Interview with Dominic Campbell: Technology and its potential for transformation in local government

As part of our new interview series for Future Local Lab, we sat down with Dominic Campbell, a highly accomplished public service entrepreneur and thought leader with extensive experience driving organisational change and digital transformation across the UK, US and Australia.

Dominic has held various leadership roles, including founding and previously leading FutureGov, a consultancy focused on bringing digital and design into government development. Dominic is currently a partner at Impossible Ideas, a public service venture studio that focuses on investing in and inventing solutions to organisational challenges for the future of the public service sector. His impressive experience and dedication to public service innovation are exactly why we were excited to sit down with him to talk about transformation, technology and the future of local government.

Dominic Campbell is one of LGIU’s top 25 thinkers in local government make sure you check out the rest of the list.

Watch the full conversation on Youtube here.

02:04 – Introduction to local government
05:20 – Pushing boundaries in public service
06:38 – Comparing local government in the UK and US
10:55 – Public perception of government services
16:59 – The evolution of local government roles
22:35 – Technology’s role in public service
35:49 – Investing in public service startups
41:06 – Embracing AI for future governance
46:20 – Aspirations for the future of public service

Watch/listen to the full conversation on Spotify here.

Don’t use Spotify to listen to your podcasts? Don’t worry; we’re on all the platforms. Find your preferred place to listen right here and be sure to subscribe for future episodes.

A written version of the interview has been edited down into a Q&A format, which you can read below.

Introduction to local government

You’ve done a lot of different things over the years with some consistent themes. Local government leadership, running a startup and now investing in others doing that work. So when you look back, was there a moment where you thought, ‘this is it. This is what I want to make my life’s work?’

I did a TEDx talk back in Birmingham, where I grew up, a few years back. And you can see halfway through my talk, this realisation that I have that I was highly institutionalised in terms of my aspirations – I went to a red brick school, a red brick university and as a child, I went from wanting to be a priest to wanting to be chief executive of Birmingham City Council, all in the space of a couple of years. So I think that’s probably the backbone of it. So, 30 years later, I’ve never quite reached that aspiration, but I’ve certainly worked in and around that space plenty.

I went into local government straight out of university. My view was that it was going to be sort of a hotbed of social activism, quite naively. I think my impression was founded more by the community organising, maybe even the councillor side of things, without realising the managerial side. I found a lot of love and respect for the managerial side and the bureaucratic side – how we need that to keep the lights on and make sure that we’ve got stability in our communities.

For me, it was always this tussle between, am I a bureaucratic entrepreneur or an entrepreneurial bureaucrat? And I’ve sort of been dancing on both sides of that line ever since. So I guess it is that combination which I’ve pulled into work at FutureGov and elsewhere, it’s about understanding the system enough to be able to shape the system and to push the boundaries. I think having that foundation is useful as long as you have that sort of rebellious soul within you as well.

Pushing boundaries in public service

Is the theme pushing the boundaries rather than breaking the system for you throughout your life?

I think so. I think the people who understood the work of FutureGov well, and particularly as we matured as an organisation, and just stopped being, you know, I could see how we might be seen as a bit too pushy or a bit like arrogant at first. Myself and Carrie, who was co-director at the time, we had our grounding in having led large-scale change in big organisations in local government. So hopefully people recognised over time, it was coming from a place of understanding, respect, but also a recognition that we were always taking the outside in perspective. It’s very easy to get lost in the everyday life of large organisations. For me, it’s large versus small, not public versus private versus charity.

These large organisations inherently start navel gazing to some degree, and you look at your own processes, you look at your own internally on cost, but it’s a real struggle to look from the outside and what the citizens really value at the centre of your thinking every day. I think that’s probably the role we played best was a level of respect for the system, a level of understanding for the lives that people were leading in government, but also saying, come on.

We had a series of events at one point in the words of, expect better. When I look back now, that probably is the summary of my 20 years. Whether you’re inside or outside of government, we’ve got to raise our expectations. People are allowed to and deserve to expect better. And that’s what we should always hold in our hearts.

Comparing local government in the UK and US

You’ve worked in the UK, you’ve worked in the US. Have you noticed a difference, not just in the last six months or the last year or two, but in general, what would you say was the best of both? And what do you think they could both do better?

So, my master’s 20 years ago was focused on local government reorganisation and the introduction of mayors. So it’s really a nerdy interest for me to live in a city with a very strong mayor that’s always been that way, even though it has no representation at the national level. We have taxation without representation in DC – let’s hope it will be the 51st state one of these days.

It has been really interesting to see, to actually get to what I’d worked on a bit in federalised systems in both Germany and, more so, in Australia prior to moving to the US. To see the benefits of that sort of devolution, not that they would understand it that way, as it was just the way it was constituted 250 years ago, but it’s really interesting to compare that to the reorganisation agenda in the UK at the moment. I am a big fan. I do think there’s a bit more logic to it in the US than what I’m seeing emerge in the very organic political way in the UK.

I’ll confess I’m not a regional, strong regional mayor man. I’m much more into local mayors and believe that there is a really strong role for strong leaders to sort of mediate between national global capital and local needs, and trying to advocate for place. I’m not sure the sort of you know, the money people of the US or the Middle East or anywhere else are particularly aware of what South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire or anything else means compared to Leeds or Manchester and some of these more naturally obvious economic units. Hopefully, this is just a journey, and things will clear their way through. But the US shows that local taxation and the ability for Texas and Florida to compete with the rest of the US by having certain taxes, rather than income taxes, for instance, that’s odd. The US is definitely more like the European Union than a regionalised UK in how it rolls because it’s very odd for a nation to compete with itself in that way. But I do see the benefits of it in terms of self-sustaining areas.

When it comes to transformation agendas and things like that. It’s like living in the past in the US, if I’m being frank. To live in the country that is the home of so much of the technology we’re all using and the money that’s funding it, yet for government to be so far behind. Just go and look at Washington DC’s website and you’ll see. I think it won the best of the web 2012, and I doubt it’s been touched in the last 13 years. It’s appalling.

It’s seen as very much probably like what was going on in the e-government, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, in the Noughties agenda in the UK, which is essentially, some digital is better than nothing. Let’s buy a product, overlay it, plug it in, and then we can sit back and say we’re modernised. Whereas obviously, the UK has gone so much further. Last I looked, places like the Ministry of Justice have two, three, or four hundred people working just in their digital and design teams. That’s not far off the grand total that the entire central team in the federal government has in the US, and we’re talking about England being roughly equivalent to California. So the argument just hasn’t been won here, in terms of what the potential in government can be. I think that largely comes from the perspective on government as well.

Public perception of government services

The way I view government here is that the economy and the private sector are seen as the sun, and the government circulates out on some cold moon of Neptune somewhere. However, I think that in Europe, government is seen as the base of the triangle and the fundamentals that allow us all to live our lives and the basis of an economy that can thrive. In the US, it’s very much seen as a sort of annoyance and a thing that gets in the way of earning money. I’m glad that that’s not the case in Europe. I think it’s more similar in the US to how it is in Australia.

I think one of the big challenges here is that there is a lack of language. I think Americans would call it civics education, but it’s more than that. It’s a language around understanding government. So, people say they hate government almost across the board; people just hate government. And then you ask them what they mean. And you say, do you hate your teachers? Do you hate your arcs (assisted residential care)? And they say, ‘No, but that’s not, that’s not government. That’s not what I’m talking about.’ What you realise is they basically hate the people on Capitol Hill or the president. Whereas, I find in Europe and the UK, we have more of a nuance. It’s probably got worse, if I’m being really honest, but we have tended to have more of a nuance. In large part because of things like the NHS. We’re able to understand the difference between hating the government, you know, national government of the day, and those are politicians. That still doesn’t mean you hate the passport agency; it just means you hate the people in Westminster. You can understand it as public services rather than just this nebulous, like government concept.

That’s a real struggle in the US when it comes to local government as well, because people don’t differentiate between tax collection, federal government or waste collection. So much of it here is outsourced that they probably don’t even know that their taxes fund waste collection because it’s just got a private contractor’s name on the side of the truck. I think the thing that is front and centre is the economic development side of things in the UK, which is ironic because that’s where I came into local government, at a time, we had a hundred economic development officers and I think it was a year or two of my career before they were down to like three or four.

There was a point at which we understood local government to be important in the economy, but that seems to have been lost. Maybe that is a good thing about this mayoral devolution agenda. However, a lot of that’s now being done at sub-regional, regional level, and local government could risk going into more of an Australian model, which it’s essentially customer service: bins, housing etc. More like purely district council level functions, and that’s said with love for districts. With that people lose some of the understanding around child protection, education, adult social care, which may not be there already, to be honest. But so many of those functions are delivered at the state and national level in the US, that there’s a lack of connection because everything’s quite remote from people.

It would be a real shame if we were to follow too far down that track because, on the whole, people understand, even at the lowest level, that they value the role of councils in child protection and other things that keep the show on the road in the UK. I’m nervously watching where things settle down in England, in particular.

The evolution of local government roles

That’s really interesting because I think it’s complicated where some of those services are set in the UK, but maybe it’s more complicated across the piece. I’m from a small town in the US, and you know who the people are, and they’re dedicated to local issues, so in different places, there are different ideas of who does what.

Yeah. I mean, depending on how you count it, there’s something like 30,000 sub-federal agencies in the US – I love the very loose use of the word ‘city’ in the US. I remember going to what I would call a beach resort in Oregon, population of 700, being called a city and falling off my chair as someone with a geography degree. Appalled at the misuse of the term city compared to the royal charter in the UK. But it gives opportunity for that proximity that you’re describing for sure. I can see the pushback from districts there and elsewhere in terms of fears around some of that.

Questions around ‘Should Surrey be one or two organisations?’ Well, even two is absolutely enormous and quite distant from people’s everyday lives. It’s something we need to watch out for, and it definitely gives an opportunity. I would love to see more of a real reboot of our institutions through this process. In a way, the superstructure could be enormous, and that’s fine to some degree, as long as we’re smart about it.

Councillors, you could argue to some degree, came about before customer service as a function, before social media, before much easier ways to engage with citizens. I’m not arguing necessarily that we don’t need three councillors per ward. Although I probably would argue that if I’m being honest, because the role is fundamentally different. But it’s a bit like AI to some degree. What is the load that institutions and technology can take that once were held by local politicians, to free them up so they can do the strategic things that only humans can do? I think we’re not quite thinking in that space. That doesn’t necessarily have to be determined by the size of a local government organisation. It can be designed even within an enormous organisation if we’re deliberate about it. Too often, what I’m seeing in these restructures is a sort of big four mindset of combine restructure, transform plan, which I’ve seen written time and time again, and that happens over five years. Of course, if you’re lucky, you get to modernisation, but you absolutely never get to transform. And in many respects, you could argue that transform should come first.

We’re obsessed with safe and stable when we’re combining our organisations, but you can do that while simultaneously saying, but how should this really be done? It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us to actually say these organisations were built for 1970, whatever the last restructure was. What should we be doing in 2025 with the tools that we’ve got available to us? And at the moment, I’m sad to see the focus is mostly on just smashing organisations together and hoping two wrongs make a right, rather than creatively thinking how should we be working?

Read: What could local government reorganisation look like?

As a geographer, think about this connection with place. How much does that matter in terms of this reorganisation? Do you think it matters to people’s identity?

You know, I grew up at a time post-West Midlands, but when I was in Birmingham, you still talk about it 50 years later. So they’re things and they capture people’s imagination, but the institution behind that is one thing. How we then want to achieve for the community is something completely different.

We don’t have to force people to understand that. It’s Conway’s law, just because we decided that the institution looks that way, we then spew it up on a website and say, ‘this is how we’re structured, click one of these tabs’. For people, it’s like I don’t know the difference between social services and the democratic council, just talk to me like I talk to you as a human. That’s where things are getting trapped.

We need highly functioning, highly efficient, highly modern institutions that have brilliant technology, brilliant ways of working, underlying a whole plethora of operating models and ways of delivery that aren’t even delivered necessarily or designed necessarily at a children’s services level or an adult social care level. You know, we always come in with two by two-by-two matrices and say, which of these operating models is the council? The council has 153 services, each of which should have its own way of delivering. It may be that they’re grouped into six different ways of working, fine. Some can best be delivered by top-down, rigid services. Child protection probably falls into that category. There might be other operating models that are partnership delivered, where bits of them are transactional and bits of them are strategic. The council has to have the knowledge, but not necessarily the operational delivery. And then there are other bits that might be just matchmaking, saying ‘We’ve got the best view of an area and, therefore, we’re going to matchmake’. Economic development is probably a good example of that.

It’s needs, for me. It’s almost like a reimagining of this sort of institutional capacity and capability. Delivery is so often just seen as separate, rather than being a bit closer to IT, HR, and customer service. These are all cross-cutting capabilities that enable both service delivery and community empowerment to happen. I’ve very rarely seen a creative articulation of that. It’s very much like these are the silos we have. We design singularly for this service and then, at the end of it, commission IT to buy us the least awful system on the market that was designed for a world 20 years ago. It doesn’t meet our needs, and then we’ll change our service to do what the technology says to do. That’s totally ridiculous.

A lot of it revolves around creativity and confidence. I think we lack confidence a lot of the time to actually say, ‘We know what we’re doing, and we’re going to make the market, whether it’s daycare providers or technology providers, do what we ask to change creatively to meet what we think is the right design solution for our people because we’re listening really well.’

Some people might laugh at me because they’ve got very bold leaders or whatever else. But a lot of the time, what I’m seeing from that leadership is best guesses or, you know, they heard an idea from somewhere else and they’re going to impose it on their place rather than truly is this informed by what you’re seeing and hearing locally. It’s inevitable that complexity mixes together.

Technology’s role in public service

I’m going to flip that around a little bit from government saying to tech because we’ve got a situation in the US where some well-funded tech guys are coming in and saying, ‘This is how you run government.’ We’re both technology enthusiasts, but what are the implications of these tech folks coming in with maybe very little respect or knowledge for the reality of governance? How can we make sure they are joining to serve the public good?

This is a really good example of why the UK is in a better place for this change in the long run than the US from my experience, because as I say, the, the lack of experience and capacity within the US system and this sort of worshiping at the altar of Silicon Valley, has led to this and they were able to roll through these institutions quite quickly and easily, because there wasn’t a large enough, well-informed enough collection of civil servants in place to be able to back some of that pressure and to say you’re breaking the law or we’re already on the case. There’s a long time of underdelivery and change in the US system, so the population was willing to vote for a sledgehammer or a chainsaw, as he posed his metaphor.

Whereas in the UK, I’ve seen the local results recently and I know that there is a strong upswell in radicalism. Interestingly, from the side that calls itself conservative, both in the US and the UK are now the radicals. The change upside is there, but I think the majority, comparatively, in the UK is in a strong place to say things are moving forward, it’s slow, but we value this foundation. Whereas, like I said earlier, government isn’t respected, it isn’t seen as foundational in the same way. There is an awful lot of power in the system from people with money. There are still some challenges in the UK. Very few people at the top table in the UK really understand this. You know, there’s one guy on the outside who’s part of the global tech bro elite who seems to be the main advisor, the sole advisor to some degree. And I think that is risky, but we have thousands of modern data, AI, and technology professionals in our civil service.

However, I don’t see in either country at a local level anybody is waking up and investing at the level that they really need to. Because, cards on the table, I do believe there needs to be a massive shift towards AI-driven public services that will inevitably shed a huge amount of jobs of certain types. The ones where robots do it better than humans. Even Karl Marx wrote about how ‘technology could either emancipate or enslave the masses’. I think we’re seeing both of those things happen at the same time right now. And if we don’t get on the front foot, it’ll be the second one. If we get on the front foot, I really think it can be the emancipation of people.

One of the things that I’ve invested in is Magic Notes, a voice-to-text case note technology that gives social workers a day a week back. That just can’t be bad. At the very least, they might work a 40-hour week instead of a 50-hour week, which is great for retention, great for vacancy rates, and great for mental health. But we need to make sure that we understand the technology and we’ve got the right people in the system to act on behalf of government and the public good. I don’t think we’re anywhere near that. It’s still a head of IT three layers down who gets tossed a task, who then is incentivised to employ people at the right level to help them understand things properly.

I remember going through various procurements where I would advise even from the inside to bake in cultural values. Think like proxies as well, like data ownership. If a provider is willing to admit that it’s your data and not theirs and not charge you for access to your own data, which is rare, then they have the same value alignment. Otherwise, you end up with these relationships with people like Palantir in the US, who are certainly at the wrong end of the spectrum and are in the NHS, actually.

We did some work back in the day in FutureGov Australia around the new child protection system for New South Wales. I wanted them to build their own system so that they had full transparency. The thing that interests me is that councils generally would never imagine not being involved in the design of their new town hall. They would never say, ‘Here’s a very high-level aspiration we have, go away, design it and build it, and we’ll only come when we get the keys.’ But when it comes to technology, that’s exactly what they’re doing. They’re like, ‘I don’t need to see the software. I don’t need to understand how this thing works. I don’t even need to own my own desk in the building. My own data, all the contents will be yours when the lease ends in 10 years.’ Like, what are you even talking about?

In that project in New South Wales, we started with values and user insight and created top 10 value sets, in terms of how we wanted the supplier to behave and how we wanted to experience that relationship and then put it out to market, so it becomes a requirement. However, too often, we start with who has bought one of these systems before. Can we copy and paste their procurement, and do we get the same system as them for slightly less price? And it’s not the way to do things.

Exploring that further, you know, people are pressured for time, and there is a tendency for leaders who don’t understand technology very well to think the external company just does those things and makes those decisions. How do you, if you’re mid-level, push back on that and say, ‘No, we need to build in and understand how this works and be accountable?’

I think it’s absolutely the hardest thing. When I was doing consulting, we’d be brought in enthusiastically at the top, but then we would end up being in the workshop with the people doing the delivery. They wouldn’t know why you’d been imposed on them. And so often I would close the door and say, ‘Okay, look, I know you have been advocating for change. I know you know the answer. We all know how this game works – the outsiders will be listened to more often than the people on the inside. You tell me, we’ll work together. You know where all the skeletons are. You know how to make change happen. I know how to persuade the budgets and the powers that be to align with what we’re trying to achieve.’

That was one group of people. There is definitely a very strong and powerful inertia-led group of people who have made their careers by being the mosaic guy or the Microsoft Teams guy. You sometimes feel they wish they were working for the supplier more than the council because they’re so precious about the systems, because it’s defined their careers. That force is very strong and very hard to overcome. The risk of moving is a thousand times higher than the risk of not moving in people’s minds.

We’ve had disasters, I understand that, but we’ve partly had disasters because we haven’t done it the right way. So it becomes a bit of a chicken and egg. Like, if you invest in the right mindsets and capabilities, you’re going to get the right outcomes more often than not. It is possible. But a lot of it is around partnering, and it doesn’t have to be with externals, but partnering with other people in the business. A creative and frustrated IT person or finding a mid-level social work manager who is desperately advocating for change.

What we saw in West London while doing child protection there was that we were lucky. We had plenty of the DCS, a couple of mid-level and even entry-level, 20-odd-year-olds, entry-level social workers saying, ‘Are you kidding me? This is how I’m meant to work.’ And actually creating a sort of movement for change. I think there’s a lot of room for organising approaches to be used in change management, the way communities do. So, if you find all the people who are willing to be part of the journey and really advocate for outcomes, rather than let’s have a fight about Google versus Microsoft, because that’s a lost cause. Then I think there’s opportunity there.

Investing in public service startups

We’ve talked about it from the local government/institutional side, but now you’re investing in new agencies and startups that are working in this kind of public service field. But a lot of what local government does touches areas of sensitivity in people’s lives, so how do you make sure that the people you’re helping to fund or you’re mentoring have that kind of public service ethos or values that you would like to partner with if you were in local government?

Over the years, I’ve been very black and white – like the expect better thing. I was like, is it either good enough or not good enough? Not that I’ve accepted less, but I’ve grown into is this grey area. You can do a lot, but you can only go so far until you’re restricted by the system around you. I’ve really enjoyed it. I’ve invested in about eight startups now, everything from like planning technology to social care, the money app for immigrants and refugees, health care services for children. So, as you say, extremely sensitive. I’ve generally also been quite dismissive of bad privatisation over the years as well, even in the IT space and outsourcing as you would imagine from what I was saying earlier about the lack of ownership of data and the behaviour of some suppliers in taking advantage of the sector. But all of that combined has made it quite complex for my brain to understand the right way to do things and the right way to invest. So I started Impossible Ideas as a nonprofit.

Previously, I started FutureGov. I took investment from Nesta and Surrey County Council, so a quarter of my company was owned by public and not-for-profit entities. I thought that safeguarded me against certain business models and approaches. But inevitably, so much of it in this space is driven by growth and exit. And fine, I benefited from that. Also, I gave back to Surrey and Nesta three times the money they gave me. So, the public sector and others benefited from it. I see that as good. But where you end up is either a publicly listed company or you get owned by private equity, and your old venture capital has a certain rhythm to it. That side of things is the side that I’m most focused on at the moment, like how we change the money model and how we change the money system.

At the moment, as much as I do work to get to know the founders, to make sure that they’re driven by the right motivations, to ensure that they have the right safeguards built into their technology. Things like the commitment, the value and the approach of the individual. But the last piece of that puzzle I haven’t resolved yet is that all of them have taken angel or venture capital investment. That money is impatient and at some point requires an exit. You can do that by listing and becoming publicly traded, but that drives certain incentives for constant growth and profit margins, which have knock-on effects in terms of how much gets invested in the development of the technology, or how much people care about customer service or if they cut corners around data. There are different approaches and different routes to the future. What I can do is try to create part of the process as an angel investor for these great new inventions. The bit that I’m then most intellectually concerned about is what does the future of those organisations look like? How do we maintain them to be in the public interest?

Impossible Ideas was created through a partnership with 11 local authorities. They put the money into helping us design. The intent was a pitch due to be on the day of the lockdown 2020. We had our posters up on the wall at Camden Council for the 11 councils to come and look at the pitch. We said need to create a design hub, an incubator-owned by and for the sector, so please will you put in another 100/200,000 pounds so we can get this thing going and invent and spin out these technology and delivery companies who benefit you all without them having the distorting ownership of other parts of the economy. That remains a sort of itch in my head as something that desperately needs to be resolved so that we’re in charge as a sector, not the wider global capital movements, which can have detrimental effects on the lives of children in North London, which seems perverse.

Embracing AI for future governance

We’ve talked about loads of things and barely even talked about the potential of AI to transform work in the public sector. But if you’re a high-level manager or a political leader at a council, what should you be finding out about and what should you be encouraging others to look into and experiment with?

My first thing would be to encourage curiosity. I know that chief execs are curious, and they have a lot of things that they have to be curious about, but we have to realise once and for all that every organisation is a software organisation. It is driving the behaviours, values, approaches of all service delivery. It’s not for debate, it’s just true. Go and sit over the shoulder of any of your employees and see what they’re doing seven tenths of the week in terms of filling in boxes and being told what to do and what to say. These robots are super important, and they have been for 50 years. But what is about to happen will make the digital revolution of the last 20 years look like child’s play – taking a piece of paper and putting it on the internet. We have 60,000 PhDs in a football stadium able to answer a question for you in less than a minute; it’s slightly more radical in terms of what’s possible. Hollowing out what you thought was core to your being and your everyday work is suddenly gone, and you have to up your game. You have to think, what am I doing with that time? Like, what is it that is truly human and valuable?

That robot is going to be doing for me – whether you like it or not, the systems are going to get this stuff put into them. You’re not in control of that. You’re having it baked into all of your systems already. It’s now about curiosity and understanding. Listen, reading, and really understanding what the implications are going to be, because it’s an HR issue, it’s a legal issue, and it’s a finance issue. It’s how you think about your organisation and the work that you do, and it will massively impact the lives of the people that you’re the custodian of as the chief executive or a leader of a council.

The two big areas that I’m excited by are productivity on the one hand. There’s no doubt that it’s the emancipation side of what Marx was hoping for, so you need to see it creatively and optimistically as what can these humans do for us now? If you say to me, ‘You’ve got two days of your life back every week. What else would you like to do? Here’s everything we do, the 152 services we deliver. Would you like to spend a day in a daycare centre and a day out in the garden, like doing gardening in the parks?’ Imagine what value you can bring to a place with that time. If we all park our egos and our seniority and actually say, ‘That’d be quite nice. I have a boring office job three days a week, and I’m out and about helping the community, the other two.’ If my salary and pensions are protected, then there are real creative opportunities out there.

The other one is that sort of 60,000 PhDs in a football stadium type of stuff, being able to really interrogate data at a level that we’ve never seen before, to be able to join the dots, to be able to use things like agents in AI to get ahead of problems that we used to only respond to in a blue light fashion. It can really help us understand trends in care, trends in health, trends in various different places, and help us solve problems before they become problems without us even knowing that the problem has been solved, potentially. So, for me, there really is not enough creative design thinking going on in this space right now. There’s a massive gap for people to look at it positively, rather than how do we restrict copilot?

Aspirations for the future of public service

To close, 10 years from now, in a hopeful sense, what three words would you like to be able to use to describe local government?

There are so many different ones I could imagine. But I’m going to use one three-word phrase, which is probably out of office. I think so much of what we view as local government right now is ultimately just process, and if we can get out of the office, if we can really focus on the human-to-human relationships, that will safeguard the future of local government. That’s what makes it special. It will help people understand where their money’s going and what value has been created. People talk about their teachers. They talk about the person who cared for their elderly mother. They don’t talk about, I’m afraid, those of us, me included, who do photocopying or typing numbers into boxes every day for a career. I think robots can do a lot of that. So if we can lean on that emancipation of local government through the technology angle and get out of the office, be with the people we serve, then that would be an amazing outcome for the sector.

This interview is part of LGIU’s new Future Local Lab – a holistic programme of resources aimed at helping you to prepare for and respond to the emerging challenges facing local government everywhere. It’s open to everyone, make sure you’re signed up today.