The principle of a modern state appears right at the top of the coalition agreement. “Service to citizens is one of the main tasks of a modern state,” it reads. A state in the broadest sense: administration, services and local authorities. Two aspects are highlighted to develop this “service to citizens”: modernising and strengthening the civil service, and digitisation--the subject of the day.

What is the programme? “The government intends to further promote the digitisation of services and the simplification of the state’s administrative procedures, while retaining the possibility of using more traditional, non-digital exchanges.”

The current state of play

The 2023 OECD Digital Government Index report, published in January 2024 and covering the period 2020-2022, paints a mixed picture of the situation in the grand duchy: Luxembourg is just below average, in the soft underbelly of OECD countries. Where the country performs worst is in the ‘data driven’ dimension. This means developing the governance and tools needed to access, share and reuse data throughout the public sector.

It is surely no coincidence that the first concrete measure introduced by the government concerns the adoption of the “once only” principle. The project, spearheaded by digitalisation minister  (DP) was , eight days after prime minister (CSV) delivered , in which he announced the widespread adoption of this principle.

This principle is reflected in bill 8395 on the use of data in a trusted environment and the implementation of the “once only” principle. The bill is currently before the Chamber of Deputies’ committee on higher education, research and digitisation. The rapporteur is Gérard Schockmel (DP). Both Obertin and Frieden hope to see it adopted by the end of the year. According to the financial statement attached to the bill, the introduction of the system will require an additional budget of €310,000 for 2025 and subsequent years up to 2028, to cover the costs of experts and studies. The bill for the Government IT Centre (Centre des technologies de l’information de l’État, CTIE), which will have to set up a back-office platform to manage access requests and authorisations, is estimated at €750,000.

Promoting a culture of sharing

What does the text say? The main thrust of the draft is the obligation on the state, ministries and local authorities to share the data they hold on citizens and businesses, where this is necessary to process a request initiated by the latter. This may seem natural in an information society where patience is not a cardinal virtue, but until now it has met with a great deal of resistance.

The first source of resistance is the fear of a police state from which nothing can escape. This is a fear that Obertin set out to allay when presenting her bill: “The widespread exchange of information between administrations will not be used to monitor citizens’ activities in order to detect possible fraud. The data cannot be used for any purpose other than that for which it was requested. And if tax data has to be circulated, its use will be particularly closely monitored.” Another limitation is that this exchange of data will be restricted to national use.

The second resistance is more subtle and comes from the ministries and administrations themselves, according to observers of government affairs. In Luxembourg there is a culture of administrative compartmentalisation due to an extremely strong political dimension linked to an unwritten distribution of the main ministries between the parties. There was no trust between two ministries and an administration of different political colours. The absence of a systemic data-sharing organisation with clear, independent and apolitical rules penalised the country. Legally, government departments were prohibited from sharing their data. It’s a prohibition behind which it was practical to take refuge.

From now on, as soon as the law is passed, the state, ministries and local authorities will be obliged to share the data they hold on citizens and businesses alike, as long as it is necessary to investigate a request initiated by the latter. The citizen must first initiate an administrative procedure, and data sharing will be limited to the information needed to complete the procedure. “From that point onwards, it will be an obligation for the services holding this information to exchange it, so that citizens will no longer need to retrieve the data themselves that is necessary for their application and give it to the administration that needs it,” summarises the minister.

All of this will be done in compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which requires confidentiality and anonymity of data in situations of re-use where knowledge of the constituent is not imperative. The aim of using this data is to facilitate the creation of new services, make government more efficient and provide tools to combat social challenges.

Digitalisation to help simplify administration

By promoting digitalisation, the government also wants to promote administrative simplification. But is digitisation necessarily synonymous with administrative simplification?

In this area, which the OECD report calls “user-driven”--understanding the ability of governments to place the needs of users at the heart of the design and delivery of public policies and services--Luxembourg is clearly lagging behind. The solution? To see digitalisation not simply as the digitisation of existing services, but as an opportunity to rethink processes by integrating user needs.

This is what Estonia has done--the example favoured by professionals when the issue is raised. And how? By promoting the use of the e-wallet ab initio.

What is an e-wallet? In a nutshell, all your personal data--diplomas, career, health, etc.--and all your administrative procedures are in one place, accessible at all times, all secured by a strongly protected digital identity. The adoption of an e-wallet features prominently in the coalition agreement, “in order to broaden the range of practical uses of secure digital official documents.”

This is not a new subject. Bill 8168 on the identification of natural persons was tabled in the Chamber of Deputies on 2 March 2023. The bill sought to introduce a legal basis for the state to set up a personal digital wallet mobile application to enable users to create and hold official digital certificates with the same value as the usual paper certificates. The bill was withdrawn from parliament’s roll on 15 July, with the government preferring to wait for the European e-wallet, which is currently in the test phase and will be available to all European citizens wishing to use it in 2026. There is a risk that the overhaul of existing administrative processes will fall by the wayside.

An accessible administration

Similarly, is digitalisation necessarily synonymous with accessibility for citizens? Not everyone is equal when it comes to digitisation. “Digital transformation must bring people together and not exclude them,” Obertin told MPs on 23 January when presenting the broad outlines of the “digitisation” section of the coalition agreement. At the time, the minister announced that the and platforms--the cornerstones of Luxembourg-style eGovernment--would be further developed and that, at the same time, additional ‘guichet’ physical reception points would be set up.

On 1 October, the minister unveiled the first concrete details of these announcements. A “life events” section has been added to guichet.lu. The idea is to bring together on a single page all the essential information on administrative procedures and existing support for events as diverse as marriage, birth, maternity leave and financial aid. Ten situations are available and ten new ones will be added by mid-October.

Another new feature is the possibility, via myguichet.lu, of scheduling video appointments with government departments. The National Health Fund (Caisse nationale de santé, CNS) will also be offering this facility in November. The brand new secure platform on which the video meeting takes place is the fruit of GovTech Lab’s “Virtual Meeting Room” innovation partnership. This project has been financed by the European Union as part of the Recovery and Resilience Plan.

Finally, local physical “Guichets” will be deployed throughout the country. Where will they be set up? The ministry of digitalisation has just launched a survey to gather suggestions from the public, which will run until 6 December. Details can be found on the ministry’s website.

Zoom on the CTIE

The Government IT Centre (Centre des technologies de l'information de l’État, CTIE) is at the heart of the state’s digitalisation process. Created in March 1974 by the Pierre Werner government and reformed in March 2008 by (CSV), then minister for the civil service and administrative reform, its role is to support the government, ministries and administrations in digitalising their services. With a staff of around thirty, the department now has more than 600 people working under the direction of Patrick Houtsch. Its mission is “to promote and organise, in a rational and coordinated manner, the automation of state administrations, municipalities and associations of municipalities and their public establishments, particularly with regard to the collection, circulation and processing of data.” It also works on the security of the state’s IT infrastructure. It is behind the online portals guichet.lu and myguichet.lu, as well as the physical counter in Luxembourg City, where all citizens who are reluctant to use digital technology can come to do their paperwork.

This article was written in for the , published on 23 October. The content is produced exclusively for the magazine. It is published on the website as a contribution to the complete Paperjam archive.

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