Public Spending: One Way to Solve Many Problems

Like most governments, the Scottish Government is currently going through the difficult process of deciding how to spend a shrinking amount of money on a growing list of problems. Given its “tight budgetary envelope”, says the Government’s Investing in Scotland’s Future paper “it is imperative that public spending is deployed as efficiently and effectively as possible” via policy interventions that help “maintain the affordability of public services over the medium to long-term”.

Within this context it is seeking to prioritise three things:

• To support progress towards meeting poverty targets
• To address climate change
• To secure a stronger, fairer, greener economy

Now, we would say it wouldn’t we? But it’s true (and it applies to almost any Government you can think of, not just Scotland). On every issue identified — whether it’s efficiency savings in public spending, maintaining the affordability of public services, tackling child poverty, addressing climate change, or securing a stronger, fairer, greener economy — one, single action could help address them all: building a personal data logistics infrastructure that empowers citizens and enables the safe, efficient sharing of the data citizens and service providers need to access and provide public services.

Guiding principles

The Scottish Government says its approach to these challenges will be “heavily informed” by the principles of the Christie commission’s report on the future of public services, which says the Government should:

• Empower individuals and communities
• Integrate service provision
• Prevent negative outcomes from arising
• Become more efficient by reducing duplication and sharing services

Providing each individual with their own personal data store, which they can use to safely collect and store data about themselves, and share it under their control, would do all these. By enabling the right data to get to and from the right people and organisations at the right times, this citizen-empowering data infrastructure could radically reduce transaction costs for both citizens and service providers. It would both cut costs and enable service improvement.

Let’s give a quick run through those key headline priorities.

Improving service efficiencies

In work previously done by Mydex CIC for the Scottish Government we showed how a system by which public service providers deposit ‘verified attributes’ (cryptographically secure tokens confirming facts about people) in their personal data stores and that enables citizens to share this data as and when needed, could strip out huge amounts of friction, effort, risk and cost for both citizens and public services.

In particular, it would help eliminate endemic duplication of effort (e.g. recreating or checking data that has already been generated and confirmed, or simply rekeying data that already exists) and errors caused by inaccurate or out of date data (including the cost of rectifying those errors).

This system works like this.

1. Services holding different types of data about an individual deposit verified copies of this data in the individual’s personal data store.
2. This data remains under the individual’s control in their PDS, and kept up to date and accurate via secure API link.

3. When the citizen needs to provide some of these data points to a different service provider they simply say ‘Yes’, and the data can flow accordingly — enabling them to bring their data with them to new service relationships, without having to fill in forms.

Scottish Government has already formally recognised the power of this approach by deciding to establish its new Scottish Attribute Provider Service, which is based on these principles. Yet from what we can see, the potential of this new service is being overlooked, remaining unmentioned in the Government’s spending review.

This needs to change. This is something that is entirely within the gift of the Scottish Government, and has already been agreed. Now all that needs to be done is for it to be implemented.

Tackling child poverty

Current approaches to help families in poverty are grossly inefficient. Much attention has been paid to the ‘poverty premium’ where those in poverty have to pay more for basics such as energy because they cannot fit into organisations’ preferred administrative systems — e.g. paying by meter rather than by direct debit.

But hardly any attention is paid to the ‘poverty punishment’ — the fact that people in poverty are burdened with significant amounts of extra friction, effort, cost and stress in their lives because, to access the support they need, they need to jump through multiple hoops finding out about and seeking to access sources of support, finding and proving the information needed to prove eligibility, and repeating the same basic processes (including providing basically the same information again and again) each time they wish to apply for a new service. As a result, many people do not apply — or do not complete applications — for services they are entitled to. Which means they are punished if they do (taking on extra time, effort and stress) or if they don’t (missing out on services that they are entitled to).

This is compounded by the fact that, as Scottish Government reports have emphasised, poverty is complex and multifaceted. People in poverty face multiple challenges, not just one challenge. They are quite likely to have issues relating to employment, mobility (e.g. the difficulty of getting to work without a car), childcare, housing, physical and mental health etc — and every single one of the services addressing these issues operates as a separate silo, which means the situation faced by the family is never addressed in a joined up way.

Using the infrastructure we’ve just talked about, the Scottish Government could provide those wrestling with poverty with the means to easily and quickly find out about available sources of support, access and provide the information they need to prove eligibility for benefits and services while cutting service providers’ administration and service delivery costs. It enables poverty to be addressed as a whole, in a joined up way, efficiently and effectively.

This is something that it is within the power of the Scottish Government to do, now. And it is something that would quickly and noticeably improve peoples’ lives whilst making services more efficient. Why not do it, now?

Addressing climate change

We’ve talked about the crucial role of data in helping to tackle climate change here. The key point is that, as well as helping to reduce paper use, providing much better data logistics — getting the right information to and from the right people and organisations — is the organising tip of a huge iceberg of physical logistics, because it is data that is used to organise the delivery of physical services. The more efficiently data is used, the bigger the multiplier effect on physical, carbon-emitting activities.

Amory Lovins, the veteran energy campaigner, notes that while attention naturally focuses on renewable energy replacements for fossil fuels (which of course are essential), the biggest immediate carbon emission reductions could come from re-designing the ways in which existing systems and services work.

For example, he explains, far less energy is needed to pump heat or cold through fat, straight pipes than skinny, long and crooked ones, because there is less friction. “In our house we save 97% of the pumping energy by properly laying out some pipes. Well, if everyone in the world did that to their pipes and ducts, you would save about a fifth of the world’s electricity, or half the coal-fired electricity.”

Using better data logistics to cut waste from decision making and implementation is a key part of the system redesign we now need. It is just waiting to be done.

Securing a stronger, fairer economy

The same personal data store-based data logistics infrastructure is also key to the creation of a stronger fairer economy.

• Stronger This infrastructure enables individuals to amass rich new sets of data about themselves in their personal data stores; data assets that simply weren’t possible to create when individuals’ data was dispersed across multiple separate organisations’ data silos. The infrastructure enables individuals to bring these rich new data assets with them to their relationships with service providers — data that will inform research and innovation in ways that were simply not possible before.
• Fairer The same infrastructure pre-distributes power of data, by enabling individuals to build their own personal data assets independently of the organisations that have traditionally collected data about them. Instead of concentrating data power primarily into the hands of large private corporations, personal data stores build citizen-inclusion and empowerment into how a data-driven economy works.

Conclusion

In its Review the Government says;

“We will identify where there may be shared interest, duplication or overlap in intended policy outcomes over multiple portfolios. Where there is, we will look to develop a more effective and efficient cross-government solution.”

The personal data infrastructure we have described helps exactly that.

It also says:

“As well as challenging portfolios, we will also examine discrete opportunities for longer-term, large-scale public service reform and transformation that leads to both beneficial outcomes for our citizens and the realisation of more fiscally sustainable delivery mechanisms.”

In her recent speech to the National Economic Forum, Scottish Finance and Economy Secretary Kate Forbes said that:

• Scotland needs to be “a country that boosts productivity”,
• “We need everybody to be empowered to participate, and everybody to share in the successes that we have”,
• “We need to ensure we redesign services from the perspective of their users and whilst big talk about delivery might not capture the headlines, it is the delivery that is absolutely critical”,

What more can we say? The citizen empowering data logistics infrastructure we are talking about fits all these goals and criteria exactly.

We would say it, and we are saying it. Whichever way we turn on the Scottish Government’s public spending review or national economic strategy, there is one, single, simple, low cost thing it can do to make progress on all fronts at the same time: invest in the infrastructure we’ve been talking about.

The Scottish Government has already recognised this infrastructure’s potential, with its decision to go ahead with SAPS, as discussed above. All it needs to do now is recognise how strategically important this move is — and to build it into its spending and investment priorities for the years ahead.