Advertise on podcast: At Play In The Garden of Eden

If, as Joe believes, human beings are machines, why are we bothering to build artificial intelligence. If we succeed all we will have done is create new humans. And there is a well know, tried and tested way of making new humans which is more fun and much cheaper. Meanwhile it seems that the best definition of artificial intelligence that we have is anything that computers can't do right now. Whereas the definition of human stupidity is everything that humans can do right now. If this sounds harsh this is the week when Embassy staff of many nations are being withdrawn from Ukraine

.… the machines are coming. I have seen the future and it does not look anything like the past or the present. We are as children now, innocents at play in the garden of Eden. Aurelia Pinchbeck - The Character of Thimbles - 2021 A podcast conversation about atrificial intelligence, documentaries, human stupidity, chess and the future of the human race. Joe Tibbetts is an Englishman, a documentary film-maker. He lives on the White Cliffs of Dover with a fine view of the past across the English Channel. For more than a decade he has played a daily game of chess against TChess Pro one of the most highly rated and popular chess engines in the world.  Tom Kerrigan is an American, a computer programmer, app and game designer. He lives in Seattle with a fine view of the future across Union Bay. In April 2011 he launched Stobor, a chess engine. Stobor is his name for TChess Pro, his creation.

Madeleine Starr, Director of Business and Innovation at Carers UK explains how digital can help the UK’s 8.8 million unpaid carers - including the 5 million who juggle care with work It is not even about developing anything new, she says: ‘what I really want to see in the 2020s is the technologies that we already have out there that work so well embedded in frontline practice.’ She means technologies like activity monitoring that provide a 24/7 service that, combined with care visits, can be targeted, because the carer can use a dashboard to understand what a person’s experience has been overnight - eg if they have been up several times and lost sleep - so that they can tailor their next visit. Starr goes on to describe how Carers UK supports individual carers but also local authorities, who have duties to support carers under the Care Act, but who have in fact been carring out declining numbers of carer assessments since. Carers UK have developed a standalone platform for local authorities and employer subscribers that packages a range of information products with its own-developed app ‘Jointly’ that helps families manage and share caring responsibilities.

A wide range of professionals from the world of planning and development convened at December’s MapLondon event to explore how cities might be made better through more data sharing and wider use of digital maps. The podcast, captured against the background hubbub of the event, features contributions from a range of speakers at the event in this order: 00:12 Sowyma Parthasarathy, Director, Arup 00:33 Theo Blackwell, Chief Digital Officer for London 00:54 Lisa Taylor, Director, Coherent Cities 01:15 Rebecca Lee, Senior Architect, Pollard Thomas Edwards 03:04 Euan Mills, Head of Digital Planning, Connected Places Catapult 04:02 Miranda Sharp, Innovation Director, Ordnance Survey 05:09 Sowyma Parthasarathy, Director, Arup 06:52 Theo Blackwell, Chief Digital Officer for London 07:43 Euan Mills, Head of Digital Planning, Connected Places Catapult 08:24 Lucy Webb, Head of Regeneration, Croydon Council 09:10 Sowyma Parthasarathy, Director, Arup 09:48 Alicia Francis, Director, Newman Francis 11:10 Lucy Webb, Head of Regeneration, Croydon Council 12:21 Alicia Francis, Director, Newman Francis 12:41 Euan Mills, Head of Digital Planning, Connected Places Catapult 13:06 Lisa Taylor, Director, Coherent Cities 13:52 Rebecca Lee, Senior Architect, Pollard Thomas Edwards

Asmat Hussain, Corporate Director of Governance tells Rachael Tiffen of CIFAS what happened next after the High Court’s overturn of its 2014 mayoral election The former mayor was found guilty of corrupt and illegal practices, including vote-rigging, by an election court in 2015, so the council needed to rebuild trust with the authorities, staff and local residents. Asmat became Tower Hamlets’ statutory monitoring officer after the fraud had happened, along with a whole new leadership team including chief executive William Buckley and a new financial director. With commissioners in charge following a PriceWaterhouseCoopers investigation, the council developed a delivery plan, putting in place measures to ensure members’ decisions were made within the rules; greater transparency and openness around mayoral decisions; relaunch of whilstleblowing procedures; staff training and a website where members of the public can report concerns about fraud. Tower Hamlets underwent a Peer Review conducted by the LGA in June 2019, which concluded among more detailed findings that they were now ‘a normal council’. At the time of this interview, in November 2019, the council was just starting preparations for the December 2019 general election.

Damian Nolan (Halton BC) and Jane Hancer (CC2i) explain the problems of administering meds and describe a new collaboration by councils to find a digital solution. Complicated relationships exist between patients, GPs, pharmacists, hospitals, carers and family members in terms of medicine management, and getting the right meds to the right people at the right time carries high risks and costs across the health and care system Five councils and their care partners have come together in a project brought together by CC2i, supported by LGA and match funded by NHS Digital to explore issues and difficulties as well as identifying what ‘good might look like’. The conversation covers why the project is being undertaken, the process and timetable being followed by the five participating councils, and the benefits of the collaborative approach.

Jane Hancer (CC2i) and Damian Nolan (Halton BC) describe how a five-council collaboration supported by the LGA and match-funded NHS Digital will deliver via the Social Care Innovation Accelerator In this discussion recorded in July, Jane Hancer describes the process of collaboration via CC2i that is being supported by other key players in the field of social care innovation. The project is being undertaken in response to new legislation around the safeguarding of children and adults - Liberty Protection Safeguards – that councils will have to start implementing from October 2020 as a replacement to the current Deprivation of Liberty arrangements. The conversation covers why the project is being undertaken, the process and timetable being followed by the five participating councils, and the benefits of a collaborative approach. Other councils will be able to share in the project findings from early 2020.

The Bridge - Shropshire Council’s immersive approach to presenting local data - is set to transform council and NHS commissioning The Bridge (as in ‘the view from’) is an approach to the presentation of data developed in house at Shropshire Council that enables managers to make better use of information they have access to but may fail to take into account in decision-making. As Andy Begley, Director of Adults and Housing at the Council explains in this programme, The Bridge provides an immersive experience that engages elected members, service managers, council partners and commercial suppliers, enabling them to see ‘the obvious’ in a way that spreadsheets don’t. The Bridge is supporting close collaboration with the local NHS, according to Julie Davies, Director of Performance and Delivery at Shropshire CCG, who describes the project as ‘hugely exciting’. The in-house developed project requires people to step inside a space and see a 360° display that may include data layered onto maps, images and walkthroughs of buildings, graphs and charts. A key factor driving engagement is that people leave their laptops outside, says Emma Murdock, whose team manages the data and presentations that drive the project.

Kate Hurr, Digital Manager at Cumbria County Council, describes colleagues’ enthusiasm for creating digital services in-house. The discussion makes it clear that the Council’s ‘low-code’ approach to building new digital services is not about replacing the large council systems that sit at the core of highways, planning or social care management. Rather its about redesigning the ‘bits around the edge’ (technical term), in order to create new or better online services for customers or staff, without having to procure these from the same source. Or to replace online systems – say Blue Badge applications – that might have previously been bought in from another third party IT supplier. Availability of a low-code platform means that Kate’s digital services team can work closely with service managers to co-design services and then build them in-house without the need for developers. Very short feedback loops speed up the development process – something that might have taken four months in the past can now be done in four weeks – and fine tuning once launched can be done really quickly because everything is done in-house. Although the council is committed to keeping other channels open, given Cumbria’s rural ‘not-spots’ and its ageing population, shift to online from recent projects on skips and scaffolding licensing and complaints have been impressive. -o0o- Netcall takes the pain out of big change projects, working with 1 in 4 councils to deliver better services for their citizens and within the NHS to help Trusts reduce DNAS by up to 40%, reduce postage costs for reminders by 50% and give patients choice over communication with their hospital. We help 600 UK organisations across all sectors to radically improve customer experience through collaborative CX. As a leading provider of low-code, contact centre and omnichannel messaging solutions, we enable customer-facing and IT talent to collaborate.  As described in the interview with Kate, our low-code allows you to make big changes fast – without creating work for IT, blowing the budget or replacing core systems. Prebuild applications are free to download bringing around 80% of standard process functionality. So, you don’t start from scratch. And, when you’re ready you’ll update and share unlimited services with other councils. Now it’s your turn. Talk to us about your business case today 0330 363 0300 www.netcall.com

London Borough of Havering’s Chief Operating Officer Jane West and transformation lead Susie Faulkner describe a process designed to bring staff and residents along with change. Havering embarked on its transformation journey soon after Jane West arrived in post in early 2018, at a time when the borough - already under pressure from a rising population as people continue to move from inner London - was facing up to a front-loaded £37bn deficit. Thinking by the senior leadership and elected members about change was done around four themes: communities, places, opportunities and connections. To encourage fresh approaches, officers took leadership of themes not associated with their ‘day job’, the head of social care, for example, taking on the ‘places’ theme. When service reviews were conducted, they were done so with service directors out of the room to encourage staff to put forward their own ideas about delivery. When it comes to residents, Havering has drawn on Wigan Council’s ‘deal’ with its citizens to create the ‘Havering Together’ concept and the slogan ‘cleaner, safer, prouder, together’. Part of this is making clear what the council is doing and how it is looking to its communities to share some of the challenges of the stepping back of state provision. Meanwhile residents will see changes in how they access services (including more digital access) and significant regeneration activity, with £3bn of spending being rolled out across 12 estates. 

Clair Green, Director of Assurance at London Borough of Barnet tells Rachael Tiffen, Director Local Government at CIFAS, about an unprecedented fraud In December 2017, the council became aware of what turned out to be an unprecedented internal financial fraud, committed by a former member of staff then working as part of an outsourced contract. The individual responsible was prosecuted and pleaded guilty to two separate charges of ‘Fraud by Abuse of Position’ and received a custodial prison sentence. Capita, the holder of the outsourced contract, underwrote the loss from the fraud to the council and money was also recovered from gambling establishments where the proceeds of the crime were largely spent. The council subsequently commissioned Grant Thornton to carry out an independent review of financial controls. This enabled the council to understand and document the circumstances under which the fraud was allowed to happen, and to identify lessons learned. The report found that there were insufficient financial controls in place in the outsourced finance and regeneration services and that the council did not have sufficient oversight. The council is now implementing a plan to increase financial controls through revised procedures and processes including increased controls of payments and revised schemes of delegation. Clair explains that Barnet Council are keen to be as open and transparent as they can be about the incident, to learn for themselves and to share that learning with others.

The proportion of over 65s and 85s in Shropshire is growing faster than in most parts of the UK and that concentrates the mind, says Andy Begley in this discussion recorded at the recent Tech 7 event in Shrewsbury. Provision for older people cannot be sorted by the social care department working alone, and in any case, says Mark Barrow, whose remit covers local economic development, decisions about roads, housing and other infrastructure have significant impacts on the quality and sustainability of life for over 65s. This will in turn impact their future demand on local health and care services. This thinking is driving work by the council – including ‘The Bridge’ an immersive and interactive data visualisation initiative - to make better use of their vast access to data about the location and condition of people and assets, for prediction and planning purposes. When data is layered together to present rich information, colleagues really engage, says Andy Begley, and ‘can start to see solutions’. The realtionship with providers also changes when data is visualised and shared: the council stops simply acting as a commissioner and can start having conversations with the market about how problems can be solved together.