Why the public sector needs trust to innovate
The public sector is facing pressure to innovate in response to changing needs, financial pressures, and emerging technologies. To innovate it needs to be trusted. The public sector can earn and maintain trust by aligning data and technology use with democratic values.
There is pressure to innovate
The pressure to innovate is coming from multiple directions.
Politicians and organisational leaders need to respond to multiple crises such as the risk of more pandemics, climate crisis, and ageing populations. Ongoing funding pressures are forcing organisations to try to reduce costs and/or improve outcomes by redesigning services to do more with less.
Meanwhile the private sector is pushing ahead with technologically-enabled change, such as the current wave of AI or digital wallets. This creates new expectations from some citizens, new opportunities to reimagine public services, and a fear that without action the private sector will control the future.
Trust is your licence to innovate
Trust can provide a licence to innovate. This trust needs to come from a range of people for example, service users, politicians and public sector workers.
If people trust you then they are more willing to let you try new things.
Apple built trust through its commitment to privacy, transparency and control for users before launching health, financial and identity services.
If politicians trust you then they will back you
The UK’s Government Digital Service successes in the early 2010s relied on that political trust to carry out major changes like the redesign of gov.uk.
If digital professionals trust you then they will want to join and work with you
If digital professionals believe that the innovation aligns with public sector values, then they will want to join and work with you.
Many people join the public sector because they share its values. They want services that are caring and work for everyone in all of our wonderful human diversity, services that are lawful and democratically accountable, and that make the lives of the people and communities they live in and work for better.
But a lack of trust can put the brakes on
In 2012 the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) started a programme to make it easier for farmers to apply for farming subsidies. The programme spiralled out of control with a 40% increase in costs in the first three years and complaints from farmers that the service was not reliably paying them on time. In some recent work I was struck by how many farmers and organisations brought up the programme as a reason not to trust new data and technology initiatives.
In 2021 NHS England tried to change the rules on how data collected by GPs could be used to plan NHS services and in medical research. Poor delivery led to a public backlash and over 1.5 million people opting out of both the future scheme and the existing uses of GP data. Two years later the new scheme is still not in place, while NHS planning and medical research have been weakened by the opt outs.
Public sector workers need to trust innovation. But when you talk with people in the sector you discover that service teams are unsure of how to safely innovate. They worry that an innovative project could be prematurely stopped because of lack of money, lack of trust from politicians, or lack of trust from people.
They worry that data and technology could harm the people and communities they work for, but don’t know what to do next. I regularly speak with digital professionals who are stuck in analysis paralysis, unable to make a decision and continuing to do ever more rounds of theoretical research, rather than either stopping a project or responsibly prototyping to get a better grasp for what is possible.
Aligning data and technology use with democratic values
So, just like commercial organisations, the public sector needs to earn trust to innovate. But it needs to do it differently to the private sector, it has different values and outcomes to achieve.
Most importantly, it needs to deliver public services that are competent and reliable. Services that work and deliver the outcomes that people want and need today, that are truly inclusive and work for everyone.
The public sector needs to earn and maintain public trust by continually aligning how data and technology are used with democratic values, societal and user needs. There are some signs that social trust may be growing in the UK, that may be something to build on.
Earning trust requires a strong commitment to working in the open, and the practical work of making technology and data use transparent, accountable and meaningful to people as they use services. That practical work will provide a foundation for more complicated activities, like increasing participation in reuse of data for research.
And the sector needs to be strong, opinionated and brave enough to shape the private and third sector tools and techniques it uses so that they align with public sector values.
That needs the sector to be able to imagine the future. What could be, not just what is.
So that society and politicians trust that the sector will deliver both the services that are needed today, and the outcomes that will be wanted and needed tomorrow.
Acknowledgements: This blog post has been co-written and edited with the help of the team at IF who have experience with a range of public, private and third sector organisations.
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