From strategy to delivery: key insights from techUK’s winter supplier summit

techUK’s winter supplier summit brought together senior leaders from government and industry to take stock of progress on digital reform and, crucially, to focus on what comes next. With strategic direction now well established, the conversation has shifted decisively toward delivery, collaboration and execution at scale.

Across the day, contributors reflected on how government can move from ambition to outcomes, aligning digital leadership, commercial reform, and innovation with the practical realities facing departments and delivery teams.

UK digital government update

Opening the Summit, David Knott provided a candid assessment of where UK digital government stands at the end of 2025. Reflecting on the publication of the State of Digital Government and the Blueprint for Modern Digital Government, he emphasised that these documents were intended not as endpoints, but as a foundation for sustained reform.

A central message was the need to move away from a system that relies on “heroic effort” to deliver success, toward one that enables consistent outcomes by design. While progress has been made, such as the GOV.UK App and digital wallets, structural challenges remain.

These include fragmentation across the public sector, legacy funding models, skills shortages, and the complexity of operating in an environment of shared infrastructure and heightened cyber risk. Against continued fiscal pressure and low productivity, digital transformation was positioned as one of the most powerful levers available to government to improve efficiency and public value.

Looking ahead, David highlighted two major milestones: the forthcoming Digital and AI Roadmap and the translation of increased digital investment from the Spending Review into delivery across departments.

Digital Commercial Centre of Excellence (DCCoE)

Dr Philip Orumwense set out the progress of the Digital Commercial Centre of Excellence (DCCoE), a joint initiative designed to bring digital and commercial leadership closer together at the heart of government.

The DCCoE reflects a clear shift in how government approaches technology procurement, moving from fragmented, department-by-department purchasing toward more coordinated, strategic sourcing of common goods and services. Early activity has focused on end-user devices and cloud services, with the aim of aggregating demand, reducing duplication, and improving value for money for taxpayers.

Philip also highlighted the importance of consistency, ensuring suppliers experience a more joined-up, predictable approach across departments, while maintaining the flexibility needed to support innovation and growth. Central to this is closer collaboration between departments, supported by clearer governance and shared accountability.

Commercial Innovation Hub

The Commercial Innovation Hub, presented by Toni Peters, showcased how government is beginning to use the flexibilities of the Procurement Act to procure differently and to procure innovation itself.

The Hub’s work focuses on two complementary challenges: innovating within procurement processes and creating clearer pathways for innovative solutions to move from early development into scalable government adoption. Through Pathfinder projects, challenge-led procurement, and greater use of competitive, flexible procedures, the Hub aims to lower barriers for SMEs while safeguarding public value.

A particular focus was addressing the “valley of death” that many innovative suppliers face: a place where solutions exist but lack a viable route to large-scale public-sector deployment. By improving discovery, connection and adoption, the Hub is working to ensure innovation funded or developed in the UK has a realistic pathway into government use.

Departmental challenges: where collaboration is needed most

A defining feature of the winter supplier summit was the presentation of four live delivery challenges, each grounded in real operational constraints and policy objectives. Rather than set-piece announcements, these sessions were designed to surface practical problems and invite collaborative thinking about how to address them.

Digital licensing

The digital licensing challenge, led by the Department for Business and Trade, highlighted the scale and inefficiency of current licensing processes across government. More than one million licence applications are processed each year, spanning hundreds of licence types and authorities, many of which still rely on PDFs, manual data re-keying and inconsistent eligibility checks.

These limitations create unnecessary friction for businesses, increase costs for local authorities, and undermine wider policy objectives, particularly in areas such as public safety and regulatory compliance. The challenge is not simply digitisation for its own sake, but the creation of interoperable, data-driven licensing processes that enable validation, automation and secure data sharing across systems. Departments are seeking views on where to standardise, where to integrate, and how best to balance central capability with local delivery.

Legacy remediation

Legacy systems remain one of the most persistent barriers to effective digital government. Departments outlined how ageing platforms increase operational risk, constrain service improvement, and absorb disproportionate levels of resources simply to keep them running.

The challenge here is prioritisation and sequencing. Wholesale replacement is rarely feasible, yet incremental fixes can entrench technical debt if not managed strategically. Departments are looking to understand how industry approaches legacy remediation at scale - including how to assess risk, manage transition, and modernise without disrupting critical services - while ensuring that new solutions do not recreate the problems of the past.

Improved business support

Improving how businesses interact with government remains a shared priority, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises navigating complex regulatory, licensing and support landscapes. Despite progress in content and signposting, many business journeys remain fragmented, repetitive and difficult to navigate.

This challenge focuses on how the government can better join up services around business needs, reduce information duplication, and make smarter use of data to provide more responsive support. Departments are keen to explore how digital tools, shared platforms and improved service design can simplify engagement while still meeting regulatory and policy requirements.

Digital engineering

The final challenge centred on strengthening digital engineering capability across government. While external suppliers play a vital role, departments are increasingly focused on building sustainable in-house capability, particularly in areas such as platform engineering, modern development practices and service resilience.

The challenge lies in striking the right balance: attracting and retaining digital talent, leveraging supplier expertise effectively, and embedding engineering practices that support long-term adaptability rather than short-term delivery. Contributors emphasised the need for clearer operating models, stronger communities of practice, and better alignment between digital, policy and commercial teams.

Across all four challenges, a consistent message emerged: early engagement, open dialogue, and shared problem definition are essential to successful delivery.

Wrap-up: a call to engage

The Winter Supplier Summit reinforced that government cannot deliver digital transformation alone — nor should it try to. Moving from strategy to execution will require sustained collaboration between departments, industry and delivery partners.

techUK encourages government teams across policy, digital, data and commercial functions to actively engage in forums like the Supplier Summit: to bring forward real challenges early, test assumptions with industry, and shape solutions collaboratively before formal procurement begins.

As digital reform enters its delivery phase, openness, partnership and shared accountability will be critical. Departments that engage now will be best placed to turn ambition into outcomes — for citizens, businesses and the public sector as a whole.

Charles Bauman

Junior Programme Manager - Central Government, techUK

Charles Bauman is a Junior Programme Manager in the Central Government Programme at techUK.

He supports the programme’s mission to represent the technology supplier community to the UK government and advocate for digital innovation to address public sector challenges. Charles helps facilitate market engagement, foster partnerships, and ensure that tech suppliers and the government work collaboratively to improve outcomes, deliver value for money, and enhance public services for citizens.

Before joining techUK, Charles gained significant experience in research, analysis, and strategic advisory roles. At H/Advisors Cicero, he specialised in public affairs and corporate communications, while at Verdantix, he supported sustainability research and advisory projects, focusing on regulatory and environmental challenges.

Charles holds an MSc in Theory and History of International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and an MA in Medieval History from King’s College London.

Charles enjoys volunteering with a think tank, reading, hiking, and spending time with his dog and family outside of work.

Email:: [email protected]
Website:: www.techuk.org
LinkedIn:: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-bauman-75712016b/

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