Teams in wider government: How do you use GOV.UK Frontend and the Design System?

[calvin-lau-sig7]

About this work

Since June 2025, we’ve made updates to the Design System to support work on the GOV.UK brand, in line with the GOV.UK brand guidelines.

As part of GOV.UK Frontend v6.0.0, the colour palette will change to the web palette defined by the GOV.UK brand guidelines.

Currently, our colour palette is open for everyone to use as long as you follow guidelines set out in the Service Manual.

The Making your service look like GOV.UK page says that services not on GOV.UK must not:

• identify itself as being part of GOV.UK
• use the crown or GOV.UK logotype in the header
• use the GDS Transport typeface
• suggest that it’s an official UK government website if it’s not

Right now, we do not know how this list of ‘things that are part of the GOV.UK identity’ will change to include other brand elements like the colour palette.

How you can help

We want to hear from service teams outside of the GOV.UK proposition that use GOV.UK Frontend and the Design System – such as local authorities, arms length bodies, other public sector organisations.

We’d like you to tell us:

• about your organisation
• how you use the GOV.UK Frontend and the colour palette
• how you make your service look different from GOV.UK
• how you extend or modify GOV.UK Frontend for your needs
• what might be at risk for you as we make brand-related changes to our styles, components and patterns

Other ways you can give feedback

You can also give feedback to the Design System team by email
Or give feedback on the #govuk-design-system channel on UK Government Digital Slack

When to give feedback by and our next steps

We’d appreciate hearing from you before 12 January 2026.

We’ll use your feedback to decide how we can support service teams as we release GOV.UK Frontend v.6.0.0. You’ll also help us inform decision-making in our organisation.

[markhobson]

About your organisation

Active Travel England (ATE) is an executive agency under DfT. We have a separate website and so our digital services are hosted under our own domain rather than gov.uk. This means that we fall under the non-GOV.UK service guidance and have to make our branding distinct from the GOV.UK brand.

How you use the GOV.UK Frontend and the colour palette

Our digital services are built with Python and use the GOV.UK Frontend Jinja Macros port to produce the frontend. We adopt the standard GOV.UK Frontend colour palette but change the brand colour to the DfT organisation colour to align with our branding.

We also use the GOV.UK One Login Service Header which in turn uses GOV.UK Frontend.

How you make your service look different from GOV.UK

Following the guidance we:

1. Remove the crown from the GOV.UK header. This would be helped by:
   • Make it possible to override or remove the Crown logotype from the header govuk-frontend#1639
2. Remove the crown from the GOV.UK One Login service header. This would be helped by:
   • Allow Crown Logo to be customised govuk-one-login/service-header#40
3. Remove the crown from the GOV.UK footer. This is not explicitly in the guidance and needs to be confirmed by:
   • How to adapt footer for non-GOV.UK services govuk-frontend#5952
4. Replace the crown with the crest in the favicons. This is not explicitly in the guidance but was inferred from the above. Recently, though, we have received confirmation from the GOV.UK Brand Team that departments can use the crown for favicons and social media avatars. We will still need to change the brand colour in the favicons to adopt this:
   • Use digital crown for favicon acteng/update-your-capital-schemes#215
5. Remove the GDS Transport font
6. Change the brand colour to the DfT organisation colour. This also requires working around:
   • Notification component uses govuk-brand-colour for border colour #4877

See the maintenance docs for one of our services that highlights the extra work that this involves.

How you extend or modify GOV.UK Frontend for your needs

Very little, just customising the brand colour as mentioned above.

What might be at risk for you as we make brand-related changes to our styles, components and patterns

Hopefully not much if the changes respect a different brand colour.

---

As an aside, it would be very useful for the GOV.UK Frontend docs to explain exactly how it can be configured for non-GOV.UK services. This would clarify the grey areas mentioned above.

Furthermore, it feels worth revisiting why so many departments and executive agencies, that are generally considered part of government, are required to avoid using the GOV.UK brand. For example, ATE and many of those with custom design systems. It would save a lot of effort if they could adopt the vanilla GOV.UK brand, especially during times like the recent rebrand.

[alexwybraniec]

Hello!

about your organisation

Camden Council.

how you use the GOV.UK Frontend and the colour palette

We consider LBCamden Frontend to sit downstream of GOV.UK Frontend, and both utilise and override styles and components.

https://www.camden.gov.uk/ uses components and styles in HTML, and sites like https://families.camden.gov.uk/ use components and styles as Nunjucks macros. We also have an experimental JSX version of LBCamden Frontend we use for transactional applications.

how you make your service look different from GOV.UK

We override the colour and font styles, and have custom components.

how you extend or modify GOV.UK Frontend for your needs

We've added multiple new components, and we've also moved our tooling away from GOV.UK's, implementing Storybook, Vite and Vitest.

what might be at risk for you as we make brand-related changes to our styles, components and patterns

Hard to know, but we have a suite of visual regression tests that will allow us to identify the differences very quickly.

Please let me know if you need any more information.

[gracebuttall]

About your organisation
HM Land Registry is an executive agency and non-ministerial department. Our landing page is on GOV.UK and our main citizen services are hosted on a GDS domain. The rest of our services then sit on domains hosted by us. This includes, a number of customer help pages/services, 1 service that citizens and professional access and all our professional services. We have a lot of user journeys that take the user from GOV branding to HMLR branding.

How you use the GOV.UK Frontend and the colour palette
Newer services from the last decade (either hosted on GDS or HMLR domains) use the GOV.UK Frontend. If the service is on a HMLR domain then we have changed the necessary components to adopt our own branding such as the old GOV header uses our own green for the bottom border.

How you make your service look different from GOV.UK
For HMLR hosted services we use the old version of the GOV.UK header but use our brand green for the border bottom. We also use our own logo in the top left for the professional services. We have a slightly more bespoke footer that uses our own logo in the bottom right though we still used the GOV.UK grey that was in the old footer component. You can see some of this in our design system

We are currently looking to change our header and footer to be as consistent as possible with GOV.UK's new ones however we are unsure just how much like GOV.UK to look like. The guidance from the service manual is to not look like GOV but we feel it's important for users to keep a fairly consistent look and feel. Whilst its obvious to remove the crown and GOV.UK logo other aspects such as colour are less clear. Then it is also unclear how much of the blue tint we should adopt for component such as the nav bar and footer.

How you extend or modify GOV.UK Frontend for your needs
Very little, as you can see from our design system the only current extensions are the header and footer. Other components coming soon are not to modify but extend such as maps in services.

As much as possible we stick as close to GOV.UK as possible for a number of reasons but a consistent for experience for users being top of the list.

What might be at risk for you as we make brand-related changes to our styles, components and patterns
HMLR has quite a bold green for its main brand colour which is difficult to use digitally and also clashes with the GOV blue. If the blue tints are applied to widely across components this wouldn't be ideal.

Great that you have set up this github discussion to get some input from other departments it is appreciated. A number of departments did meet recently to discuss inconsistencies across services not hosted on GOV.UK. Colours came up as a key area of this but the conversation also covered components in general and the header in particular. We collated all our thoughts in a document that I will send over to you shortly.