What’s next? Chapter Four…
(Part of an occasional series, following on from What’s next? Chapter Three)
TL;DR: I’m joining Public Digital to be part of their exciting work supporting more of the public sector through radical transformation. I still strongly believe in the mission of disruptors like Placecube, and how important open, flexible and community-led digital platforms are in delivering the improved services and outcomes citizens need. I will continue to advocate and work towards making that shift happen.
I joined Placecube in 2018 with the ambition of contributing to a big mission in local public services – providing a truly open digital platform for councils and other public bodies to build internet age digital services and experiences. As I said in the post I published back then, I had come to realise that my personal mission over the past 15 years in Bristol had been to help local public services design and deliver better ways of meeting people’s needs, enabled by open technologies.
Continuing that mission, Placecube set out to be a different kind of supplier, one that stuck to the principles and values exemplified in the Local Digital Declaration that I had helped the Ministry for Housing, Communities & Local Government (MHCLG) Local Digital team to draft and publish, with 40+ councils and sector organisations as co-signatories. We promised councils that our Digital Place platform would use open standards, provide open APIs and be open source, removing the vendor lock-in that continues to hold so many councils back. At the same time we promised that we would care about accessibility, security and well designed services as much as councils do, committing to develop with these qualities in mind without having to be pushed into it by our customers. And because we published our code with an open source licence, we would make those well-designed services and integration connectors available for re-use by any other council without additional costs, helping local government to benefit from collaboration.
In 2018 it felt like the tide was rising for local government service design and digital. The Declaration marked a moment of collective ambition and intent, and many innovative digital leaders were being appointed across the country, including new people joining local government from successful careers in central government and the private sector. Many of those leaders had an ambition to tackle the barriers that had held local government back from designing and delivering truly digital services, particularly around breaking the oligarchy of back office systems that were generally characterised by poorly documented, costly and limited capability APIs (and some which still didn’t have any APIs at all), and a plethora of “citizen access portals” that weren’t designed with any user research or user experience principles in mind. All of this added cost and barriers to innovation and joined up services, frustrating residents, council officers and elected members. As we toured the country in 2019 we could see a real ambition and appetite for a new kind of supplier and products.
But of course the world took a different turn in 2020, as the COVID pandemic hit every country and all energy and effort had to be refocused on saving lives and supporting people who had lost their sources of income. Since then the public sector has been under increasing pressure from a combination of shocks – the continued impacts of austerity, the war in Ukraine, energy price rises, economic impacts of Brexit, an ongoing cost of living crisis, and surging demand for council services such as social care and homelessness. These pressures and previous governments’ approaches to funding local government have brought many councils to the brink of “bankruptcy” and some have gone over the edge. In these circumstances it’s not surprising that the ambition and capacity of the sector for internet age service transformation has in fact declined, with many clinging on rather than having the space to think boldly. But this hasn’t removed the need for real change, in fact the need is greater than ever.
Through the past four years we have delivered on our promises with Digital Place and we’ve stuck to our intentions to be a different kind of supplier – as evidenced by feedback from our customers. Despite the challenges for the sector, we have grown from nothing to a great set of customers and have built some fantastic new capabilities that solve problems for the public sector over the past years. This includes work delivered through collaborations with customers who have won Local Digital Funding that’s built enhanced low code features and a council specific commerce capability into the platform.
But we’ve also seen some discouraging signs, that I believe are driven by the financial and political position that has intensified in local government over the past few years. Whereas in 2018 people were talking about whole service transformation and beginning to focus on service design rather than just the technology side of “digital”, in the past couple of years to 2024 we have seen many councils reverting to a focus on trying to cut posts and remove manual tasks, and in many cases simply copying their old processes onto new platforms, with no attempt to improve them. With too few exceptions, there is a lack of capacity, time or vision for the kind of digitally enabled service transformation that the sector really needs to pivot away from transactional service efficiency towards delivering better outcomes for people across the whole place. To some extent the appetite to do the really hard work of designing services so that they meet people’s needs and remove wasteful and frustrating activities has been replaced by a hope that an AI silver bullet will remove manual work.
With the election of a new government in July this year, there seems to be a recognition that we need a new approach to solving the big problems of our time through cross-sector missions, and the role of digital is back in central focus. I can see that many of the themes and approaches that we tried to pioneer in Bristol in 2014–16 are going to be central to the new agenda. I want to be able to contribute more directly to influencing and delivering the kind of work and new strategic thinking that is needed by senior leaders and boards so that they create the right conditions for teams to deliver the outcomes that people need. In my role at Placecube I find myself unable to engage in the right conversations with the right people – as a product supplier we too often find ourselves responding to the current market rather than being able to shape it.
So I am happy to be taking on a new role as a Director at Public Digital, where I can work alongside clients, facing the challenges they need to resolve, and help them based on my experience of being in their shoes, with the support of a highly skilled team around me. Many of the people at PD have been influences on my career and thinking, whether they were part of the original GDS team, from digital and data teams across the public sector or the growing number of ex-local government digital leaders joining the company. I’m looking forward to learning from and contributing to work, like the Town Hall 2030 initiative being delivered in partnership with Future Governance Forum, and hope to influence the sector in ways that will ultimately make it easier for new and innovative organisations like Placecube to support the public sector in meeting its users’ needs and tackling the significant challenges which are still ahead.
My six years with Placecube have been a fantastic learning opportunity and I will leave with huge respect for my colleagues and their sense of purpose and mission. Their technical skills and dedication to supporting customers have been exemplary. I’ll miss them hugely and will always be an advocate for what we have been trying to achieve. The local public sector is still far too trapped in a morass of proprietary, closed systems, and commercial practices that often aren’t in the interests of the sector or the people it serves. Open digital platforms designed with and for the sector are part of the answer, and we need to help councils to collectively regain their confidence, ambition and the will to make the changes they need to procurement, technology and delivery practices that will support them in meeting their urgent and pressing challenges and create conditions where more suppliers are encouraged to help create a vibrant market, founded on principles of collaboration and putting citizens first.
