The eight horizontal layers

The suppliers, products and customers discussed in the survey are in the landscape database, with known spend and sources. The graph shows how they connect.

Eight functional categories recur across nearly every public-sector chapter. They are not domain-specific: governments build or buy them repeatedly, paying each time. Shared public infrastructure would have the most effect in these layers.

Each layer is shown below with concrete cross-sector examples drawn from the sector chapters. Together they form the basis of the shared-platform thesis.

1. Identity

Authentication, credential management, federation. Recurring examples: NHS Login, GOV.UK One Login, ScotAccount (Scotland), HMRC Government Gateway, sector-specific staff-identity systems in policing and HMCTS, organisational identity for HE single-sign-on, identity for council customer portals, immigration-status identity (eVisa).

The current pattern is a proliferation of overlapping identity products, each implementing similar capability with different governance, hosting, and APIs. One Login is consolidating identity in central government but does not extend to local government, NHS, or police staff identity. Each public service that builds or buys its own identity layer pays for it separately, and there are hundreds of such services.

2. Case management

Track an item through stages with attachments, decisions, audit, and escalation. Recurring examples: social-care case management (Liquidlogic, Mosaic), probation (Delius), housing repairs (multiple), immigration casework, planning casework (Idox Uniform), revenues-and-benefits casework, court case management (Common Platform), HMCTS digital case files, force RMS in policing, fire risk and pre-planning, regulatory casework across many bodies.

Case management is structurally the same problem in each of these settings. The shape of the data, the workflow concepts (assignment, escalation, deadlines, sub-cases), the integration patterns (documents, comms, audit), and the regulatory overlays (retention, data subject rights, FOI) are consistent. A single well-built case-management framework that institutions could adopt and configure could replace a substantial number of systems across several sectors.

3. Scheduling and resource allocation

Appointments, dispatch, rotas, capacity. Recurring examples: NHS appointment booking (e-Referral, GP appointments, hospital outpatient), social-care visit scheduling, council waste-collection routing, fire and police dispatch (out of scope for replacement but in scope for tooling around them), highway works coordination, court listing.

The technical primitives are the same: matching demand to capacity over time, with constraints. Sector-specific overlays (clinical priorities, statutory deadlines, vehicle capacities) are configuration on top of a common engine. There is no shared scheduler in the UK public sector; each system has its own.

4. Document and records management

Storage, retention, retrieval, redaction. Recurring examples: council records management, court digital case files, NHS clinical-record retention, freedom-of-information processing, prison case files, legal-aid claim attachments, body-worn-video evidence storage, immigration document handling, HE student records.

Retention obligations differ by sector but are well-defined. Redaction (FOI, disclosure, GDPR) is a universal need. Digital preservation for long-retention records (medical, social care, court) is an underdeveloped capability across the sector. Open alternatives exist (Alfresco, Nextcloud, ArchivesSpace) but adoption is sporadic.

5. Payments and financial transactions

Inbound, outbound, ledger, reconciliation. Recurring examples: council-tax billing and collection, benefits payments, fines and court fees, NHS patient charges, tuition fees, social-care charging, NHS supplier payments, government supplier payments, citizen refunds.

GOV.UK Pay covers a significant share of citizen-facing inbound payments in central government but does not extend to local government or NHS. Benefits and pensions outbound is a long-running internal modernisation. Council and NHS supplier-payment ledgers run mostly through Oracle or SAP. There is no public-sector-wide consistent reconciliation layer.

6. Communications

Citizen-facing messaging and notifications, plus staff-facing collaboration. Recurring examples: NHS-App messaging, HMRC notifications, GOV.UK Notify, council appointment SMS, school parent comms, court hearing notifications, immigration status updates, criminal-justice victim updates.

GOV.UK Notify is the best UK example of a shared horizontal layer: it was built once, is used by hundreds of services, and has an open architecture. It does not extend to NHS or local government routinely. Staff-facing collaboration is dominated by Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace across nearly every sector.

7. Geospatial and asset management

What is where, who owns it, what condition it is in. Recurring examples: council asset management (highways, buildings, trees, lighting), housing-association stock condition, NHS estates, fire-and-rescue station and equipment, police asset management, defence estate, transport asset management, planning constraints, street-naming-and-numbering.

ESRI ArcGIS dominates GIS across nearly every sector. Open alternatives (QGIS, PostGIS, GeoServer) exist and are mature but adoption is fragmented. Asset-management products are heavily concentrated on a few suppliers (Yotta, Confirm, NEC) with similar lock-in patterns to other council software.

8. Reporting and analytics

Operational dashboards, statutory returns, BI. Recurring examples: NHS Statistics submissions, council statutory returns (CIPFA, RA, MHCLG), DfE returns (school census, ASC), HMRC reporting, ONS data submissions, regulator returns, internal management information across every sector.

Statutory return formats are well-defined but each system implements its own export logic. BI tooling is dominated by Microsoft Power BI and Tableau (Salesforce). The Federated Data Platform in NHS is a variant of the same pattern that raises specific sovereignty concerns. Public-sector-wide analytics infrastructure that respects data-residency and sovereignty constraints does not exist.

What this means for the CIC

This is the main reason the survey treats the horizontal layers as the CIC’s main area of opportunity, alongside specific sector-level work in the strongest individual cases (social care, planning, housing, waste, highways).