LG/WWW

Back in February 2025, I set aside some time in my diary to do something simple: talk to strangers, once a week. The idea was borrowed from the NHS' Randomised Coffee Trial and similar initiatives, though in my version the selection of participants was anything but random.  I wanted to discuss technology, data, and the internet as they relate to the design and delivery of public services, though we could talk about anything, provided:it isn’t: A product or service you’d like to sell me A political party or politician Working for me, or me working for you I expected a handful of takers in the first few weeks. A year and a new role later, it's still going. The topics have been as varied as I’d hoped. Artificial intelligence came up often,  from the ethics of agentic AI to specific tools and the case for small language models.  Other conversations went deep on Universal Property Reference Numbers, development capacity in local government, and the broader challenges of digit...

Advancements in technology open up new avenues of opportunity, allowing many to achieve what was once the preserve of a specialised few. This should however come with a caveat: just because technology enables you to do something, doesn't mean you should. Before the modern Content Management System (CMS), publishing to the web was a technical endeavour.  Many early websites were built with hand-crafted HTML, and while applications such as MS Frontpage and Dreamweaver, and database-driven platforms that with PHP and Classic ASP front ends later reduced the need to code every single page, you still required a significant degree of technical knowledge to publish. The advent of CMS, and later Enterprise CMS, opened up content creation, allowing anyone with basic IT skills to edit and add content, and over the following years we saw the consequence: a proliferation of truly awful websites. In some cases, these were vast digital estates containing tens of thousands of pages, authored by h...

It’s often been fun, occasionally frustrating, always fulfilling, but this is my final week employed in local government. There are few types of organisation that deliver a similar volume and variety of functions as local government  Beyond emptying bins and fixing potholes we see so often in the media, there’s social care (often portrayed as just a NHS function), housing, roads, public transport, education, planning, leisure (including sports centres), culture (including libraries), and very much more. Working part of a digital team in a council it's likely you’ll engage with every department across the organisation during the course of a year, offering real variety whatever role you’re in. The next few years will see a huge change across local government, not only in the 21 English counties invited to go through reorganisation (LGR), but through devolution, and everywhere as a result the continued stretch on public finances and rising public expectations driven by the acceleratin...

Last month I gave evidence to the Science, Innovation, and Technology Committee in Parliament. I haven’t written much about it because you can watch it yourself here. I thank the committee for inviting me to speak, and its members for their insightful questions on how technology has improved service delivery. Since my appearance I’ve been asked a few times what I think was the most thought provoking question or comment the committee made, and it’s perhaps not the one you think it might be, so I’m writing about it here. That comment was from...

It's likely there are hundreds of solutions that utilise generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) already in use across the public sector. Where I work we're already using AI for a variety of tasks, from drafting reports using i.AI's pilot of Minute , or writing job applications which we developed ourselves . Under the surface of these solutions you'll find many have at least one thing in common; They are essentially user interfaces for large language models (LLMs) owned by OpenAI, Amazon, Google, or Meta. We've seen a lot about scaling up the use of AI in the public sector recently, and this letter from the Department of Science, Innovation, and Technology states that the Government calculated their efficiency targets using the assumption that 100% of routine tasks could be automated. Whether that's achievable is a question for another time, but even if half of that target was reached, that's 50% of UK public sector tasks essentially outsourced to US tec...

Service patterns are reusable designs for common problems that help create consistent functions and services.  I've been talking about service patterns and design with people from around the public sector recently, partly because this could be key to a wholesale reshaping of the public sector. Service design goes beyond the use of digital, but given almost every public service now makes some use of technology now, service design and digital transformation are intrinsically linked. I became aware of the need for common service patterns at an event organised by the Department for Communities and Local Government a few years ago. The workshop was part of the now defunct GOV.Verify programme, and brought together licencing and digital teams from councils across the country. The idea was to see if Verify could be used as part of a common service to apply for a taxi licence, but as the day went on it became apparent that despite similar roles all delivering services to same legislation,...