Year Note 2025

Our Business Development Lead, Jack Hughes reflects on some of our highlights from the year.

Since joining Public Digital in 2024, I’ve had the privilege of showcasing our work to organisations around the world.

This year, I’ve personally seen a fundamental shift in our ability to deliver radical change at scale. This has been driven by our own growth, jumping from only 38 people in 2022 to over 100 today. Bolstered by our 300 brilliant network members, we're now working alongside some of the most ambitious organisations we've ever worked with to tackle their most critical digital transformation challenges - from building cyber resilience to harnessing the value of AI.

If you’d like to discuss any of our work, share your digital transformation ideas, or find out how we can help your organisation navigate the year ahead, please get in touch.

In 2025, our teams partnered with governments and organisations in the UK and around the world: from Barbados to the Dominican Republic, Canada to Peru, Ethiopia to Nigeria, and from the Netherlands to Ukraine. Meanwhile, we’ve worked with some of Britain’s leading companies, including M&S, BT and Arup.

But above all, our work in 2025 has focussed on helping our clients respond to some of the biggest challenges facing organisations today - public service reform to Artificial Intelligence (AI), to cyber and technological resilience.

In 2025 we continued to help governments around the world build public services for the future, bringing radical thinking to some of the most significant institutions in the world.

We were selected as the Cabinet Office’s strategic partner for the £100m Test, Learn & Grow programme - a core part of the Public Service Reform agenda. We’ve partnered with New Local and the Government Outcomes Lab to bring deep domain expertise, enabling us to work at scale across the UK to build capability in test and learn approaches, applying these to key local challenges, whilst helping to shift the conditions within central government.

We were also selected this year as a transformation partner to HMRC to accelerate their ambitious five-year transformation agenda. This partnership will see us support HMRC over the next two years across leadership and culture, service ownership and change delivery.

Looking beyond the UK public sector, we partnered with GovTech Barbados to pursue a whole-of-government approach to digital transformation, with a focus on citizen-centric, universally accessible public services. We're helping them grow their team and build their capability to deliver digital services at scale, as well as building alpha.gov.bb – a brand new single digital front door for Bajans.

The partnership is equipping GovTech Barbados to create and socialise Service Standards for digital delivery, as well as develop a design system that will enable consistent, scalable digital services.

PD has always helped organisations build the skills, leadership capabilities and structures to adapt to new technologies. In 2025, that adaptability is critical for successfully harnessing AI.

The risks and opportunities presented by AI have been front of mind for our clients, and we’ve worked with high-profile organisations around the world to realise the value of AI: from supporting a financial regulator to use AI to reduce manual administration and support risk identification, to helping the Government of Nova Scotia co-develop their foundational AI Adoption Playbook. Continuing our long-standing relationship with the Canadian Province, we’ve helped them build the business case for AI by establishing a practical, user-centred approach to assessing its impact.

Cyber attacks and technology failure have dominated headlines this year, exposing the fragility of critical national infrastructure and destabilising global markets.

Against this context, our clients have sought advice and guidance in how to prepare, respond and build future resilience, and we were pleased to be able to step in quickly to help a major UK retailer manage the immediate aftermath of a damaging attack this year.

We’re particularly proud of our work with the Local Government Association (LGA) to develop and launch a Cyber Incident Grab Bag for local authorities across England. This 'first-at-hand' resource is designed to help local government staff coordinate a response to major cyber incidents, and - thanks to the LGA - is available in the open.

In the face of fast-evolving user expectations, we’ve helped a range of diverse organisations redesign and innovate their services to meet the needs of today’s users.

We were appointed by the Department of Business and Trade (DBT) to work with the Post Office, where we are supporting them to build the culture, capabilities and conditions to transform their technology estate and ensure the organisation’s long-term success.

Elsewhere, we’re excited to have begun work with NHS Digital Prevention, where we are working to strengthen the NHS’ digital capabilities for preventative healthcare. The three-year project is part of helping the organisation shift from a treatment model to a preventative care model.

We were proud to win the King’s Award for Enterprise in International Trade and receive a high commendation in the prestigious Lloyds British Business Excellence Awards. It’s also been a big year for our leadership, with our CEO Ben Terrett receiving a CBE for his services to design.

Alongside those milestones, we’ve seen internal changes at Public Digital:

• PD’s Chair, Tim Brooks, is standing down at the end of this year. Tim has been Chair since our early days, and has brought incredible leadership, expertise and compassion. We are delighted to announce that our wonderful Non-Executive Director, Lesley Cowley OBE, will assume the role of Chair starting next year.

• We appointed Gurpreet Sehmi as Head of Central Government, Lauren Kahn as Head of Global Impact, and Cate McLaurin as Head of Local Government. They each bring outstanding leadership, experience and stewardship in the critical areas where we seek to have impact.

• We also welcomed Graeme Clarke as our first People Director. Graeme brings over 30 years of international experience in human resources and people strategy.

Our profile and reach expanded significantly this year. We’ve continued to advocate for bold ideas in everything we’ve written and everywhere we’ve shown up.

We’ve enjoyed convening and speaking at major gatherings on digital government and digital ways of working, including FWD50 in Ottawa - where we were a producing partner - and the Global DPI Summit, where we spoke about digital sovereignty.

We partnered with the Future Governance Forum to convene a panel at the Labour Party Conference on turning policy into delivery.

And we hosted the Future of Government Awards, celebrating the leading digital teams from around the world.

Our founder Mike Bracken also attended the Paris AI Action Summit convened by President Macron.

We’ve written 3 books this year, and distributed hundreds of free copies: Competitive Advantage by Design, Adopting the Practice of Test and Learn, and Shaping Technology for Transformation.

And we’ve continued to write on our blog, from our definition of digital sovereignty, to our take on the UK Government’s plans for AI, to thought pieces on the costs of leadership debt and why the unit of delivery is the team.

We also sent the 100th edition of our newsletter to over 10,000 subscribers.

As a business we’ve grown by almost 25% this year. But we continue to build Public Digital, guided by our positions.

As part of that, we’re honing our focus on the main areas where we think our work can have the biggest impact in 2026, and we look forward to seeing what the new year holds.

Thank you to the staff and network members who have been part of our 2025, and wishing everyone a happy new year.

See you in 2026!

Jack is Public Digital’s Business Development Lead. He steers our activities to support strategic growth and client development.

Contact Jack on LinkedIn