WIREDGOV

Blog posted by: Adam Robertson, Senior Product Manager, Government Digital Service, 03 October 2023 – Categories: GOV.UK Forms.

Here at GDS, we’re making it easier for departments to build better digital services. GOV.UK Forms is an online form builder which can be used to make accessible and easy to use digital forms for GOV.UK. It saves time for departments that are processing form submissions, and time for users that are filling in forms.

In just a matter of minutes, government teams can replace PDF and other document-based forms with digital forms which all users can access and are legally compliant with the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018. 

Best of all, there’s no need for any technical knowledge and it’s completely free!

GOV.UK Forms is currently in private beta, where we’re testing the product out with a small number of teams that own forms. This is to help us steadily understand how our product is working and what issues we need to address. After that, we’ll move into public beta, where we’ll open up GOV.UK Forms for any central government department to use freely.

We wanted to share what we’ve been up to since our last update, and what we’re doing to open up private beta for a wider pool of users - a phase that we’re calling ‘Early Access’. This will allow departments with forms that only require current features to start building them, and also allow any government user to try out our product. It will also help us to ramp up our overall user numbers and test the stability of our platform before public beta.

What we’ve done

In October 2022, the Insolvency Service was the first government organisation to publish a form with us. This was a relatively simple form as we only supported quite basic features at the time. The vast majority of document-based forms require more complex features to turn these into digital forms, including multiple options, declaration statements and more.

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