Local public services across the UK are experiencing significant and ongoing pressure. Common issues include persistently high waiting lists, social care services operating at or beyond their intended capacity, widespread housing pressures affecting multiple sectors, and community organisations striving to support individuals despite constrained and unpredictable funding. These are not isolated failings. Taken together, they form a consistent picture of a system that is trying to meet 21st-century conditions with operating models largely designed in the late 20th century.
Despite this challenging context, feedback from those involved in contributing to our analysis indicate that the sector is delivering wide-ranging change, innovation and transformation.
Developing new digital capabilities provides opportunities to overcome many of the constraints imposed by these uncontrollable external forces. The future requires us to ‘connect together better’ to solve complex issues of ‘whole system working’. Starting with communities, prevention and early help, that use shared intelligence, integrate digital foundations and simplify access, and that focus on people’s lived experiences in places, not within organisational boundaries.
This will require public services to recalibrate, particularly in areas such as:
- Place-based, collaborative leadership, harnessing people, technologies and data.
- Digital skills and capability, from service delivery to board level roles.
- Community resilience, as more dependence is placed on digital systems and access.
- Innovation to deliver better outcomes for people, communities and places by harnessing data, systems and service remodelling.
- Change management and service design shifting to an adaptive and learning model.
- Co-design and co-creation with residents and other service users/stakeholders.
- Standards to enable data sharing and insights to target resources and services more effectively.
Understanding how to take advantage of digital and technology opportunities to build connected public services will enable digital and technology priorities to be aligned, sufficiently resourced and managed in the context of external pressures and service needs:
