A Welsh Digital Service

We would create a Welsh Digital Service, headed by a Chief Digital Officer for Wales to serve the whole of the Welsh public sector. Its role would be to turn Wales into a digitally enabled country. It would:

• Develop options for Wales-wide digital infrastructure, creating similar standards, shared registries, interoperable services, and other areas where Welsh Government, public agencies and local government can better cooperate.
• Design new services across the public sector, building a new cloud-based government from the ground up, and focusing on the services that citizens, communities, businesses and other organisations need. We will set a target to move all government services to the cloud by 2023.
• Provide all Welsh citizens with a single, high-quality digital identity to access digital services which will enable access to up-to-date information about eligibility for Government help and support in all areas. By 2025 all personal health information whether from primary, secondary, community or social care will be portable across the system allowing patients and physicians, with appropriate permissions and within clinical best practice, to access all relevant information on a patient.

We would commit to a digital spending target – a percentage of Government expenditure spent on digital services through a specific digital spending review.

We would announce an ‘only-once log-in’ rule for all public services – central, arms-length, NHS and local – which must be in place by the end of 2023 at the latest.

We would ensure robust privacy rules to allow individuals to control and protect their privacy and understand how data about them is being used.