Local government update

The cost of a web transaction in local government, in other words of a contact between a local authority and one of
its citizens, has been estimated to be just
15 pence at 2013 prices. In contrast, the cost
of a telephone transaction was £2.83; for a face-to-face transaction, £8.62.

Given the state of local government finance, there is a compelling case for a ‘channel shift’ to make the primary channel of communication with citizens online. Evidently, not all services can be delivered in this way, but it is clear that there is much unrealised potential for not only cost saving, but also service improvement and greater citizen engagement through online delivery.

Technology is advancing, rapidly causing both falling prices and raised user expectations. Evidence of the public appetite for online information, and particularly mobile data, and their ability to operate available technology, is already clear.

In 2008, 53 per cent of UK adults were buying goods and services online; by 2013, usage had risen to 73 per cent of UK adults accessing the internet every day. An average household in 2013 owned three types of internet-enabled device, but
20 per cent of households owned six devices
or more.

Digital challenge

So, is local government meeting the digital demand? It’s certainly made a start. For example, Hertfordshire County Council’s current social services telecare project for remote monitoring facilities in up to 4,000 homes, now being rolled
out under contract arrangements with Serco
and Tunstall.

The county council expects to achieve both a decrease in the number of referrals to residential social care, and to defer referrals that would have been needed without the monitoring system. Both of these measures will save the council costs. The system is expected to lengthen the periods of independent living for service users thus providing service improvement.

Home visits by carers can be reduced in number and shortened, which may be controversial, as they will not need to spend so long gathering data on service users. In considering operation
of the service overall, the county council expects the available domiciliary care resource to be better allocated by redirecting this to those in greatest need.

Another interesting feature of this
forward-thinking project is that the telecare systems are to be used preventatively, by installation for people not yet in receipt of social care but considered likely to require care in
the future.

As well as the familiar alarm call systems to alert a family member, friend, carer or volunteer in the case of accident or other emergency, the remote monitoring sensors installed in homes can provide medication management, warn of the build-up of carbon monoxide, and communicate flood alerts.

However, meeting these particular social care needs in this way requires major investment and complex multi-party outsourcing arrangements with private sector contractors, which allow the capital cost of the investment to be spread over a long period. Can switching to online realise a much wider range of benefits and do so at relatively modest cost? If so, how is local government coping with these challenges?

Smart people

There is some good news. A report by New Local Government Network, Smart People, Smart Places, highlights that, after a slow and patchy start, local government is now hosting a diverse range of digital initiatives. These are beginning to unlock the benefits of digital technology to provide improved services more cheaply.

Examples are apps for reporting road potholes, data-sharing personal networks to support vulnerable adults and children, online streaming of council meetings with citizens able to put questions to the meeting in real time, remote access to budget decision-making and a social network for sharing homemade meals with people unable to cook for themselves.

However, local government is well behind central government, and both are well behind their counterparts in the US, the world leaders in this field.

In New York, a team of digital experts located at the heart of the mayor’s office has tripled the city corporation’s social media audience, created more than 40 digital learning programmes for New Yorkers and increased the number of open datasets from 350 to more than 2,000. Boston has a similar strategic digital team transforming digital inclusion there.

Limited scope

Some UK initiatives have produced impressive results, but they are all piecemeal and limited in scope. Generally, the public experience is that council websites are sources of information rather than portals for accessing local government services. Council website users also report high failure rates.

More significantly, local government has been slow to adapt to mobile connectivity, and public expectations for this are rising fast. In social media, local government’s steps so far have been limited and users have expressed frustration with the slow response times.

However, the potential social media audience is very large. There are 33 million Facebook accounts and 34 million Twitter accounts in the UK.

Impeded involvement

Smart People, Smart Places found weaknesses in:

• digital skills
• organisational culture
• leadership
• strategic coordination; and
• accountability.

Surprisingly, lack of funding was not identified as one of the main reasons holding up expansion of online. While it is clear that establishing a team of digital experts in the style of New York and Boston is not cost free, the size of the team is really quite small as a proportion of the total staff headcount.

The perceived barriers holding back developments are the ones that hold up any local government organisational change: difficulty in defining the exact outcomes needed, inflexibility of legacy IT systems and infrastructure, and a risk-averse approach to commissioning.

A number of recommendations are made by
the report to overcome these barriers and weaknesses. To foster leadership, there should
be a cabinet member responsible for digital, and
a staff champion with a mix of service-based and technical skills, able to work across all service areas and with external partners.

The champion needs to be sitting centrally – most likely within the chief executive’s office. To change organisational culture and manage risk, the report proposes greater trust in staff to innovate and develop digital skills. Such skills should be audited and promoted, and staff mandated to experiment digitally on a small scale on the understanding that small failures are acceptable.

To engage the community, more effort must go into understanding user’s needs, opening up data (i.e. increasing the number of open datasets) and involving digitally minded citizens in co-production. Council websites should be mobile friendly, and text messaging should be used. Use of personal data stores is encouraged.

The report observes that where a citizen, rather than the council, controls access to their own data and is responsible for its accuracy, they are more likely to be willing to share the data than have it distributed by council diktat.

Finally, the report urges establishing a programme for sector-wide collaboration, so that the fruits of the various local initiatives can be pooled, subsequent improvements coordinated and duplication of effort minimised.

The programme envisaged would cover benchmarking and good practice standards, evaluating innovation, policy development
(e.g. for security requirements), a link with both
the IT professional civic tech communities, opportunities for joint contracting and scaling
up, and a role in fostering local government
digital skills development.

Step-by-step guide

More practically, the report sets out 27 steps. If embedded in management procedures, they will help any council to move towards the ultimate position of digital by default (where the user’s first choice for interacting with the council is online) – a long-established government target.

While most of the practical steps suggested impact on management procedures, several have legal implications for governance, service design and commissioning, employment practices, joint-working arrangements, data-ownership rights and data-sharing protocols.

Implementing the steps will need to be driven by a council-wide digital strategy, in turn reflected in service area plans. It is believed that as yet, only around one in three local authorities has a digital strategy in place.

This gaping hole needs to be filled rapidly, and a good understanding of the implications of the digital agenda by local government legal services will help to shape this. Early preparation for what must inevitably be far-reaching organisational and cultural change will place lawyers much closer to decision-making that may well be critical to their own council’s survival.

A first step might be trying to find out if you have a local civic tech community willing to engage with the council. Is anyone out there up for a hack day? SJ

Peter Hill is a senior associate at Geldards