The Scottish Government is on track to add half a million users to its national digital identity system by the end of the year, according to new data.

Around 9,000 new identities are being created every week on the national ScotAccount platform, which gives one login to people interacting with government services online.

Alistair Hann, chief technology officer at the Scottish Government, shared the news yesterday at the annual Transforming Public Services conference in Glasgow.

He said: “At this rate, it looks like we’ll easily be half a million by the end of the year; and it’ll be [20]27-28, when we get to about half the Scottish adult population having verified identities. So, it’s getting to big numbers, but also getting quicker.”

Hann, the former Skyscanner chief technology officer, joined the Scottish Government at CTO three years ago after working on the NHS national digital platform. Before that he worked in the private sector, most notably for the online travel search giant Skyscanner before it was sold to Chinese travel giant Ctrip for £1.4 billion in 2016.

The ScotAccount service launched in 2023, and ever since things have been “ramping up”, Hann said. Current use cases include for those applying for a level 1 service with Disclosure Scotland – which conducts background checks on people applying for jobs with vulnerable groups – and for witnesses in court cases, and for those involved in bankruptcy proceedings. The service allows for people to login with two-factor authentication and reduces the need to repeat the same processes multiple times.

Another digital service – ScotPayments – went live with the Scottish Public Pensions Agency in January, said Hann. The system is a scalable payments platform through which public sector organisations in Scotland can make quick and secure payments to payees. And the Scottish Government’s digital directorate has also been instrumental in building a licensing system – e-Pass – that can be configured across multiple different types of licence issued by government, including tobacco and vapes licences, alcohol and food safety.

Digital Post is another service that has been prototyped through CivTech – the Scottish Government’s public sector innovation accelerator, said Hann. The system will eventually – it is hoped – slash the amount of physical mail being sent to households across the country by government and its agencies. In one estimate with NHS Scotland, the secure messaging platform could lead to 1.6 million letters being digitised, saving £1.8 million a year in postage. Going digital is also predicted to save £32.2 million in missed appointments. In another scenario with Food Standards Scotland, modelling shows that the system could lead to 750,000 letters being digitised, saving an estimated £550,000.

“There’s a lot happening,” added Hann. With ScotPayments, he said £140 million had gone through the platform last month, and it’s on course to process £1 billion later in the year. There are now 45 workloads on the Scottish Government cloud (ScotGov Cloud) platform, he added, and digital components built centrally are increasingly being re-used across the public sector.

“There’s a good pipeline of customers and lots of people getting bought in,” he said. “So, the message I want to get across here is that we’ve gone from having an ambition of having components that are reusable to actually these things exist, they have traction and they’re accelerating.”

Hann credited many of the achievements to having built the capability of in-house software engineering teams within the Scottish Government’s digital directorate, and bringing in ‘talent’ from outside government. The cloud platform also has driven efficiencies, by having a single architecture on which multiple services can be hosted and developed.

With Food Standards Scotland, which regulates food vendors and processors, including supermarkets, restaurants and even abattoirs, the current process relies on the supply chain interacting with the 32 local authorities in Scotland, often requiring those organisations to register multiple times in separate geographies. The agency would like to offer this service once, and providing it ‘back out’ to the local councils, thereby saving time and cost, Hann said.

He added that the digital directorate will work with some components developed by the UK Government, for example Notify and Gov Pay – for inbound payments – and that there is therefore no desire to duplicate tools that already exist. Moving forward, he would like IT industry suppliers to understand that the directorate is working in a more strategic way, and not just buying end-to-end solutions.

“So we need to make sure, through procurement and communicating with industry, that people understand that’s how we’re going to work together,” he said.

The next step is achieving scale.

“We need to understand how to glue these things together and do it,” he said. “This is new for us now. So we’re learning, as we bring things together, how that’s all going to happen, how we compose things. And then there’s also need to think about scale.

“So if we’re working with two or three organisations, it’s a very different relationship to working with 30 different organisations consuming identity or payments. So how do we scale that up? So that means things like self-service, having libraries and clear information about APIs and material reference architectures,” he said.

Having now moved beyond ambition to delivery, the number of organisations consuming these centrally developed services will rapidly accelerate, from three or four to 20 a year, Hann predicted.

“That’s a big step change,” he said. “But the potential we have here to build digital services that are cost effective and really transform the way we do public service in Scotland is enormous, and so it’s a great opportunity to do things to help the public sector and people of Scotland.”

‘We need to accept that AI is going to make mistakes’

The conference also heard from four national infrastructure assets supporting public services. The National Robotarium, based at Heriot-Watt University, The Data Lab – the national innovation agency for data and AI – Edinburgh’s supercomputing centre, attached to Edinburgh University and Glasgow University’s Centre for Data Science and AI, contributed to a discussion about supporting the work of key public services such as the NHS in order to transform and modernise what they do.

Professor Sandosh Padmanabhan, representing the Centre for Data Science & AI at the university of Glasgow, said that AI-based solutions across a range of health disciplines, including medical imaging and physiotherapy – often supported through research at centres such as his – are ‘slowly and incrementally’ transforming healthcare services.

But the investment in AI needs to be long-term and strategic, said Professor Mark Parsons, at Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre. He said we are in an age of ‘computing inflation’, and the commensurate power resources needed to perform the complex underpinnings of technologies like AI means investment needs to be in both computing hardware – which is getting more expensive – and energy systems.

However, the benefit to the economy of harnessing AI and robotics for the economy and society of Scotland will be substantial if we get it right, said Stewart Miller, chief executive of the National Robotarium. He credited some of the government funding that has supported new university research facilities across Scotland with creating a vibrant ecosystem that now stands to benefit the economy, if we can get them working together strategically.

“I think we’ve actually got, either by design or by accident, a really good ecosystem now for pulling through, whether it’s into the public or the private sector, new technologies and new ways of delivering services more closely to home,” he said. In his field, he predicted that in five to 10 years time, robots will be commonplace in social care settings but also for maintenance and repair of council housing, and cleaning hospitals.

“We have the opportunity to not buy those in from China and from the US, but actually to procure them in such a way that it encourages young, inventive people who are trying to develop those kinds of robots here in Scotland to have a future and build those robots here and create new jobs and create new income,” he said.

Heather Thomson, chief executive of The Data Lab, highlighted some of the use cases of AI already being supported by agencies like hers, in partnership with public sector bodies. She mentioned how they’ve been working with NatureScot – the national agency looking after natural heritage – to explore how systems like ChatGPT can assist helpdesk support teams, and with Police Scotland on streamlining the answering process for 999 calls. And they’ve also been bringing data-driven innovation to support dementia care and stroke care, by prescribing more targeted medication that is more likely to work with stroke patients based on their genetic makeup.

Despite the advances being made, the panel agreed that there are barriers to innovation to overcome. Creating time, space and the ‘headroom’ for public bodies to innovate was essential if we are going to accelerate technology adoption in the public sector, as was staffing and skills. Improving the way we procure from homegrown technology companies and connecting the research and innovation within academia to the wider economy were identified as other obstacles to adoption, as was securing follow-on funding from successful pilots to allow them to scale.

Professor Padmanabhan said: “You have an invention, you apply to NIHR [National Institute for Health and Care Research] or any grant funding body, they’ll give you the money for research, but then you’re stuck, and you have to scramble around and try to find how do we really get this into clinical practice.”

Risk appetite was another.

Professor Parsons said: “I think we need to accept that AI is going to make mistakes, and it shouldn’t stop us doing these projects. I sometimes get nervous when I’m dealing in particularly with public sector friends who don’t want to do something in case it goes wrong. I think we just accept that it’s going to go wrong here, and that it shouldn’t hold us back from using it [AI] and making it better.”