The government started an initiative, later backed out in nearly every aspect of "openness" and hired some Fraunhofer FOKUS people (federal research institute) do code something.
They used a huge JEE app-server as foundation for their work, have not a single test and neither a documentation. When they launched a couple of months ago, their production server went down for 2 days besides their research in "cloud computing" which does Fraunhofer as well. (=> https://govdata.de sources at https://github.com/fraunhoferfokus/opendata-platform)
So, congrats to UK. You're doing it right. Please continue this work and put more stress on incompetent and lazy political actors and "research factories" in other countries, e.g. Germany.
In other words, they hired the wrong guys.
Liam Maxwell and folks at GDS are hitting all the right notes so far.