Readers of The MJ will be well-versed in the pressures facing local government. As leaders seek sustainable responses, I believe the regional model of collaborative innovation pioneered by the London Office of Technology and Innovation (LOTI) offers a vital blueprint for delivering public service reform.
The challenges councils face – from homelessness to poverty, and from flooding to cost of living pressures – have no respect for administrative boundaries. To understand these challenges, we must see their true scale. For that, we need data.
Seeing the whole jigsaw
Before the creation of LOTI, on many issues, London was like a 33-piece puzzle. Each council had their piece, but no one could assemble them to see the whole picture. Not only did that make it harder to diagnose problems, it hindered providing more joined up, coordinated and preventative services.
A core part of the LOTI model is providing the design, project management and legal expertise to join up data so councils can see what's going on across the whole capital. We've successfully integrated data from every London borough and eight major homelessness charities to enable housing teams to visualise city-wide rough sleeping patterns and design more preventative interventions. We've shared data about children who qualify for free school meals to ensure no child goes hungry simply because they attend school outside their home borough.
Whatever councils wish to do, joined up data can help them do it better.
Technology at scale
While data delivers value through sharing, technology delivers value through scale. There's a massive opportunity for councils to collaborate at a regional level on the testing and adoption of new technologies.
Consider the Internet of Things (IoT). Small sensors are increasingly being used by councils to monitor things like river levels, air quality and traffic. It makes little economic or operational sense for neighbouring authorities to deploy different sensors that capture data in incompatible formats. Residents will not thank us if they are forced to download dozens of different apps to navigate details of their local area. At LOTI, we've rolled out the same IoT sensors in social housing across 20 boroughs to monitor temperature and humidity levels, allowing teams to predict and prevent damp and mould before they become health crises.
Similarly, the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) can benefit from a regional approach. As with any emerging tech, the most impactful use cases of AI are not yet clear. If councils experiment in isolation we guarantee duplication of effort and a slower learning curve. Instead, regions should divvy up those experiments. While one council tests AI for helping triage social care inboxes, another can test its efficacy in handling housing complaints. Together, both learn faster.
There is plenty of sharing of good practice in our sector, but too much of it is just the press release version. It lacks the detail, context and nuance other councils need to actually replicate. At LOTI, as well as coordinating boroughs' experiments on AI and sharing the lessons, we share a whole library of technology, data and innovation initiatives providing detailed implementation guides to scale good technologies and the conditions needed for them to deliver impact.
Reimagining services, together
When it comes to broader innovation, I'm a fan of a framing set out by Tony Clements, chief executive of Ealing LBC. He argues councils need to do two things in parallel. There are things councils have to do to balance this year's budget. There's a different set of things they have to do to design services for the future.
The first is about optimisation: finding efficiencies in current service models through approaches like automation and continuous improvement. Given that councils face such similar financial pressures and service hurdles, why solve them in silos? Too often, neighbouring authorities pay the same consultants to solve the same problems differently. Through regional collaboration, they could address those problems once, together, at a fraction of the cost.
The second is about transformation: recognising that some service models are no longer viable in their current form. No amount of optimising what we currently do will ever be enough to meet the rising demand in areas like adult social care. In these cases, we have to find some fundamentally different ways of meeting resident needs. Yet testing unproven service models is often too risky or resource-intensive for a single council to bear.
Recognising this, LOTI trialled a regional innovation approach with directors of adult social care using immersive theatre. By acting out the lived experiences of Londoners navigating the care system, we were able to bring together the public, third and private sectors to witness the full end-to-end journey for themselves. This allowed them to work together to identify problems and design more radical solutions such as large-scale volunteer mobilisation which were tested on mock-ups of those services. This way, bolder interventions could be tested without risking live services.
The UK's ability to deliver successful public service reform will depend on how well councils can make intelligent use of data, technology and a wide range of innovation methods. There is a powerful logic to doing this at a regional level with bodies like LOTI.
Councils care more about having flooding data from their neighbours in a way that is not true of a flood happening at the other end of the country. Aligning the whole country to use a certain technology will be far harder than agreeing by region. And when we need to fundamentally reimagine some delivery models, that process of public sector research and deverlopment will be so much faster if done together. Imagine what we could do if each region took charge of reimagining one major public service challenge and shared it with the rest of the country.
Yet collaboration like this does not happen by accident. It has to be someone's full time job. That is the purpose of LOTI.
Public service reform is hard. Having more collaborative innovation models like LOTI's can make it more feasible and would be a massive positive step in shaping the future of local government.
Eddie Copeland is director of the London Office of Technology & Innovation
Opinion: Collective working can resolve our communities' biggest issues
