Thursday, 19 February, 2026

Tom Loosemore published some thoughts about public services and AI on LinkedIn:

Many public services rely on friction to stay viable. They depend on slow, confusing, frustrating user experiences to put off those otherwise eligible. This is both unfair and politically convenient. You could say ‘twas ever thus’. Until now.

From parents seeking special needs support to property owners appealing council tax bands, it’s often the friction of bad service design that restrains demand, not the law.

AI – specifically AI agents – will remove that friction. Your AI agent will be doggedly relentless in how they access public services, however byzantine. They’ll make sure your application is perfectly crafted to maximise your chances of getting what you want, treating any appeals process as just another stage to be navigated by all.

Well worth a read in full.

Missed this first time around, but there’s some interesting stuff to think about in here – Courage is required for GDS Local to succeed.

There is currently both a real opportunity and a grave danger facing local government in England from the confluence of technological and governance considerations. The opportunity is to use the forthcoming governance changes to review the current fragmentation of approaches and consolidate both operating models and their enabling technology stacks. The danger is that the governance changes will absorb the available leadership bandwidth and will actually significantly delay the digital transformation of the local government sector.

Wednesday, 18 February, 2026

Claire Craig from the Essex Digital Service on User research in libraries: finding the voices between the bookshelves

We’re currently working through a research project, exploring Essex residents’ thoughts and feelings about AI being used in public services. We’ve recruited research participants for online and in-person one-to-one interviews, and the sessions are well underway and proving to be hugely insightful.

And whilst we’re deeply grateful for every single participant who answers the online recruitment call, project after project after project falls short of reaching a demographically representative sample. They are somewhat self-selecting – you’ll reach the highly engaged, the digitally literate, the loud and confident voices (sometimes, the squeakiest wheel). You have to go further to find the complete set of user voices.

Tuesday, 17 February, 2026

📅 Weeknote w/e Friday 13 February 2026

Another Tuesday posting! Weeks are flying by. I guess this is part of getting older. That and getting increasingly bad at remembering, well, anything.

This week’s worky highlights:

  • The publication of the LGR DDaT playbook has been postponed for a couple of weeks. It’s a shame but can’t be helped. In the meantime we are writing the next sections, organising new community activities, and all that stuff.
  • Am also getting a bit more involved in another strand of work with Local Digital, around future tech strategies for councils. How do we create the conditions to make it easier for councils to invest in better tech? Various ideas are being worked on – including some things I’ve wanted to see happen for years!
  • More interviews at Luton, this time for a senior role leading on IG. Once again, great candidates and a terrific hire made.
  • Delivered a couple more demos of Skillstats, and enquiries are still coming in as well, which is lovely. Getting close to those who have purchased going live too, which is exciting.

Not really work stuff:

  • I added email subscriptions to the blog. I haven’t managed to get a newsletter out this year, so I guess this is a way to make myself feel better about that.
  • Properly had a play with the default Apple Notes app on the phone and desktop. Trying to use it to organise myself a bit – it does a lot more than I thought it did. Have set up a note to act as a todo list, organised into now, next, and later to try and keep everything in one place. I give it a week before it all falls apart!

Media consumption:

  • I finally finished Until I Find You and it was really quite good. A high 4/5 from me.
  • Watched the end of The Rip on Netflix, which was also good – recommended for those who like twisty thrillers.
  • Saw the finale of The Traitors’ most recent season. There was a palpable moment where I thought “They’re actually going to do it!”. Great fun.
  • I find modern computer games just too damn complicated for my simple brain, so imagine how delighted I was to get Micropolis working on my Mac. It’s basically the original 1989 version of Sim City. Great for whiling away the odd hour – and not too much more.

Monday, 16 February, 2026

Carol from the team at Luton blogs about the new telephony system implementation:

When we kicked this off, it wasn’t just because our old Avaya system was outdated; it was because colleagues were struggling with tools that didn’t support how we work today.

We needed something more reliable, more flexible, and far easier for staff and residents to engage with.

Love that new voices are being heard, about a whole range of different types of work. Blogging isn’t just for the web team!

The LGA have released their toolkit for local government reorganisation (LGR). There’s not much digital in it – largely because that will be covered in detail in MHCLG’s DDaT LGR playbook, which I have been working on with the team for the last few months.

More blog tweaking. I’ve added an email subscription option so readers can get news posts from here in their inboxes automagically. Just use the sign up box in the header of the site on desktop, or on mobile the same form is on the contact page.

It uses the Jetpack plugin, which I have always been nervous of – because of bloat – but having played with a few options, it really is the easiest to set up and maintain. I’ve turned off as many of the other features as I can, so hopefully performance isn’t affected too much.

(There’s also a thing for me about Jetpack which makes it slightly contradictory to self-hosting my blog. Jetpack ties you in to the WordPress.com platform – so it makes me wonder what the point is of not hosting there in the first place!)

One thing is that it defaults to sending post individually, which might get annoying. On your first email on subscribing you get a button to press to manage delivery – I suggest you switch to daily! Sadly I can’t amend the default.

Friday, 13 February, 2026

Catherine Howe – Head towards the North Star:

Some of the shifts we need to make are very much rooted in public service; better coproduction with communities, prevention at scale and deep modernisation of technology and practice. Some of this I wrote about in my last post. Other shifts are more in response to bigger change and what a modern workforce needs to thrive; how we become more inclusive internally and externally, how we provide an environment where learning is embedded in how we work as a way to underpin a more adaptive organisation, how we make hybrid working genuinely work for people.

If only every chief exec was so thoughtful, and open!