'Our digital future will be based on how we create a service that is both responsive and predictive'

Ivan McKee might have one of the toughest briefs in government. Opening the folder placed squarely on his desk, the recently appointed Cabinet Secretary for Public Service Reform will see a long list of problems laid out before him.

While his main responsibility is firmly centred on ensuring the fiscal sustainability of Scotland’s public services, a difficult job at the best of times, McKee also has responsibility for overseeing the implementation of the Digital Strategy for Scotland.

Launched in collaboration with Scottish local government in late 2025, the ambitious strategy set out to address the slow, inefficient and sometimes bewilderingly complex processes that constitute the way Scotland’s population interacts with public services.

At the time of the launch, McKee, then in the role of public finance minister, said the strategy would “support work to deliver sustainable digital public services fit for the future” while the strategy pledged to create “collaborative digital programmes” designed to “improve public service efficiency” and “transform the user experience.” To help facilitate these goals, the strategy also set out plans for an app intended to allow Scots to access personalised public services on their phones.

Few countries offer a more attractive model for the kind of sustainable and efficient public services that the Digital Strategy promises than Estonia. In 2025, the small Baltic nation announced that 100 per cent of its public services were available online through its e-Estonia system, a process that began after the country threw off the shackles of a 50-year Soviet occupation in the 1990s.

“For Estonians it’s unimaginable nowadays not to have these services,” Ambassador Sven Sakkov, Estonia’s representative to the UK, tells Holyrood. “No one can imagine a life of looking for your birth certificate or going to queue for an appointment to see a bureaucrat; people would just not put up with that.”

In Estonia, every interaction from birth to voting and even divorce can be handled in a matter of clicks and with no more effort than checking social media. But can a similar digital infrastructure be implemented effectively in Scotland, where many of the systems that constitute the state are fragmented across platforms and organisations?

The Estonian system works by linking all data about a person to a single mandatory ID card that can then be used to sign in and use online public services. This means that every time a user books a GP appointment or even confirms the sale of a house, the relevant data is linked to their ID card, ready for use when needed.

Sakkov claims that the e-Estonia system saves the average person nearly two weeks of their time per year, with the use of just one aspect, digital signatures, reportedly saving two per cent of Estonia’s GDP annually. The digital signature system is valid on everything from a legal agreement to a prescription and is used to verify identity from anywhere in the world.

“Our system means you can do whatever you need to do quickly, whether that be from the privacy of your home or if you’re on vacation having an Aperol Spritz somewhere in the Canary Islands,” says Sakkov. “But unfortunately, we Estonians aren’t very good at taking that time off, so we just work two more weeks.”

Last year the UK Government announced a voluntary digital ID scheme, intended to combat illegal working and make it easier to access government services. It is expected to be rolled out to all UK citizens and legal residents by the end of this parliamentary term, with employers required to check it, making it effectively mandatory for anyone in work. The scheme has been widely criticised, with First Minister John Swinney calling it an “attack on liberty” at the time of its announcement and promising to use devolved powers to block its implementation in Scotland. 

When asked about the functionality of the proposed app without digital IDs, McKee said: “The mygov.scot app is intended to provide a voluntary gateway for people in Scotland to access personalised public services – supporting the ambition that every service that should be connected digitally will be connected digitally. This will offer mobile access to services, notifications, and ability to securely store and recall important documents on the go.”

But the ambition to connect every service digitally could prove to be nothing more than an ambition without a unified and simple way of uploading and linking personal data automatically across all services. 

The possibility that personal data collected could be misused by future, hypothetical, authoritarian governments was raised as a concern by SNP MP Pete Wishart during a Westminster debate last year, where he invited fellow MPs to “imagine the sight of Prime Minister [Nigel] Farage with the data of the nation at his fingertips.”

Campaign group Liberty echoed this sentiment when it warned that a digital ID scheme could create “a nightmarish surveillance system” and lead to the profiling of individuals and marginalised groups across society.

“When people are talking about misuse of data and a lack of human or democratic rights, we have people alive who have actually experienced that,” says Sakkov. “People are alive who remember the repression of the Nazis and the long, long occupation of Estonia with the atrocities that the KGB did. If any democratic nation has an authoritarian government, I don’t think there’s much of a difference in what type of information system it has, whether it is digital or not. So no, I don’t think there is a specific threat from our way of doing digital government than from any other form of government.”

Critics also cite recent high-profile cyber-attacks on private companies like Jaguar Land Rover and various public bodies across the UK as potential downsides to implementing a digital-first system of government like Estonia’s. In a 2025 review, GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) reported that it had dealt with over 400 cyber incidents in the year to September, with nearly half being classed as nationally significant attacks.

That number, critics say, would only increase if the UK or Scottish governments implemented a system where all the nation’s data is stored online, creating an attractive target for hackers or hostile nation states. Speaking at a cybersecurity conference in Glasgow earlier this year, the NCSC’s chief executive officer, Dr Richard Horne, warned that if the UK were to be in, or near, a conflict situation with a foreign state, then the risk of attacks would increase, without the option to pay a ransom to recover any stolen data.

In 2007, Estonia was subjected to a major cyberattack that led to the formation of the Nato Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, based in the nation’s capital, Tallinn. The 2007 hackers didn’t access sensitive data but caused significant disruption to banking networks and local news sites as massive waves of spam emails and automated online requests swamped servers. The perpetrators of this attack have never been formally identified, but it took place during a moment of extremely heightened tension between Estonia and the country it shares a 180-mile disputed border with to its east, Russia.

“What would be sweeter for a nation-state or a state-supported hacker group than to take down the world’s most advanced digital nation?” says Sakkov. “In the hacker community that gives you bragging rights for a couple of years and free drinks at the bar. So, of course they are trying to hack us. But we are doing very well with our underlying technology that ensures a safe and secure way of conducting our business of running a digital government.”

For supporters of a digital-first approach to public services, Estonia might seem like a shining city perched atop a mountain of data, resplendent in its apparent transparency, security and efficiency. But implementing a system like this in Scotland will be more complex than simply creating a targeted strategy, building an effective app and ensuring data is shared between organisations.

In a 2024 report, Audit Scotland highlighted the danger of taking a digital-first approach in a country where one in six Scottish adults lack the digital skills needed for everyday life. The report warned that people unable to access digital public services were at risk of “not being able to fully realise their human rights”. It added that the rights at risk could include the right to education, a fair trial, protection from discrimination, social security and to receive and impart information.

Additionally, a UK-wide Ofcom survey conducted in 2025 found that 13 per cent of people aged over 65 do not have home internet access, rising to around 20 per cent among those aged 75 and over. Ofcom also reported that among adults without home internet, some of the most commonly cited online tasks that people had to ask others to do for them included accessing online government or local council services at 18 per cent and using online health services at around 16 per cent. 

The Scottish Government did acknowledge this challenge in the Digital Strategy, committing to expanding access to the internet for disadvantaged and rural communities, supporting people to get online and designing inclusive public services to ensure that no one is left behind. But the reality of implementing that commitment is likely to be both very expensive and very difficult, with issues around poverty, rural connectivity and service accessibility a long-standing theme of politics at Holyrood since devolution. 

When asked about the progress of the strategy since its launch, McKee said: “The refreshed Digital Strategy was published last year and set out our joint long-term vision for digital in Scotland with local government.” But turning that vision into reality in the medium to long term will require the Scottish Government to overcome challenges that Estonia has spent decades grappling with, from cybersecurity and data sharing to public trust in digital identity systems. While ministers continue to wrestle with those questions, Estonia has moved onto a different one altogether: what comes next once the state is fully digitised?

In its Digital Agenda for 2030, the Estonian government outlines an ambition to create a country full of “Digital Vägi”. A direct translation of the word “vägi” into English doesn’t exist, but it is best understood as an invisible magical power that can apply to anything from trees to songs and even the idea of digital public services. For Sakkov, one of the ways that this invisible power will be expressed is by meeting Estonians where they are, before they even need to ask.

“Our digital future will be based on how we create a service that is both responsive and predictive,” says Sakkov.

“For example, by automatically updating your employment status when you get hired, we can create a service that comes to you, not one where you have to figure out where to go whenever you need it.”