By Mark Thompson

This year, I was fortunate enough to engage in discussion about how technology can be used to improve our ravaged public services at both the Labour Conference in Liverpool on 24 September and the Conservative Conference in Birmingham on 30 September. The title of both panels was “Improving public service productivity: can we have better services for less money?”, and it was ably chaired by the Institute for Government. Other panellists included Georgia Gould MP, Parliamentary Secretary at the Cabinet Office with the brief for public service reform, Baroness Neville-Rolfe, Former Cabinet Office and Treasury Minister, Nick Davies, Programme Director at the Institute for Government, and Dan Butler, Head of Government Affairs at Google Cloud UK. As might be expected from such a panel, discussion ranged over a broad number of topics, so I will focus on a few high-level impressions here.

The first thing to say concerns the conferences in general: the press was indeed right about the broad moods at each. Labour’s event did feel a little more subdued – even apprehensive? – than one might expect for a newly-installed administration elected on a landslide, whilst the Conservatives definitely seemed to be in Party Mode: the three main bars in the open-plan Hyatt Regency hotel were working overtime, the booze flowed and I detected a sense of ‘demob-happy’ relief that – amongst other pressing concerns – the need to improve our public services was now Someone Else’s Problem.

And so to those public services. Whilst of course there was the expected difference in mood music between the two panels about, say, involving the private sector, shrinking the state ‘cutting waste’, and so on, the key message of this blog is that neither party yet has any worked plan. Indeed – and I accept that I might be expected to say this given my job – discussing how ever-accelerating technological innovation should shape our public services should be a Main Hall issue, not relegated to fringe events like these. The fact that these discussions are not more mainstream should, I believe, be a source of concern for us all.

This is not, of course, to say that (often somewhat breathless) references to AI, or to digital identity, or security, or to tech procurement, don’t pop up from time to time everywhere, because they do.

So what’s my concern?

It’s this: fundamentally, wherever tech is discussed, it is almost always in terms of what new digital toys we should be giving our existing public services to play with, to experiment and ‘innovate’ on the front line. Whilst there’s nothing necessarily wrong with this as a principle, we’re bolting this stuff onto a hopelessly outdated, duplicative organisational structure that struggles to share strategy, good ideas, data, and of course funding, and where adding new technology risks merely embedding all this duplication still further, generating the next generation of siloed government legacy. An example might be the hundreds of social housing organisations currently initiating separate discussions with suppliers about building ‘digital layers’ that will enable them to engage digitally with customers, as well as to use sensors to monitor housing stock within a live network of assets and suppliers. They are all essentially talking about doing the same thing, but instead bespoking it hundreds of times over, with little-to-no advantage to their customers; the only ones laughing are the armies of tech suppliers and consultants they will need to pay to make this happen over and again.

In the private sector, major corporates would never aim to do this (with differing degrees of success, it must be admitted): rather, they would try to look holistically at their changing purpose, mission, strategy, customers, partners, suppliers, competitors, position in the value chain, operating model, organisational structure and capabilities, and technology architecture; all of these are considered to be constantly evolving as they keep pace not just with changing customer expectations, but crucially, the proliferation of new technologies that make new offerings, and ways of delivering these, possible. So – perhaps barring competitors – why do political parties leave all these considerations outside the door when they discuss the future of public services in conference?

The usual reasons, I’m afraid. Short political cycles mitigate against forming and executing long-term strategies for reform; anyway, structural reform along the dimensions above necessarily involves winners and losers, and (in spite of the fact that politics is all about deciding on winners and losers) political parties seem reluctant to engage with those sorts of conversation. Then there’s the general lack of digital education amongst a political class who, in most cases, also lack senior organisational experience ‘out there’. Add to this the distractions of general ‘BAU’ (business-as-usual), budgetary constraints, Treasury Green Book protocols that mitigate against collective investment, and the relative disinterest amongst both general public and press in digitally-enabled reform, and you have a perfect storm.

So what do I take away from these two conference events? There seems to be acknowledgement everywhere that technology is reshaping our lives, and that it has a strong role to play in helping public services to become more productive: both in improving services on the front line by making them more co-ordinated and informed by data, as well as in saving them money. The sticking point, as ever, is what we do about it. I came away more convinced than ever that many of us are having the wrong conversation, and that we need to move from discussing how new tech can improve [existing] public services, to one that asks how we fundamentally rethink our public services around better use of new tech. It’s fundamentally a tech-enabled business conversation, not a tech conversation – and until we grasp this particular nettle I fear our public services will remain in intensive care for some time to come.