Life-event services: designing around what happens to people

A life-event service is organised around something that happens to a person, such as having a baby, moving house, starting a business or losing a relative, rather than around the departments that each handle one part of it. It matters because these are the moments when people deal with the most public bodies at once, often under stress, and when gaps between agencies cause the most harm. Designing for the event lets the state do the joining up instead of leaving it to the person.

Designing around events, not agencies

Estonia's Information System Authority (RIA) puts the problem plainly: life and business events bring obligations and needs for public services, and with many institutions providing many services, the system is hard for people to find their way through.¹ Its answer is to bring the activities linked to one event into a single service, usually provided jointly by several institutions through one national channel, so that the complexity of the state stays invisible to the person.¹

The European Union (EU) uses the same frame in law. The Single Digital Gateway Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2018/1724, lists the procedures Member States must offer fully online under life-event headings: birth, residence, studying, working, moving, retiring, and starting, running and closing a business.² That obligation has applied since 12 December 2023.²

The annex shows how much one event can involve. Under moving, it lists registering a change of address, with confirmation of deregistration at the old address and registration at the new one, and registering a motor vehicle.² Under starting and running a business, it lists notifying the business activity, registering as an employer and registering employees with compulsory pension and insurance schemes, among other steps.² Each step usually sits with a different body.

From one-stop to proactive and no-stop services

Life-event services sit on a spectrum. A one-stop service gathers everything in one place but still waits for the person to come. A proactive service starts from the state's side: the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) describes a proactive government as one that pre-empts requests, providing answers or solutions through push rather than pull delivery.³ A no-stop service goes furthest, completing the process with no action from the person at all.

The OECD made proactiveness one of the six dimensions of its 2020 Digital Government Policy Framework.³ In the same paper it reported Estonia's target of seven life-event services offered automatically and proactively by the end of 2020, the first of which, having a child, was implemented in October 2019.³ Services for the death of a relative, getting married, retiring and entering military service were named as next in line.³

Two documented examples

Estonia: family benefits after a birth

When a child's birth is entered in Estonia's population register, the Social Insurance Board's system automatically checks data from various databases to see whether the parent is entitled to support, and prepares a pre-filled offer.⁴ The offer is sent by email, and both parents can review it in the self-service portal and confirm the option that suits them.⁴ The parents still confirm, so this is proactive rather than no-stop.

Estonia's state portal now hosts a set of event services, including getting married, having a baby, the death of a loved one and settling in Estonia.¹ It reports that proactive services were visited over 478,000 times in 2025.¹

The UK: Tell Us Once after a death

In the United Kingdom (UK), Tell Us Once lets a person report a death to most government organisations in one go.⁵ The registrar explains the service when the death is registered, and either completes it with the person or gives them a reference number to use online or by phone within 28 days.⁵ It then notifies bodies including HM Revenue and Customs, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Passport Office, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency and the local council.⁵

Its limits are instructive. It covers people who lived in England, Scotland or Wales, not Northern Ireland, and banks, utility companies and personal or workplace pension schemes outside the public sector still have to be contacted separately.⁵

What it takes behind the scenes

The visible service is the easy part. Underneath, most life-event services rest on four things:

• Data sharing between registers. The trigger, such as a registered birth or death, has to reach every body that needs it, which depends on reliable registries and a secure exchange layer.
• Legal bases. Each body needs the power to receive and act on the data, which is the practical core of the once-only principle.
• Consent for personalised services. In Estonia, personalised event services can only be used after the person gives consent, and the marriage service shows the status of a new identity document only if the person has agreed to that monitoring.¹
• Identity and ownership. People must be reliably identified, as covered in the guide to digital identity, and one body must own the whole journey. In Estonia that is, in most cases, the service owner, which coordinates the other institutions and RIA as the portal's administrator.¹

When proactive decisions go wrong

A proactive decision is only as good as the data it starts from, and register data does not always match real life. Estonia's Social Insurance Board states that family benefits are paid only if both parents and the child actually live in Estonia, and that population register residence data or citizenship alone is not sufficient.⁶ A system that paid purely on register entries would pay some people wrongly and then have to recover the money.

The opposite error is quieter: people missing from the registers, or whose records are wrong, may never receive an offer at all. That is why proactive services need a clear account of what was decided and on what data, a simple way to correct the underlying record, a route to challenge the decision, and an application route for anyone the system missed. Opinions differ on how far no-stop services should go. A confirmation step, like the one in Estonia's family benefit offer, costs the person a minute but gives them a chance to spot an error before it takes effect.