Friday, 14 August, 2026

A lovely time by the sea

Light blogging recently – partly due to starting a new contract, and partly due to the fact that I am just back from a lovely week by the seaside.

Didn’t venture too far, just an hour and a bit down the round to the North Norfolk coast, mostly Sheringham, bit of Cromer (prefer Sheringham).

Was a proper break, barely looked at my phone. Managed to get some reading done too – have been in a real slump of late on that front, and managed to read Straight Man by Richard Russo (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️) and Therapy by David Lodge (⭐️⭐️⭐️).

Being by the sea meant we could enjoy the hot weather – when we got back home, inland, the heat really hit us!

#A lovely time by the sea

Wednesday, 5 August, 2026

Coined a new (to me!) phrase today: “performative project management”.

Can see myself using it a lot from now on!

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I love stories like this. Luton’s Hazel Lunn shares the low down on her career in local government, from working in the contact centre to now heading up technology and infrastructure for the Council:

When I first joined local government 23 years ago, I could never have imagined that one day I would become an assistant director of technology and infrastructure. Like many careers in public service, mine did not follow a carefully planned route.

A great read and a fantastic example for anyone just starting out in their career.

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Monday, 3 August, 2026

This looks quite interesting: London Productivity Library.

CleanShot 2026-08-03 at 12.41.26.

A productivity tool from LOTI, for any organisation to deploy. A curated collection of prompts, workflows, productivity tips, and AI assistant how-tos that work with whatever stack your organisation uses.

There is a blog post telling some of the history of it too:

Like most councils, we started with AI prompt training/Lunch & Learns in Croydon. Decent sessions, good attendance, positive feedback forms. And then not much changed. People went back to full inboxes and busy days, and whatever they’d learned about prompt engineering faded before it had a chance to stick.That wasn’t a failure of facilitators or staff, it was the wrong approach for the world we live in today. A housing officer with a backlog of case notes doesn’t want to become a prompt engineer, they just want their Tuesday afternoon back. So we flipped it.

Looks like it is just a prototype at the moment, so could disappear at any time.

I’d be interested to know how helpful folk think this might be. I suppose a lot of it depends on the breadth of the rollout of LLM tools in the organisation – and I’m not sure having a pre-written prompt would go that far in persuading a busy officer to spend time experimenting, if they are already nervous or sceptical?

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Thursday, 30 July, 2026

Another great update on the low code platform rollout at Luton, from Kev Rowe:

A key principle of our low code platform approach is to build reusable components that can support multiple services.

Over the last two sprints, James Coleman, Senior Digital Developer, has introduced several new platform patterns, including:

  • enhanced filtered list functionality within back-office interfaces, making it easier for users to see which cases require actions
  • integrated PDF viewing within portal applications, allowing documents to be viewed directly without requiring downloads
  • continued work towards a more accessible HTML-based document experience, ensuring we improve accessibility while providing a practical interim solution through integrated document viewing

These patterns help us develop new applications more quickly while providing a more consistent user experience across the platform.

Following this journey is such a good learning resource for other councils about to embark on similar work!

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Wednesday, 29 July, 2026

Sucharitha Revanuru from the Essex Digital Service team writes From Bananas to Better Outcomes: Taking Product Thinking to the LGD Community:

Like many digital teams, one of our biggest lessons has been learning to balance stakeholder requests with genuine user needs. Sometimes the challenge is not building quickly but making sure we are solving the right problem first. This is where discovery, prioritisation and continuous feedback become so important.

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I don’t know why I enjoy aggressively sceptical posts about AI so much, but I do. Here’s a doozy: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making:

There have been several occasions where I have seen someone, apropos of nothing, blurt out almost word-for-word “AI is changing everything”, only to concede moments later that their organisation does not currently use LLMs for anything, and indeed, that they cannot name a single thing that has changed other than they get some use out of ChatGPT (frequently the free-tier).

It’s full of such zingers.

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Tuesday, 28 July, 2026

Matt Cain – The Architecture of Effective Digital Government Centres:

Over the last eighteen months a distinct cohort of governments has produced fast measurable gains in digital government. These aren’t “just” against international rankings (the biennial UN Index will be refreshed this autumn), but by governments that have delivered digital services at scale for most citizens. This note examines how the digital centres of six of those governments — Greece, the Philippines, Brazil, Japan, Ukraine and Malaysia — are actually constructed: where responsibility for digital sits, how senior and how well-sponsored the person holding it is, and, above all, the mechanism by which that centre can compel consistency from the rest of government.

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Ronan Fitzgerald on the Justice Digital, Data and Science blog writes How user research transformed GOV.UK guidance for separating families:

Thousands of people use guidance on child arrangements every month, often at some of the most stressful moments in their lives.

We wanted to find out whether it still met people’s needs, and what we could do to improve it.

In September 2024, I formed a content improvement team with another content designer and a user researcher, focused on Private Family Law content on GOV.UK. This is how JDDS approaches digital services more widely, bringing different skills together around a single user problem rather than working in separate lanes.

Our goal was to revamp live content and user journeys based on regular user research. We wanted to understand our users and their needs in detail, while showing the value of improving content that is already live.

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Monday, 27 July, 2026

TPX Impact have published a “Market-shaping playbook for policymakers”:

Market-shaping is the practice of designing and delivering interventions that make a public service market produce better outcomes. Services like planning, housing management, social care and education are powered by markets, including technology and other service providers. When buyers experience vendor lock-in, can’t access their own data, or can’t access the products and services they need to deliver well, interventions like collective buying powers, data standards, regulatory guidance and training are needed.

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Kailani Knight – The Certainty Principles:

Accessibility work often feels chaotic. Every new project seems to start from scratch. Every person who flags a barrier is treated like a unique puzzle to solve. The result is slow, expensive, exhausting – and it still results in solutions that fail people.

In my day to day I notice more and more that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Beneath the surface noise, there are constants – Patterns that repeat, needs that are knowable in advance and systems that can learn.

This Certainty Principles series names these constants and gives you a framework to act on them. It’s for anyone who’s tired of reinventing the wheel every time inclusion comes up – and for anyone who wants to move their organisation from reactive firefighting to quiet, dependable competence.

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Thursday, 23 July, 2026

On the MHCLG Digital blog – Building Local Transcribe for local government:

Local Transcribe is a new AI-powered tool designed to change that by capturing conversations, transcribing and summarising them, and producing a draft set of case notes for officers to review and edit…

It builds on Minute, developed by the Incubator for AI (i.AI) and piloted with 22 councils using real case data. We’re taking what worked and evolving it into a scalable service for wider use across local government, starting with housing.

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Wednesday, 22 July, 2026

Johnny Williams – No Ivory Towers Here Please (LinkedIn warning):

What DSIT hasn’t done is build sovereign and resilient digital infrastructure below that GOV.UK front door. Standardising the citizen-facing layer is a different achievement from owning the plumbing underneath it, and for years now too much of that plumbing has come to depend on two American hyperscale cloud ecosystems. “Cloud first” was only ever meant to mean buying commodity infrastructure instead of building your own, but it became full-stack dependency instead. “Open source first” became code-in-the-open when there’s time for it, which isn’t the same policy at all.

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MySociety asks Robots and councils: how is AI being used by local government – and what can we find out about it?

Artificial Intelligence, as we know, is everywhere. For governments and public bodies, the possibilities for policy-making seem endless. As the UK government put it in its AI playbook ‘the potential of AI to transform public services is enormous, giving us an unparalleled opportunity to do things differently and deliver more with less’.

As with every other part of government, AI use has spread across local government in the UK. According to the Local Government Association around 70% of councils are now using them in frontline services, with almost all councils ‘using or exploring AI’ in some way.

What is less clear is what AI is exactly being used for, and how far advanced the work is. Are these experiments? Will pilots be abandoned? More importantly, how easy is it to make AI assisted policies democratically accountable? It is not clear how transparent and accountable these new AI policies are, or how they can be scrutinised.

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Tuesday, 21 July, 2026

James Plunkett publishes a long read on approaches to education (Medium warning). It’s well worth your time.

Really like this in the concluding paragraphs:

The challenges facing public services can feel demoralising; there is such a mismatch between the complexity of the world and our capacity to collaborate under such conditions. It now seems clear that the problem is not the amount of effort we are applying, but the logic by which it is being applied. We have been confined to a mindset of producing — making policies, passing regulations, delivering services, rolling out interventions. We have not focused enough on cultivating active communities.

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Richard Pope: On waiting, digital and where the state chooses to operate (LinkedIn warning):

The post-war digitisation of the UK’s tax and benefits system, the creation of automated institutions like Girobank, and teaching children programming with the BBC Micro (ironically, the conservative Thatcher government did a better job of ‘picking winners’ with the BBC Micro, than the statist Benn had done with ICL) were all bets on the future.

Those kind of bets have been long absent from British politics, but looking to the energy behind digital infrastructure in Estonia and India and it’s hard not to see the similarity.

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Matt Wood-Hill continues to blog his thoughts on his time in government working on digital planning.

This is a useful reflection on how central government best works with local:

ODP starts from the premise that those working at the coalface are best placed to help improve planning services. It provides a way for central government to listen and learn from them, and for council teams to learn from and support each other.

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Monday, 20 July, 2026

More new content on the LGR digital playbook! This time, it’s quite a long read on commercial, contract and supplier considerations during reorganisation.

This quote from a local gov person interviewed for the piece is perceptive and as a sector we ought to be having a think about what can be done about it:

We’re mostly using the same suppliers across councils, and that’s something we need to recognise early. If several authorities are going through reorganisation at the same time, those suppliers are going to be working with all of us simultaneously. It would really help if there was a way of bringing councils and suppliers together to talk about how systems might be merged or separated. Otherwise, every council ends up trying to solve the same problem independently.

I wonder if there might be a role here for someone to act as some kind of ‘broker’ between council demand and supply from the market. Perhaps even organising the staggering of work, so we don’t have everyone doing social care at the same time?

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