Friday 20 February

20 Feb 2026

This week felt like a compressed version of my first six months. Equal parts trying to deal with unpredictable things and making space for shaping the work that needs to happen. Highlights this week were:

• connecting with a previous colleague who’s leading work to change our social care case management system to meet the demands of client-level data reporting and the families first reforms
• checking in with the team who are replatforming Sutton’s website to LocalGov Drupal
• in person morning with my Sutton peers to talk about budgets and transformation
• a couple of impromptu chats about intranets and why they’re so often failing to meet user or organisational needs

That AI article from last week

Matt Shumer wrote an article that got a pretty significant cut-through. The internet did its thing and divided opinions into:

1. An unreliable narrator has created a masterpiece of hype
2. The singularity is here, we’re all about to be unemployed

As a professional fence sitter, I fluctuate wildly in opinion as I experiment and think about the implications. The recent advances are impressive, claude cowork feels like magic and the emerging practices for orchestration of multiple agents look like where the future’s headed.

Quickly and cheaply building an application has rarely been the answer to the hard questions in local government. But a direction of travel that sees a commoditisation of agentic tools, that’s interesting and a little bit unnerving.

Tom Loosemore has written a post on the end of friction as a policy lever that gets into the issues we’ve been talking about in the team. Our canary in the coal mine is FOI submissions. We have a small team of diligent and highly skilled people who triage, read and respond to requests. They’ve always been stretched, but have managed a fairly predictable pattern and shape of work. Generative AI is changing this - we’re seeing an increase in volume and complexity. What were previously short and precise requests are now quasi-legal dissertations. It’s not hard to imagine the agentic version of this, where a personal agent chases, escalates, challenges and complains.

We’ve seen versions of this before, with FixMyStreet reducing the friction to report public realm issues - which then bumped into the reality of legacy line of business tooling poorly equipped to handle concepts like status or progress. The platforms improved, integrations were built and feedback loops with residents created. The thing that’s different this time is that it could happen to all services, at the same time - including the less transactional and more complex services that are already experiencing high levels of demand.

If ever there was a time for militant optimism and a drive to rewire the state, it’s now.

Things I emailed myself

Andrew Greenway on cloaking radical change in reassuringly crusty clothes. A really enjoyable read, because you can taste the frustration. Makes a great case for radical organisational change and establishing a Royal Commission on the future of the Civil Service as the way to get there. I don’t think Local Government needs to wait, we’re smaller and could do this to ourselves. CW: Long.

New America with more on how AI can reduce friction and increase demand

Lizzie Hines on some work at the V&A to create an intranet that helps staff get things done.

Watching

The Winter Olympics. I can hear my snowboard calling me from the attic.