By Gavin Freeguard and Jeni Tennison
Summer’s gone; parliament is back. But how many MPs, peers, journalists and policymakers included Head North in their poolside reading?
The book – co-authored by new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, and Mayor of the Liverpool City Region, Steve Rotheram – leaves readers in no doubt that the new PM thinks the state needs reform. It criticises ‘a Whitehall machine which thinks it can treat our people [in the north of England] as second-class citizens’ and local government with ‘contempt’.
To his credit, since entering Downing Street, Burnham has made good on this commitment to reform. The cabinet statement in July on ‘Rewiring the State’ promised a radical devolution of power away from Westminster and Whitehall, ‘returning it to people and the places where they live, work and invest’. This is the natural expression of his thinking in government.
It is also only part of an emerging conversation on how the state should operate. A plethora of PDFs propose a paradigm shift: not just shifting power between different levels of government, but between state and citizen, and state and communities. Tom Webb’s ‘Respect Story’ for Demos captures the consensus that public services should join up around people, shift to prevention, and push more power to communities and frontline staff. Other Demos papers urge us to recognise the reality of a multimodal and multipolar state, where public servants must be allowed to use different approaches (transactional, relational, preventative, digital) in different contexts, and embrace ‘everyday democracy’ where public participation and partnership between communities and public services are ‘woven’ into decision-making.
IPPR calls for a new ‘politics of reciprocity’ around Power, Place, Participation and Protection, where citizens come together and have a stake. The Future Governance Forum proposes a new participatory relationship between people and the state, and for politicians to reject the idea of the inefficient state by engaging more seriously in questions about power: how to wield it more effectively and democratically. There is also a growing movement for community power and civic renewal.
JP Spencer – now in Number 10 – displayed the most alliterative elegance in summarising this vision for a piece written while at Think Labour. He calls it the 3Ds of improving public services: devolution, democratisation and digitisation.
These optimistic, collective, people-powered visions offer a more hopeful potential future, with a clearer sense of agency than what came before: a Starmer administration often characterised as technocratic, with AI and data seen purely in terms of offering marginal improvements to productivity and efficiency. These newer ideas see ‘rewiring’ as about power rather than digital technology – the PM himself uses the analogy of the UK as a stately home where simply patching up the old electricity system won’t do.
In a lot of this newer thinking it is simply assumed that data, digital systems and AI will exist and work. But we need to deliberately design them to meet the needs of a devolved and democratic state. With a few exceptions, the detail has yet to be filled in.
A devolved state needs data
The first layer is data. Data supports policy, planning and accountability; it supports day-to-day operational decision-making and service delivery by public bodies; and it helps individuals, communities and businesses to help themselves. Access to data confers power to make decisions that shape the experiences of people and communities. In a devolved state, we need to think about where information about a system – such as a bus network – or about an individual sits across different organisations. We need to think about how data can easily flow up and down different organisational layers to support different decisions being made at different levels, and horizontally, between organisations to help build services around people in place.
In a democratised state, providing access to data and being more inclusive in who gets a say over how it is collected, modelled, used and shared can give the public power. We need to design ways to combine official data collection with community data sources, such as bringing together citizen science water quality monitoring data with that from the Environment Agency and water companies. We need to build open data standards with broad stakeholder participation. We need to support individual and collective control over data, giving both citizens and communities power over data from, about, and impacting them. Ultimately, it’s a question of how we get the right data to the right people, at the right level, at the right time to make the right decisions, with the right governance.
Digital services have to likewise be designed for this rewired state. Organisations have to enable the public, businesses and other public bodies to navigate smoothly between services provided by them, other public bodies, and community organisations. Devolution and the ability to customise and innovate have to be balanced with consistency and efficiencies of scale. James Plunkett and Richard Pope’s work on operating patterns in the NHS describe a range of ways in which this can work, from common platforms (meeting universal needs once, supporting multiple services) to modular assembly (local services are built from common components and standards). Selecting the right model for each service will be important.
To meet expectations of democratisation and agency, we need flexibility and accountability. Informational, transactional and relational public services need to enable digital access to make our lives easier, but also recognise that sometimes just talking to a person will provide the easiest, quickest and best service. People also have to know who they’re dealing with; who they can complain to when things go wrong with digital public services; and how to hold them to account for failure. Seamless and simple services can obfuscate responsibility in a way that undermines agency; democracy is a user need.
Building the right technological foundations
Finally, our technological and bureaucratic infrastructure has to be built for the age of AI. We need ways of evaluating AI services that avoid repeated pilots of the same tool in different places, but that also recognise the impact of different accents. Public services need to adapt to the increasing use of chatbots and agents by the public, or face being broken by it. To meet democratic expectations, the adoption of AI by the public sector must come with built-in collaboration between public bodies, the people who work for them, and the public they serve – many of whom are sceptical of the potential benefits of AI. In some places this will require a wholesale re-thinking of systems, processes and success measures built for a different time.
Getting the technological foundations right for a devolved and democratised state will not be easy. We have to break away from the framing of public sector reform as headcount reduction. We cannot afford to waste time or money on large-scale transformation projects that overrun, overspend and fail to live up to the hype, distracting resources from more effective interventions. Our approach must prioritise experimentation and learning — failing fast and scaling what works through rapid iteration, bold decision making and working in the open. It is great to be bolder and to test, learn and grow; this should be matched by loudly renouncing the civil service speaking ban and encouraging public servants to talk and blog about their work. The priorities Burnham has laid out — homelessness, social care, support for NEETs — are good places to start, not least to highlight that there are no magic technological fixes for these wicked problems and to make concrete what would otherwise be abstract discussions about digital, data and AI.
The recent announcement of a Digital Devolution programme, led out of Government Digital Service, is welcome. But it will only be successful if it also brings in the final D: Democratisation. The public are not just users or customers of digital public services, they are the people that public bodies serve. The design choices public servants make in digital devolution need to be deliberate and democratic to properly serve the public interest.
Gavin Freeguard is the director of State of the Future. Jeni Tennison is executive director of Connected by Data.
