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Ben Welby's Blog

Hi, I’m Benjamin Welby. I live in Croydon with my wife and two children. I church at Croydon Vineyard. We’ve had season tickets for Bradford City since 2007. I’ve got degrees in History, Post-War Recovery and Public Administration and have spent the last 15+ years working on public sector digital transformation at local, national, and international levels.


I’m interested in too many things and this blog is about most of them: being a good husband and father, following Jesus, the theology of governing well, a warm welcome for refugees and asylum seekers, that ‘digital’ leads to fair, inclusive and equitable transformation, exploring the world, League Two football, Pantomime, the England cricket team...

Publisher:  Benjamin Welby
Message frequency:  0.33 / week

Message History

One of the first headlines I saw after Friday’s reshuffle came with a familiar and unsurprising tone. Starmer signals plan to slash benefits with tough new welfare chief. It’s probably pretty accura...

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So much of the current public discourse leaves me with a heavy heart, and Robert Jenrick’s recent interview with The Spectator is another depressing contribution. It might be worth reading the full thing because it provides important context for what follows but in short it tells a har...

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Sometimes the best ideas are under our noses, just waiting to be noticed. And I think GovWifi is one such idea. For years now, civil servants, contractors and visitors have enjoyed the ease of registering once and connecting seamlessly to secure Wi-Fi in government buildings across the ...

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In this final post of the series, we arrive in the real world. The bricks, the people, the kettle in the corner. We explore what trust looks like when the state is tangible and physically present, and how design, infrastructure and humility combine to make that possible.

To me, it seems pretty clear that someone somewhere in government should be thinking ab...

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In Part 3, we looked at AI agents and the disappearing interface. But real people, with real needs, still interact with real-world services. So Part 4 is about omnichannel: what it means to design public...

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