12 Dec 2025
Last week
I missed last week, because I was in the pub on Friday 5th and then the weekend happened.
The highlight of the week was the Sutton Staff Conference, which happened three times because it’s not possible to get everyone in the same room at the same time. The Chief Exec was kind enough to let me speak for 15mins at each one - so a great opportunity to tell stories about our residents raised expectations for digital services and how we might meet them.
I also spoke at Tech UK’s end of year event and shared an optimistic prediction that we’ll start to see more radical service design in local government. The prevailing ‘new public management’ approach to change has run out of road, we can’t efficiency our way out of it this time round.
Briefings with Councillors about an AWS Procurement, planning a business continuity exercise, informal chats about a social care digital platforms change role and the usual weekly management committments filled the gaps.
This week
Less of a singular focus this week, but a stand out highlight with my team’s end of year get together. A few folks put a lot of effort into a very slick presentation of the impact the team have had and planned an excellent (and competitive) quiz.
Kingston’s information security governance board met and the AWS Procurement got through the final committee approval. Lots of great questions from members, who were engaged in both the technical and contractual details.
Joined a recruitment panel for a vacant director role and have closed out the week reviewing audit actions and checking in with the team ahead of a big system go live next week.
Christmas bonus project
As a Google organisation, we still have to consume a number of microsoft services. 11 years after Mike Bracken’s Blog about adopting open standards for document formats in government, we still have line of business systems that cannot function without Microsoft Word and Excel. There are a number of suppliers for whom the request to integrate with Google Workspace or Libre Office has proven an insurmountable challenge. Making things open makes thing better.
The net result of this is the Cloud and Platform team will be working hard over the Christmas period to land some new solutions.
Things I have emailed myself
Just the one this week. Jukesie’s spotify-like round up of his year’s most popular non-job newsletter links
21 Nov 2025
Remembering Casserole
I was reminded of a FutureGov project from 15ish years ago called Casserole. Yesterday I took the opportunity to tell a bit of the story to a group of senior managers, to try and set some context for digital transformation.
Casserole was a local volunteer scheme, supported by a social web platform. It helped people share extra portions of home-cooked food with others in their area who might not be able to cook for themselves. It was collaboratively developed by FutureGov and a few councils around the UK.
The online social network was supported by a matchmaking team and local organisations like care homes, lunch clubs and voluntary organisations. Safeguarding and food hygiene were managed through DBS checks and online food safety quizzes. Social technology was being used to build neighbourhood connections and reduce the demand on traditional meals on wheels services.
At its peak people were sharing 1000’s of meals in the UK and Australia, but it never quite found a sustainable financial model. Smartphones were not quite as ubiquitous, pilot funding didn’t quite run long enough and austerity was really starting to bite - so radical delivery models looked like very risky options.
Fast forward to 2025 and I can use my phone to get any number of foods delivered to my door via Uber Eats and Deliveroo, but we’re still not fully applying everything the technology offers to really challenge our existing operating models. That was my pitch anyway, supported by a healthy dose of nostalgia for a wonderful project that I remain convinced should exist today.
Double the governance, double the fun
A unique feature of a shared service role is navigating large decisions through two organisations. My team has done an excellent job of managing the procurement process for our cloud services infrastructure - the last piece of the puzzle is getting approval at the relevant committees for both councils.
Reading / listening
A few long drives to and from the office this week, so i’ve mostly been listening to Apple in China, The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company. A really enjoyable story that has the history of Apple, deep nerdery on industrial and product design, stories of impossible manufacturing challenges and the main narrative of how China’s long term strategic planning used Apple to completely transform its economy.
Things I emailed myself
Katherine Wastell with some hard earned lessons on transformation
Polly Mackenzie on change and bureaucracy really resonated. The link to the three horizons model and how we need to create ‘iconoplastic’ organisations is something a lot of digital teams will recognise - particularly the need to see where rules need to be rewritten and to really hear the defenders of the status quo.
07 Nov 2025
Jevons’ Paradox and Baumol’s Costs Disease
It’s an unusual week when two things I studied in A-Level economics are spotted in the wild. Even more unusual is when they have relevance to the things we’re trying to do in local government digital.
Jevons’ paradox is from The Coal Question published in 1866. Jevons set out a theory that as something gets more efficient, you lower the cost and open up more potential use cases. This drives up demand that exceeds the gains in efficiency.
The tech sector is using this thinking to model future AI revenues - that more efficient models will increase overall demand and generate the revenue to pay for all this capital investment. At a much simpler level, I’ve seen this play out in digital teams. As we introduce reusable platforms, the business case for some of our smaller services becomes easier to make which drives up overall demand. Every time I think our increased efficiency will buy us some breathing room, I am reminded of Jevons book about coal.
The core idea in Baumol’s cost disease is that wages across the economy will rise together and the public and private sector are competing for the same people. In very people driven services (a lot of where the public sector spends its money) you hit some hard limits in the unit cost vs. output equation. A care worker, with all the AI tools in the world, can still only care for so many people in a day.
This is all a very long way of me saying we have to look beyond just cost reduction and efficiency, we need to use design and digital to fundamentally change the whole system. We shouldn’t try to do this alone, structural problems require structural solutions.
What I’ve been doing
We have some procurement decisions working their way through the process. Being a shared service means double governance and double briefings, but it’s a pretty well oiled machine with colleagues doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
Resilience has been a theme of the week. Not personal resilience, but the emergency planning kind of resilience. A half day training session with fellow directors for Sutton Council’s Silver command rota (the folks who will lead the tactical planning and coordination in an emergency), followed by a refresher course ahead of my week on call for Kingston’s Gold command rota (the strategic leadership).
A few boards for things like capital investment, corporate performance management, transformation and risk management. Some quality time with the team too, collaborating with our transformation friends.
The end of a week brought a bit of a challenging issue, but by the time I was back off the school run all that was needed from me was to review some comms explaining to affected users what happened and how it was going to be very quickly sorted out.
Managed to squeeze in a bit of time catching up with some trusted folks in my network too.
Reading
A very rare re-read. But knowing next week I am on call, I went back to the wisdom in Lucy Easthope’s book on emergency planning and recovery - When the Dust Settles
Listening
Three trips from Buckinghamshire to the offices in London this week meant nearly 15 hours in the car, so ploughing my way through 1929: The Inside Story of the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History, by Andrew Ross Sorkin, on Audible
Things I’ve emailed myself
Essex County Council’s design and patterns library update on creating usable forms
Dafydd Singleton’s post on user needs for data standards
Phil Rumen’s post on sourcing the stack for local government technolgy (also linked above)
Sean Goedecke’s post on seeing like a software company
The City of Seattle’s AI plan and Policy
31 Oct 2025
It has been almost three months since my last weeknote. Habits are hard to form and easy to break.
I won’t attempt a full recap of the first couple of months in the new role at Kingston and Sutton councils. I’m having a wonderful time, the people are great and the work is incredibly challenging.
Things I have emailed myself
Hannah White and David Eaves paper on GOV.UK Notify is a great case study on doing digital transformation at scale, in bureaucracies, with complex financing and staying user focussed throughout. As a local gov user of Notify in a few organisations, it’s fun to see how the benefit of essentially free SMS services was a key part of their adoption strategy.
A blogpost from back in June by Beth Simone Noveck that I like becuse it’s helpful to read analysis of a thing by people who are smarter than you. Beth’s take on The Agentic State whitepaper is helpful. I am wrestling with questions about how much getting your data perfect matters today, if the promise of agentic AI that can interpret unstructured documents and make light work of messy data, is true.
Model Context Protocol staying on the agentic AI theme, MCP is the open standard for connecting AI applications to external systems. It remains a challenge to get access to an API from some of our ‘heritage’ technology providers, how might the local gov supplier ecosystem respond here?
Ayesha Moarif on making product work in public services popped into my feed at a helpful time. Me and the team are spending lots of time with our transformation colleagues, looking at how we focus together on the things that matter most. The public sector is built for programme delivery, which values predictability and managing commitments upwards. We know more adaptive evidence-based work, often from small and long lived teams, can help manage complexity and uncertainty. How do we build this capacity in very stretched organisations having to face off against increasing demand?
03 Aug 2025
What I’ve been doing
I’ve handed over almost everything now, so enjoyed a week with some space in the diary.
I posted something on local government reorganisation and building websites, which a few folks have found useful.
Had a couple of handover chats with the person who’s holding the interim role for my new job. Helpful to get a headstart on this so we can make the most of the few days where we will overlap. I’ve come up with a useful set of questions that I will tidy up and share at some point.
Had a shared leaving drinks with a colleague. Nice and low-key pub chats definitely my preffered style of send off.
Put the finishing touches on a few statements of work for the Ministry of Justice. I will be sad to leave this work behind. It’s been amazing to work on something with such a direct link to impact. The blended TPX and MOJ teams have done a remarkable amount of work in 3 months. Unfortunately not my stories to tell just yet, but seeing something go from a raw prototype to private beta in 6 weeks has been a career highlight.
Had a call with Andrew Webb at Essex County Council. Really lovely to catch up and bounce some ideas around.
Finished the week by chatting to Dr Jaqui Taylor about open (data) standards. Something I’ve been fortunate to continue championing through our work with MHCLG.
What I need to take care of
A little more admin before our drive to the Alps. Crit Air sticker has arrived, high vis vests purchased, warning triangle located, GB sticker applied, headlamp sticker ordered, V5 and proof of insurance in the glovebox.
I’ve fitted a now functioning downstairs WC and some double glazing panes being replaced next week. I just need to fit out the utility room and we’re nearly ready to get this house on the market.
Watching
1923 is streaming on Netflix. Plugging some gaps in the Yellowstone lore. Goodness me Montana is beautiful.
WWE Unreal also on Netflix. Very polished docu-series as part of WWE’s move to Netflix. Feels like it spells the end of kayfabe, but I am here for it. Not quite as good as Drive to Survive of TDF Unchained, but good background TV.
8 out of 10 cats does countdown. Bob Mortimer and Richard Ayoade as team captains should be unstoppable TV, but the first episode of the new series felt a bit strained. Hope it gets better.
Reading
Because Internet thanks to a recommendation from Amy at my leaving drinks.