Public sector
Giving citizens and public sector workers a powerful say
The UK Government is turning to AI to help improve public services and reduce costs. These initiatives are being felt across the public sector: in health, education, and the justice system; in local government, central government and devolved administrations.
The public sector holds some of our most sensitive data – including about our health, income and benefits – as well as making decisions that can have huge impacts on our lives, both individually and as a society. With so much at stake, there is a democratic imperative to ensure that the public has a powerful say in how the government adopts data and AI.
We are working across the public sector with organisations and individuals who are exploring new ways of engaging the public in these decisions, as well as with the civil society organisations seeking to build transparency and accountability into the way the government adopts technology.
Along with creative agency Brickwall, Connected by Data carried out a research and development project for the Local Government Association (LGA) to inform the development of a series of explainer videos on how local government engagement with Artificial Intelligence (AI).
As part of our project on ‘Giving communities a powerful say in public sector data and AI projects’, we’re interested in supporting practitioners – particularly in the public sector – who are engaging the public on data and AI. To that end, we’re setting up a community of practice. This is funded until the end of March, which gives us the chance to set an agenda for a pilot period and see how well it works.
Communities are affected daily in both positive and negative ways by data governance decisions made by local and national governments. These arise through interactions with public services such as health and care; schooling; policing and justice; tax and benefits, as well as in more pervasive ways through government’s collection and dissemination of data, statistics and evidence to inform policymaking.
The Labour Government has a manifesto commitment to build a National Data Library (NDL) “to bring together existing research programmes and help deliver data-driven public services, whilst maintaining strong safeguards and ensuring all of the public benefit”. This commitment is in the context of a drive for greater AI innovation and adoption across the economy.
Digitalisation within the public sector continues at pace. UK Labour is strongly signalling a technology-driven strategy for wide ranging public services reform and a significant role for private sector vendors.
In order to shape public sector digitalisation towards fair and equitable outcomes for workers and communities alike, a range of voices and perspectives need to be meaningfully incorporated at all stages.
Civil servants are already using AI for a variety of purposes, from summarising and analysing data to drafting correspondence. The new Labour government sees AI as a route to greater productivity and growth, both within government and better public services.
Bringing together the themes of two private roundtables hosted by the Institute for Government in partnership with Scott Logic, this public event explored the use of AI in policy and communications, and for civil service effectiveness.
On Thursday 18 July 2024, on Zoom, we held the first meeting of a community of practice as part of our project on Giving communities a powerful say in public sector data and AI projects.
On Tuesday 25 June, Connected by Data hosted a Question Time-style event on a possible Labour government’s approach to data and AI in public services. You can watch recording of the event on our YouTube channel.
Tim presented at a meeting of the Local Government Association’s AI Peer Network on “Giving communities a powerful voice in governing AI”, sharing practical approaches to embed participatory practices in decisions about data and AI at a local level. The meeting also included a presentation from Megan Lawless on the Manchester People’s Panel for AI.
Slides and a transcript of Tim’s presentation are shared below.
On 5th December 2022, CONNECTED BY DATA organised an event in parliament, hosted and chaired by Lord Tim Clement-Jones, to explore three key areas around the future of data governance: automated decision-making, data at work and data in schools.
These are all areas that could be affected by the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill, expected to return to parliament for its second reading at some point in 2023. We think the Bill represents an opportunity to influence how data is governed in a more democratic and participatory way, but worry that – in its present form – it undermines existing safeguards and misses the chance to extend democratic data governance.
The three areas under discussion also represent domains where growing data collection and use could have both significant benefits and harms in the future, regardless of what happens to the Bill. The event invited opening contributions from civil society and academic experts on each topic before opening up to a wider discussion. The experts were on the record unless they requested otherwise, with everyone else being unattributed under the Chatham House Rule.
Jeni spoke on this panel alongside Laura Gilbert, Director of Data Science at No.10 Downing Street; Dr. Hatim Abdulhussein from Health Education England; and Lisa Allen from the Open Data Institute.
In the wake of the pandemic, the government aims to make significant cost savings by reducing the civil service headcount. Technology, it says, can help shoulder the burden of this reduced workforce.
This has put automation in the spotlight. RPA was touted as a way to cut through the admin backlog that piled up during lockdowns, and many public sector bodies put it to good use. But can it really replace a significant proportion of the civil service’s workforce?
This panel will assess the state of play for automation, including RPA and its combination with AI and other process technologies, in the UK public sector, and ask how the public sector can get the most out of the technology.
Opinion
Late last year the team at Brickwall (who produced Connected by Data’s intro video) got in touch with us to ask if we might collaborate on a commission from the Local Government Association (LGA) to put together scripts for a series of videos intended to explain artificial intelligence. Drawing on desk research, interviews and a session at UK Gov Camp, we put together a proposed approach based on three sections: introducing AI, AI in Action, and Implementing AI.
I’ve been appointed to an external advisory panel to support the design of the “digital centre” in DSIT (currently a smooched together combination of GDS, CDDO and i.AI). I put out a call on Bluesky for reckons and pointers that has had quite the response, summarised here by Tim Paul but you should go read all the responses. I want to try here to distil some of the topics, questions and opinions around the design of public services, technology support, and what DSIT needs to do as the “digital centre”.
I posted recently about the challenge of adoption of AI by the public sector.
There are two sides to this: how the public sector adopts AI itself, and how the public adopts AI-driven public services.
I’ve posted recently about the challenge of purpose and priorities in the adoption of AI by the public sector. This blog post expands on this to look not at what I think the priorities should be, but about how they should be decided, and that prioritisation method institutionalised given it’s not a one off exercise.