Your Efficient Service May Be Someone Else’s Unpaid Work

A service does not become efficient merely because its organisation has fewer counters, shorter call-handling targets or a smaller back office. Sometimes the work has simply moved. The customer now searches for the right page, creates the account, remembers the password, scans the evidence, re-enters information already supplied, waits for a code, chases a missing reply and starts again when the session expires.

That labour rarely appears on the organisation’s dashboard. It appears in kitchens, lunch breaks, library computer sessions and unpaid evenings. My argument is simple: time and effort imposed on the public are part of a service’s operating cost, even when the organisation does not pay for them.

The efficiency illusion

Moving a transaction online can be genuinely useful. A well-designed digital service may remove travel, make progress visible and let people act at a convenient hour. But “digital” and “simple” are not synonyms. A digital process can reproduce an old bureaucracy while adding passwords, file-format rules and technical failure.

The UK Government’s Digital Inclusion Action Plan: One Year On, published on 24 March 2026, defines inclusion through access, skills, support and confidence. That is an important corrective. If a service assumes all four, it may count a successful website launch while overlooking the people who cannot complete the journey.

The scale is not trivial. Government material published in December 2025 reported research suggesting that eight million UK adults lacked basic digital skills and 1.6 million lived offline. These figures do not mean digital services should stop. They mean a digital route must not be mistaken for universal access.

Administrative burden has several prices

When people hear “red tape”, they often picture the number of forms. The fuller burden has at least five parts:

• Learning cost: finding the correct service, understanding eligibility, decoding unfamiliar terms and discovering which evidence is acceptable.
• Compliance cost: gathering documents, answering questions, attending appointments and repeatedly proving identity or circumstances.
• Waiting cost: time spent in queues, on hold, monitoring an inbox or delaying another plan because an outcome is unknown.
• Recovery cost: correcting errors, replacing lost submissions, appealing decisions or working out what “something went wrong” actually means.
• Emotional cost: anxiety, embarrassment and the fear that one mistake will close access to money, care, housing, education or legal status.

These costs are unevenly distributed. The same ten-minute form can be a minor interruption for someone with reliable broadband, fluent English, a recent device and flexible work. For a person using prepaid data, assistive technology, shared accommodation or a public computer, it can become an afternoon. Equality of interface does not guarantee equality of effort.

What the evidence supports

The evidence does not justify the claim that every administrative step is pointless. Identity checks can prevent fraud; records can protect rights; eligibility rules can direct scarce resources. The question is whether each demand is necessary, proportionate and designed around the person’s whole journey.

The OECD’s 2025 analysis of seamless and accessible public administrative services argues for human-centred design that streamlines interactions and proactively addresses barriers. Its wider administrative simplification work notes that complex procedures create significant burdens for citizens and businesses. This is evidence for measuring the experience, not merely the throughput.

There is also a trust consequence. The OECD’s 2026 survey on trust and day-to-day public-service interactions reports that 68% of people with recent contact were satisfied overall across participating OECD countries. That is a majority, not a licence for complacency. It suggests that routine encounters help shape how institutions are judged. A lost form or unexplained delay is not only an inconvenience; it can become evidence, in the citizen’s mind, about whether the institution respects them.

Run a hidden-work audit

An organisation can make this cost visible without commissioning an elaborate transformation programme. Take one common task—renewing a permit, reporting a repair, changing an address or applying for support—and follow it from the user’s first question to a confirmed resolution.

1. Count starts, not just completions

A completion rate hides people who could not identify the right process, failed before analytics loaded or switched to the telephone. Record abandoned searches, repeated visits, calls made after an online attempt and requests for help. The denominator should include people who tried.

2. Time the user’s whole journey

Do not stop the clock when a form reaches the server. Include preparation, document gathering, travel, waiting, follow-up and correction. Separate active time from elapsed time: a five-minute internal review may leave a person uncertain for three weeks.

3. Mark every repeated fact

Highlight information the organisation already holds, evidence requested by more than one team and fields that ask the same question in different language. Some repetition may be legally necessary, but necessity should be demonstrated rather than assumed.

4. Test the recovery route

Deliberately upload the wrong file, lose a connection, forget a password and enter an unusual but valid answer. Can the person save progress? Does the error explain what to do? Is there a reference number? Can a human see the failed attempt, or must the story begin again?

5. Compare different circumstances

Test with a mobile screen, slow connection, keyboard navigation, screen reader and magnification. Test with someone who has limited English, low confidence or no printer. This is not a theatrical accessibility exercise. It reveals whether the service’s apparent efficiency depends on users supplying equipment, expertise and resilience for free.

What should replace the transferred work?

The answer is not always another app. Often it is clearer language, fewer questions, pre-filled data with consent, a save-and-return function, realistic deadlines and a visible route to a person who can solve exceptions. A good assisted-digital option should help someone complete the same task, not send them into an inferior parallel system.

Organisations should also publish service promises in terms users can recognise: what happens next, how long it normally takes, what evidence is checked, how progress can be tracked and what to do if nothing happens. Certainty reduces the burden even before speed improves.

Crucially, simplification should not remove safeguards that protect vulnerable people. A fast automated refusal is not an improvement if it is harder to understand or challenge. Efficiency must be judged alongside accuracy, accessibility, fairness and the quality of redress.

A better cost calculation

Imagine two designs. The first saves an organisation £100,000 but makes 200,000 users spend an extra ten minutes each. That is more than 33,000 hours transferred outward. The calculation is illustrative, not a claim about a particular service, but it shows why internal savings alone are incomplete.

A responsible business case would record staff time, technology and error rates alongside user time, repeat contact, accessibility failures, appeals and unresolved cases. It would ask who bears each cost and whether that burden falls most heavily on people with the least spare time, money or confidence.

Useful takeaways

• Do not call a service efficient until you have measured the user’s full journey.
• Treat learning, compliance, waiting, recovery and emotional strain as distinct costs.
• Track failed attempts and repeat contact, not only completed transactions.
• Provide human help and non-digital alternatives that lead to an equivalent outcome.
• Preserve safeguards, explanations and routes of appeal when simplifying.
• Ask whose time has been saved—and whose has been spent.

The cleanest dashboard can conceal a messy public experience. If an organisation reduces its own workload by turning every citizen into an unpaid administrator, it has not eliminated the cost. It has changed the person who pays.