Charities and civil society are locked out of government platform infrastructure

GOV.UK Notify, the shared notifications platform serving more than 1,500 public services, explicitly excludes charities, community pharmacies, hospices, housing associations and universities, and no UK body provides equivalent shared digital infrastructure to civil society. Charities re-buy messaging, forms and payments at retail SaaS prices with donated funds. Notify's code is open source, so the technical barrier is trivial. The barrier is institutional: data-processing agreements limited to public bodies, and the absence of any chartered provider. mySociety, SocietyWorks and small intermediaries like Superhighways help at the margins, and the philanthropically backed civic infrastructure operators of the US have no UK counterpart.

The voluntary sector delivers public services under contract and pays commercial rates for infrastructure the state already built and open-sourced. Extending access is one of the cheapest transfers to civil society available. The software is written and running.

Either extend Government-as-a-Platform eligibility to regulated charities on a cost-recovery basis, or charter a civic infrastructure service: a nonprofit operator running the open-sourced Notify and Forms codebases for civil society, seed-funded by trusts and sustained by subscriptions like Open Digital Cooperative.

// Build now: First artefact: trust-seeded nonprofit running the open-sourced Notify/Forms codebases for charities (Open Digital Cooperative model).

The software is written, open-sourced and running, and the stakes are sector-bounded with no dated trigger forcing the institutional exclusion to be resolved this year.