At a recent GDSA panel on the journey to Net Zero, one question cut through the complexity of digital transformation: should we be running a service at all, or just because it already exists?
For Emma Charles, government industry director at Hitachi Solutions, that question sits at the heart of a blind spot in the sustainability debate. While much of the focus remains on making technology greener, her research highlights how government is often digitising, automating and scaling processes that are fundamentally unnecessary. The result is a system that accelerates waste rather than eliminating it.
Why is reducing unnecessary activity such an overlooked part of the sustainability conversation?
Most of the sustainability conversation is about doing the things that need to happen in a greener way. Greener hosting, greener offices, more environmentally friendly travel. And that all matters. But what we don’t really talk about is the work that doesn’t need to happen at all.
In government organisations, there are activities that exist simply because they’ve always existed. Nobody sat down and decided they were still needed. They’re just the way things are done around here. And because of that, we’re spending time, energy, money and generating real carbon impact on things that arguably shouldn’t be happening in the first place.
That’s the bit that gets missed. Avoidance is more powerful than offsetting. It’s genuinely better not to create the emissions than to deal with them afterwards. And it’s even worse when you’re creating emissions through waste because those emissions are completely unnecessary. Not just sub-optimal. Pointless.
Your research found that organisations often automate or digitise processes that arguably shouldn’t exist. How does that happen?
A lot of it is cultural and structural. In the civil service especially, people work within quite tight constraints – funding allocated in silos, governance focused on managing risk, pressure to deliver what’s directly in front of you. There isn’t much encouragement to step back and ask whether the thing you’re delivering should exist at all.
People are genuinely ingenious within their confines. But asking someone to rethink something they’ve inherited and are very attached to, that’s a different ask entirely. And for a lot of people, that just isn’t going to happen.
So processes keep churning because they’ve always churned. And when we do invest in change, we digitise them, automate them, add AI without ever asking the more basic question: should this still be here? You end up doing the wrong thing more efficiently. Technology in those cases doesn’t remove waste. It locks it in. You’re getting to the wrong outcome faster.
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Why is duplication so hard to solve? Why don’t organisations reuse what already exists?
Because they often have no idea what’s going on anywhere else. When you’re working in a department, your focus is almost entirely on the thing in front of you. That was certainly my experience as a civil servant. There’s no simple way to see what platforms or solutions already exist across government.
You might pick things up through cross-government communities or events, but you have to be actively plugged in, and not everyone is. It’s not systematic, and it’s not incentivised either. Funding and accountability sit within departments, so it often feels easier to build something new than to reuse something that sits somewhere else.
That’s how you end up with five grant management platforms doing 80 percent of the same thing, and each one paying to stay different. Regulation looks pretty similar across the government estate, but because departments are so siloed, the opportunity to join up just isn’t there. And when teams do manage to join up, it works. You avoid doing things twice, you learn from each other, and you cut effort (and carbon) across the whole system.
That’s where suppliers like us have a real role. We work across organisations, so we can see the duplication. The responsible thing to do is to say, actually someone’s already built this, and it’ll do most of what you need. I’ve done that. I’ve directed people to other organisations and their existing tools. It’s not always the answer people are hoping for, but it’s the right one.
What responsibility do suppliers and delivery teams have in challenging wasteful ways of working?
It really comes down to people like us as suppliers to cross-pollinate between the different teams and share what we’re seeing. And the responsible thing to do when someone asks us to rebuild something from scratch is to push back. Don’t reinvent the wheel just because you want a shiny new one.
Procurement is something I raised at the panel, and it’s a good example of where the carbon footprint builds up in ways nobody really accounts for. So many suppliers end up spending enormous amounts of time bidding for the same thing, and all of that effort adds up – and it doesn’t need to happen at that scale. Some kind of funnel to reduce it would make a real difference. As suppliers we can’t really change that system from the outside, but we can highlight it in conversations like this and hopefully nudge things in a better direction. And honestly, bidding for fewer things, including the ones I’m probably not going to win anyway, is just a better use of everyone’s time.
Where we do have influence, though, we absolutely should be using it. I’ve pointed clients towards other organisations and existing tools rather than building something new. I think that’s just the responsible thing to do. And challenging processes gently, giving people the option rather than forcing it, matters too. Helping people see that it can be done differently, and leaving the choice with them.
At the end of the day, it’s taxpayers’ money and it’s our planet. We should be good citizens, of the UK and of the Earth, and keep asking whether there’s a better way.
