Government
Government is being reshaped by data, automation, and rising public expectations. Mortar is helping local and national government build the digital capability to meet this moment.
Government has always been hard. Balancing competing priorities, serving diverse communities, operating within tight constraints, and being held to account by the public for every decision — these are the conditions in which public servants work every day. What has changed is the scale and pace of the challenges government now faces, and the growing expectation that digital technology will help it respond more effectively.
The promise of digital government has been articulated for decades. The reality has been more mixed. Too many digital transformation programmes have delivered new interfaces for old processes — improving the surface without addressing the underlying complexity. The next decade demands something more fundamental: a genuine reimagining of how government uses data and intelligence to understand need, design services, and allocate resources.
Where Government Is Going
The future of government is data-driven and place-based. As fiscal pressure intensifies, the ability to make genuinely evidence-based decisions about where to invest, which services to prioritise, and how to design interventions that work will become not just desirable but essential. Governments that can do this will be able to do more with less. Those that cannot will face an increasingly impossible task.
At the local level, place-based approaches to public service will accelerate — integrating health, housing, education, employment, and community services around the needs of specific communities rather than the structures of individual departments. This will require shared data infrastructure, new models of governance, and digital tools designed for collaboration rather than competition.
Automation will transform back-office functions — reducing the administrative burden that consumes a disproportionate share of government capacity and freeing human effort for the complex, relational work that technology cannot do. And the rise of AI will create both opportunities and obligations: opportunities to improve decision-making quality and speed, and obligations to ensure that algorithmically-informed decisions are fair, transparent, and accountable.
Our Role
Mortar works with local authorities, combined authorities, government agencies, and the organisations that deliver public services on their behalf. We help them build the data infrastructure, intelligence tools, and digital services needed to deliver better outcomes in a more constrained operating environment.
Our work spans service design, system design, data strategy, and the development of intelligent tools that help government understand its populations, allocate its resources, and demonstrate its impact. We bring particular expertise in the intersection of data, intelligence, and social complexity — the domain where the hardest public service challenges are found and where the greatest opportunities for innovation exist.
We are not a generic technology supplier. We are a technical partner with deep knowledge of public sector contexts and a genuine commitment to the purpose of government — to serve the public interest, especially for those who are most dependent on the state for their wellbeing.
What We Are Building
- Integrated data platforms: Infrastructure that connects data across departments, agencies, and partner organisations — creating the shared intelligence base for joined-up government.
- Needs analysis and population insight: Tools that give government a comprehensive, real-time understanding of community need — enabling more responsive, targeted service design.
- Policy impact modelling: Simulation and modelling tools that help government understand the likely consequences of policy choices before committing to them.
- Digital public services: User-centred digital services designed for the full diversity of the public — including those with lower digital confidence, complex needs, or limited access to technology.
- Performance and accountability frameworks: Reporting and analytics infrastructure that enables government to demonstrate impact, identify underperformance, and drive continuous improvement.
Get in Touch
If your organisation is navigating the challenges of public sector transformation and wants a technical partner with the knowledge and commitment to make it work, we would love to hear from you. Get in touch to discuss your priorities.