The public sector has a duplication problem. And we’re all paying for it.

A café owner in Aberdeen applies for food business registration. A few months later, she opens a second site in Edinburgh and starts again. Often, it is a different form, a different officer, a different timeline and a different experience altogether. The same business is being asked to repeat a process that should already know something about her.

For years, public sector digital work has focused on the parts people can see: better portals, cleaner forms and more accessible online journeys. All of that matters. But the bigger problem sits underneath, where similar processes, data requirements and workflows are being rebuilt by different organisations with no shared foundation.

This is not only a Scottish issue. Across the UK, licensing is one of the clearest points of contact between businesses, local authorities, regulators and central government. Too many of those processes are still fragmented, paper-heavy and challenging to connect. Businesses provide the same information more than once. Officers re-enter data into separate systems. Records sit in formats that cannot easily be compared, shared or trusted at scale.

For digital, service and transformation leaders, this creates a difficult position. They are expected to reduce cost, improve user experience, modernise legacy systems and provide better data, often with the same teams and tighter budgets. The argument for shared infrastructure is not theoretical. It is a practical way to stop spending scarce time and money rebuilding capabilities that already exist elsewhere.

Fragmentation is a hidden tax

Every time a public body buys or builds its own system for a process that already exists elsewhere, money and effort are spent twice. The pattern repeats across forms, payments, bookings, renewals, inspections, enforcement and reporting.

Public sector staff feel the impact first. When official systems do not connect to what people need, workarounds appear. Spreadsheets. Side databases. Manual trackers. Extra emails. People create workarounds when the main process leaves gaps.

Nobody joins the public sector to copy data from one system into another, chase missing information by email, or maintain a spreadsheet that only exists because the main system cannot be trusted or used. Shared infrastructure should remove that kind of work, not just make the screen it happens on look better.

All this before we even talk about automation and AI.

Businesses and citizens feel it too. A national operator working across several authorities and governing bodies can find itself managing a different version of the same journey in every area. Smaller businesses lose hours they do not have. For the public, the result is slower decisions, weaker visibility and less consistent services.

At the Holyrood Connect Digital Transformation event, we asked public sector practitioners where they saw the most duplication in digital delivery. Forty-one percent pointed to manual workarounds used to bridge disconnected systems. Twenty-nine percent pointed to re-entering the same data across systems. Those answers describe daily operational problems, not abstract technology challenges.

Build once, use everywhere

Shared infrastructure gives the public sector a practical way out of that cycle. Common components can be available out of the box, with configuration where services genuinely differ. The core does not need to be rebuilt for every council, agency, directorate or licence type.

That does not mean one giant system forced on everyone. Public sector technology has enough scars from that kind of thinking. The better model is modular: shared foundations, common data standards and reusable components that still allow local or service-level flexibility.

The Scottish Government’s common components strategy, cited in the Digital Strategy for Scotland, commits to embedding shared platforms and components across the public sector by 2028. The principle now needs further practical proof, and licensing is a useful place to start because the patterns repeat and a component is already live.

Shared infrastructure changes the starting point, but it also goes much further than forms, which are often only the visible layer of a fragmented process. Information can be structured consistently from submission, officers get better visibility and national reporting becomes more reliable. It also reduces the time spent chasing, correcting and re-entering data. That time goes back into the work that protects the public: inspections, enforcement, advice, training and follow-up.

The first process is usually the hardest because the foundation has to be built. After that, value compounds. Payments, notifications, identity checks, reporting, renewals and enforcement workflows can be reused, configured and improved rather than started again. Change, and automation, can happen more easily at national scale.

The appetite is there. The blocker is alignment.

Digital transformation has picked up baggage: overrun projects, expensive consultancy, technology bought before the problem was clear. Scepticism inside the public sector has not appeared from nowhere.

But there is appetite for a more practical model. At the same event, we asked how relevant the common component approach felt to people’s organisations. Seventy-three percent said it was relevant or highly relevant. Nobody said it was not relevant at all. The largest group, forty percent, said it was relevant but they needed more internal alignment to act on it.

That is the hard bit now. Public bodies understand the problem. The technology itself is no longer the hardest part. But they need a route to start, prove value and build confidence without taking on a sprawling transformation programme with limited resources.

So start with one repeatable process. Solve it properly. Add the next. Let the evidence build and the benefits compound.

Scotland, and the wider UK public sector, will not cut duplication by launching more standalone services or digitising forms one by one. The way forward is sharing the underlying foundations that make services work in the first place.

James Buchan is CEO and Co-founder of ePass, a shared digital platform for public sector licensing, permitting and registration. ePass helps teams move from fragmented systems and manual processes to one configurable platform for the full licence lifecycle.

Learn more about how ePass helps public bodies reduce duplication at epass.tech

This article is sponsored by ePass