In the spirit of sharing ideas early to invite feedback, in this blog I’d like to set out something we’ve been exploring at LOTI to help councils address the huge pressures they face.

Those pressures are many and nuanced, but the headline is that local authorities find themselves squeezed between spiralling demand for some of their key services against a backdrop of significant budget pressures.

How has our sector responded to date? Broadly, by cutting back where they can, finding greater efficiencies through continuous improvement and adopting new digital tools like AI to boost productivity and improve resident experiences.

All this is vital work that must continue. Councils deserve absolutely enormous credit for how much they have achieved with those strategies.

But here’s the issue: there are some key services where the growing consensus in our sector is that no amount of improving what councils currently do will ever be enough to close the demand and budget gap. (Aspects of social care and temporary accommodation are often mentioned in this light.)

In these instances, I believe that we need a parallel stream of innovation work that focuses on designing completely new interventions and services that have a chance of being financially viable over the long term.

Should councils focus on radical innovation?

Some have replied to my earlier blogs on this subject (where I talked about the two different buckets of innovation) to argue that reaching for radical new solutions is not the right approach.

Instead, some point out that local government can and should achieve radical change by making incremental but consistent improvements to their work every single day. I completely agree that you can achieve radical change in increments. Through many micro changes, Latin evolved into modern Romance languages like French, Spanish and Italian. But that took hundreds of years. My argument is that in some service areas we simply don’t have the time to put all our faith in the incremental approach.

I recognise that designing radical new solutions is extremely hard to pull off at an individual council level, for two entirely rational reasons.

First, many councils lack the time, staff, money and risk tolerance to try completely new approaches alone. (When in the day can your average director of adult social care free up several staff to be thinking about paradigm-shifting new approaches to care?)

Second, the kind of radical new solutions we need may not look anything like the current public services they seek to replace, or map neatly on to one local authority area. They might be hyper-local or more regional, they might be more about building community resilience, changing whole commissioning models or enabling the third sector to work in bold new ways. Not all councils will feel well set up to able to influence change in these ways.

And beyond it being really hard, expecting every council to each have to come up with its own bold new set solutions feels like a lot of duplicated work and effort.

So I’m left with this thought: shouldn’t somebody somewhere have the full-time job of thinking about and helping co-design the next generation of public services? 

That’s why I’m proposing the creation of a Centre for New Public Services (CNPS).

Introducing LOTI’s CNPS

Imagine if there was a team that had the space, time and expertise to distil some of the most pressing public sector problems to their most fundamental, root-cause level and bring massive creativity to designing new solutions. A place that could provide a shared, disciplined way for councils and their public sector partners to de-risk the design and testing of alternatives to service models we know are no longer viable. A place that could engage the best minds from the public, third, academic and private sectors to generate ideas for new interventions and service models that are designed to be effective and financially viable over the longer term.

That’s the vision behind the LOTI Centre for New Public Services. Think of it as an R&D centre for the unsustainable.

What would be distinctive about it? The Centre would focus on:

• Starting now to develop the solutions we’ll need 2 years+ from now.
• Developing solutions that fundamentally address supply and demand: preventing, re-directing or handling demand before it reaches services, and/or massively increasing capacity. (For inspiration, consider at how Transport for London re-directed demand for travel information by releasing its Unified API; or how GoodSam augments the capacity of emergency services by enabling volunteers to get involved.)
• Using LOTI’s immersive theatre Sandbox Method approach to bring challenges to life and enable service users and colleagues from all parts of the public, private and third sectors to explore and deeply understand the issues to be solved, while making it possible to trial radical new approaches before risking any live services.
• Applying the widest possible innovation toolkit, from design thinking to open innovation, from behavioural science to service design, and from AI to research on global leading practice.
• Designing for scale.

Solutions coming out CNPS might be a new service blueprint; a new technology; an idea for a new organisation or initiative; or identification of an existing organisation or solution that just needs help to be adopted and scaled.

Getting some of these solutions off the ground may well require new commissioning models, better data sharing, different governance and so on. That’s where working hand in glove with colleagues in central government driving the public service reform agenda would be key. (And this is a really exciting moment to be having these conversations, as GDS, MHCLG Digital and No.10 North are seeking to support Mayoral Strategic Authorities on digital and data devolution, and the Cabinet Office is supporting regions to be more experimental through the Test, Learn and Grow programme.)

The next evolution of LOTI?

It will come as a surprise to no-one that I am a huge believer in the power of regional collaboration to support public service reform. In my personal view, regions need the ability to:

1. join up, analyse and act upon data from many organisations
2. implement strong and resilient digital foundations
3. innovate to find every ounce of efficiency out of existing services
4. design fundamentally new interventions for services that are no longer sustainable.

Over the past seven years, LOTI’s model of collaborative innovation has focused on points 1-3. We’ve slashed the time it takes to share data across the whole of London. We help boroughs work together on their technology choices. We have programmes designed to optimise services in areas as broad as homelessness, net zero and digital inclusion.

I believe now is the time to turbo-charge our efforts on point 4. Developing a Centre for New Public Services as part of LOTI is one way we might do that.

I offer this an as idea to be shaped with and by our sector. If you have ideas or think you can help, I’d love to hear from you.