little over 150 years ago, the groundbreaking design feats of London’s greatest-ever engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette laid out clean water and sewerage to power a century of economic growth.
Today, a myriad of crises, from climate change, migration, pandemics and technology change, need London and the UK to drive innovation to solve the challenges of our time. Yet the archaic Victorian structures that underpin the machinery of government are not set up to deliver what is required – and other cities around the world are running far ahead of us.
We need new foundations: modern day Bazalgettes to create public benefits, but we should not stop there. As well as its own data, the government should define and make accessible the public-interest data held by big platforms and legacy tech providers. Sharing data for public benefit should be the cost of doing business in a digital age, and with the information held by Google, Meta and their ilk, London would be able to design data flows to shape markets and turbocharge its own economy.
The benefits of free-flowing data at individual, city and national level are enormous: accelerating London’s promising Care Record nationally, to give patients and medical professionals a single view of health data could hugely improve our health service and improve the NHS app; start-ups using AI data from drones can show us which buildings are energy inefficient and help us tackle emissions data. At international level, London can compete with Singapore, Barcelona and cities with muscular data strategies. So what is holding us back?
Our legacy of data management in the UK is highly restrictive to economic growth and innovation. A generation of poorly planned outsourcing of our public technology systems means the old school technology industry ‘owns’ much of our data and restricts its use to solve policy issues. A decade ago under Francis Maude it took a concerted political and technology programme to tackle this in Whitehall so we could create GOV.UK and dozens of digital services which are now part of daily life. This problem is worse at local and regional level where the skills and resources are lacking.
Unlocking this data is a contractual and procurement nightmare, and 32 London boroughs each lack the scale and knowhow to tackle it. We need muscular interventions here, using standards to shape the market to public outcomes. Extending GOV.UK and national platforms into local government would be an easy win, and, like Bazalgette’s tunnels and embankments, the foundations of a fairer, thriving economy.
There is a model here. My company, Public Digital, is a partner in the Bloomberg Philanthropies City Data Alliance program, which is identifying 100 mayors from cities across North, Central, and South America that are the most sophisticated, ambitious, and advanced at harnessing data and helping them set a new standard for local governments committed to using data to power better results for residents.
But we must do more. The tech bros have for decades collected individual data in return for ‘free’ utility software, so they can target advertising and services to us. The next government needs to obligate big companies to open up: we need public data trusts to harness the patterns and insights they hold for public innovation.
These reforms will be key to unlocking billions of pounds of waste in duplicate IT systems, workaroundsand millions of hours of wasted time in the delivery of its missions. The data standards alone could be agreed before the election, but what is essential is the political spine to stand up to the intense lobbying. These companies have a role to play, but in return for market access and historic monopoly positions, we need to better articulate their role in public policy.
Perhaps Labour’s biggest challenge to deliver will be the structure of our UK government. Our ‘special, unique and different’ political culture keeps us locked into a Victorian system of trading arrangements between government agencies, each lacking scale and expertise. Our politics at all levels needs leaders who understand that institutional reform, not shiny apps, will deliver outcomes.
Victorian London thrived because of investment in public infrastructure. We need new public institutions where technology and data can be used in service of tackling the UK’s, and London’s toughest problems.
Mike Bracken is founding partner at Public Digital and former executive director of the UK Government Digital Service. [email protected]