wednesday. That means I’m now leading two digital teams and have effectively become our chief product officer by accident!
Speaking of our web service, I also recently spent the day with our original digital team doing paper prototyping for some rapid improvements to our admin systems and public facing register. Hopefully we can build and ship those features within the next month or two.
More widely we remain in Civil Service process hell, trying to figure out how we most efficiently and cost-effectively resource the work over the next year and beyond. As we go through that process I am reminded that shared services models do not work; never work; make things harder; and should never be attempted by anyone.
Last week, I was in Amsterdam for the Identity Week Europe conference. We often send a small delegation to this important sectoral event. This was the second conference I’ve attended this summer; and the vibe was quite different from the one in Berlin.
It was a useful opportunity to meet familiar and fresh faces from the sector in person, to hear from some different voices on issues I don’t often get exposure to and, perhaps most importantly, an opportunity for some informal team building in the margins of the event.
In bigger news from last week, the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 received Royal Assent! Third time’s the charm, eh?
This has naturally led to me gleefully correcting oodles of written notes and reminding people that the King “assents” to legislation, as in “agrees”; the legislation itself does not achieve “ascent”, as in “go to the Heavens”.
With the Act now in place, it means that we’ve got all the legislative and governance apparatus we’ve been planning for the last four years finally on foot. It also means I can re-tick the box on my Civil Service checklist for having contributed to primary legislation that made it through Parliament.
At the start of this week, the latest version of our certification scheme was given formal blessing as fit for purpose by the UK Accreditation Service. That meant we could go full steam ahead to announcing latest version of our trust framework and new supplementary codes were certifiable from Tuesday of next week, 1 July 2025.
Alongside the trust framework and supplementary codes, we’ve also published:
- new information about our certification scheme and how it works
- an explainer on uplifting certification for existing services
- an explainer for a revised approach to certifying white label services
I’ve probably missed a whole bunch of important stuff in that round up, but that does feel pretty substantial for six week’s work.
Personal stuff
Back at the ranch things have been equally as busy.
At the beginning of the month I went to my first “Mighty Hoopla”. I can now assuredly say there is something quite surreal about being a 34-year-old man surrounded by other 30-ish year old people screaming out the lyrics to bangers from the Vengaboys in the blistering sunshine.
Straight after that, I was (thankfully , mercifully) on annual leave for the following week, and Matt and I popped off to Copenhagen for five days. It’s trips like this that make me realise that I don’t hate travelling as much as I think I do, but also how much I wish I was Scandinavian.
Crashing back to reality, the dispute with our former property management company – FirstPort – continues to escalate. On Saturday they issued demands for payment for charges they issued six months ago and are no longer entitled to collect, and then threatened to send us all to debt collection if we didn’t pay by the end of this week. That’s triggered a whole series of complaints that have been escalated up to our local MP – who to her credit has immediately attempted to step in. They’ve since admitted that those invoices are wrong, but it’s caused an enormous amount of stress.
We’re also now filing potential legal claims in the First Tier Tribunal (Property Chamber), because the management company has not only screwed us over royally, but they are also now refusing to look into the complaints whatsoever.
I’m in the middle of drafting the evidence we need to submit to the tribunal; and it already runs to 30 pages. Lord help us all.
I’m finding the whole thing incredibly challenging and I vaguely understand how to navigate the system with a lot of insider knowledge. How anybody else manages to do it, I’ll never know.
Amongst that dizzying array of paperwork, it’s been enjoyable to get a stress release in the evenings, unwinding with the PlayStation 5. If the objective was stress relief, however, perhaps my choice of game hasn’t been that sensible; I’ve been playing Elden Ring: Nightreign.
Fin!