Re: Working for GDS
The concept of 1 place to see all government information in the same format is noble and good, the implementation is clearly poor.
It does stop departments expressing their data in innovative ways if it diverges from the GDS templates.
For some government departments the GDS implementation is a huge improvement for others, as highlighted in this article, is clearly retrograde.
If GDS let departments get their own way, none of it would have got done. But GDS clearly didn’t take in the requirements or needs of departments as is now seen.
Hopefully this will get resolved.
One obvious advantage of a centralised platform that looks uniform is that if a page is from domain gov.uk it has a far higher chance of being legitimate and builds public trust and confidence.