Talking 5 with Local Public Services Member Access Group

Each month, techUK's Associate Director for Local Public Services, Georgina Maratheftis, interviews a member active in the local government space about their vision for the future of local public services and where digital can make a real difference to people and society. This month we talk with Chris Wilson, Product Director at The Access Group about using tech for greater levels of automation.

Welcome Chris. Firstly, tell me more about you, your career and how you got to this position today?

I left university 20 years ago and took up a trainee accountancy role at a company providing a managed service for local government. Whilst it turned out accountancy wasn’t for me, I enjoyed doing a few different roles in the same company working in the local government space.

Through that company I met a local entrepreneur who saw the growing challenges in social care and wanted to fund a start-up to support it. So, we started a software procurement business that focussed on matching the needs of people requiring social care support to local care providers, and eventually other areas such as housing, education and transport. Eventually we reached a point whereby we needed investment to take us through the next phase of growth and met The Access Group who were building a portfolio of complimentary products. Therefore, we decided to sell the business to Access in 2022.

Since joining Access’ Health Support and Care division I’ve taken on the role as a Product Director, helping bring our different offerings together to better serve our health and local government customers. It’s a wildly different environment to running your own small business, but it’s a hugely fun challenge.

What is the greatest opportunity for local government when it comes to digital?

For many years local government has focussed on optimisation and looked at ‘digitising paper processes’ and ‘streamlining workflows. But in my view, we’re now entering the era of automation. There’s no sign of slowing demand nor meaningful increases in budgets, therefore digital solutions need to move beyond incremental improvements in efficiency.

The good news is that the technology exists to achieve greater levels of automation. The challenge for the sector is to make the transition to these modern digital tools.

The challenge to councils (and IT providers) is to be ambitious. For example, it can’t be right that social workers are spending roughly half of their time typing up notes, or that we ask local government staff to add information into multiple different IT systems. If we want to expand the capacity of local government without spending a lot more money, then we need to invest in digital tools to drive up productivity for staff. This would also make retention of staff much easier.

If we had twice as much capacity in the workforce just think what we could achieve!

What is your vision for the future of local public services and places?

The next generation of public services has to be based on communication. Digital tools are going to improve connections between different parts of the public sector, meaning that we can provide truly joined-up support for people to access public services.

Everyone involved in someone’s care should have the information available (in real-time) to know how they are and alerted when something changes. That comes from joining up systems, but importantly, with the ambition of improving communication between people, not just integrating systems to improve datasets, which is a common trap people fall into.

This also applies to the individual being cared for. People are often significantly more capable than assumed. So, if we can give them more of a voice and access to what they actually need, we’ll find the system runs a lot more effectively for the people within it.

We should be striving for a world where people accessing public services have more choice and control over their services (and shouldn’t require lengthy form-filling exercises and processes). In doing so, we’ll reach a point where someone can use their Alexa or a mobile app to book, cancel or amend a service without any human intervention. A significant (and positive) step change from what we have now that empowers citizens and releases time from councils.

Local Public Services Programme activities

Our Local Public Services Programme helps techUK members to navigate local government. We champion innovation that can create truly digital local public services helping to create thriving, productive and safer places for all. Visit the programme page here