by Nick Ray Ball and Sienna 4o🛰️👾(The “Special One”)

April 25, 2025

🛠️ The GDS pre-2003 Service.gov.uk CMS📂💻 Band-Aid Strategy

This page is designed to offer more detail for the first "band-aid" solution presented on The GDS GOV.UK CMS Solution 📂💻🚀.

We begin in the same way but then extend the detail, presenting the full 10-step guide and a stress test that helped us refine the approach along the way.

Jump To:

• 🔧 10-Step Guide — How to Create the Master Subdomain for Service.gov.uk
• ⚠️🧩🧪 Stress Test – Service.gov.uk Master Subdomain Band-Aid Strategy

Across the GOV.UK Service platform, there is clear evidence that much of the underlying CMS infrastructure originates from the late 1990s. The persistence of basic special character bugs — failures to correctly process apostrophes, hyphens, or ampersands — is a hallmark of legacy systems built before modern open-source editors like TinyMCE and CKEditor became standard.

In The GDS GOV.UK CMS Problem 📂💻⚠️, drawing from my experience with our CapeVillas.com S-Web 1 CMS (created in 1999 and launched in 2002), I observed that the CMS issues at the Departments of Justice and Work and Pensions are worse in 2025 than what I encountered over twenty years ago. Based on this, I concluded their code must have originated in the last century.

To reinforce this conclusion, we conducted an independent analysis — and Sienna 4o (GPT-4o) independently reached the same verdict:

GPT-4o: "If a system’s WYSIWYG editor or CMS still has severe special character bugs, it almost certainly descends from pre-2003 architecture — very likely designed in the late 1990s."

That this flaw continues to cripple GOV.UK Service websites today shows that the system was not meaningfully modernised during the 2012 cloud migration; it was simply repackaged and moved to the cloud, while being claimed as innovation.

In The UK Digital Infrastructure Problem 💻🚄🆘, we explained: Yes, there are strategic meetings and grand ideas — but everyone in the room knows there’s an elephant sitting next to the whiteboard:

You can’t run high-speed AI systems on track designed for steam trains.

I remember following a tweet from Richard Thaler or Cass Sunstein to an advert for two Python programmers at Government HQ — 10 Downing Street. Despite the pay being below average — and the reality that you're better off having one more expensive engineer than two at the low end of the pay scale — the advert proudly stated: “No Legacy Code.”

What this really means is there’s no need to attach Government HQ with information from government department systems. Building AI government systems without connecting to departmental databases is absurd. The challenge is not building AI — it is overcoming the legacy infrastructure that, as we have shown, seems to have been created in the last century.

The CMS — the Content Management System — is not merely a website tool; it is the filing system, the administration backbone, and the operational interface upon which government functions depend.

To Make Matters Far Worse

Worsening the problem is the subdomains issue — the fractured setup of GOV.UK. Instead of running one CMS and one unified website, the Government Digital Service (GDS) created thousands of different subdomains — each an independent website — all of which must be independently maintained.

The problem comes when you want to fix something — at Innovate UK (UKRI), they have taken the DWP and HM Courts and Appeals CMS, fixed the special character bugs, and added sorting functionality. But because the setup is fragmented across thousands of subdomains, when it was fixed for UKRI, it was not fixed for Justice or the Department for Work and Pensions.

For a more in-depth view — including a look at HMRC’s (UK tax collection) legacy infrastructure — see The GDS GOV.UK CMS Problem 📂💻⚠️.

Before presenting the ⚛️Sienna AI 🚀S-Web 6VC (Voice Command) AI CMS Solution, we first offer a band-aid fix that would solve this fractured environment. For the full 10-stage patch strategy and stress test, please see the more detailed page: The GDS pre-2003 Service.gov.uk CMS Band-Aid Strategy.

We follow below with a two-paragraph summary of this patch — before moving into the full presentation of the 🚀S-Web 6VC (Voice Command) AI CMS Solution.

🛠️ The GDS pre-2003 Service.gov.uk CMS Band-Aid Strategy

Our analysis of the problem offers some hope: in terms of the CMS systems that allow the public to submit information — be that via a GP-AI Gatekeeper grant application, submitting evidence for HM Courts and Tribunals, or completing a corporation tax return — the problem domain is primarily service.gov.uk. Therefore, in this exercise, this is our principal focus.

Our interim plan begins by creating a new master subdomain — master.service.gov.uk — where the best versions of the existing CMS components (e.g., the UKRI-enhanced CMS) are gathered, cleaned, and improved.

Then, by updating file references to point back to the master subdomain, departments no longer need to manually patch their own copies.
For example:

Improvements, such as enhancing the CMS editor to allow inline links and rich formatting, would be made once at the master level and automatically benefit every linked department.

After upgrades are completed, old subdomains are refreshed using the perfected master files, ensuring that even the most outdated systems inherit modern functionality without disruption. In cases where full replacement is impractical, departments can still link dynamically to the master, avoiding future divergence.

This band-aid strategy is far from perfect — but it creates a far more stable, maintainable bridge that gives departments breathing space while preparing for a true modernisation effort under the ⚛️Sienna AI 🚀S-Web 6VC AI CMS 🛰️🛸🛰️ Mothership architecture.

It is the first step towards bringing GOV.UK Service into the 21st century.

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master.service.gov.uk