This post covers Sustainable and Innovative Places, a one-day conference held in London on 10 October.
Featured image: Artwork around Barnet’s Brent Cross Village substation. Source: John Sturrock
Barnet builds for net zero and fun at Brent Cross
Barnet Council’s Brent Cross Town regeneration project is aiming for net zero carbon emissions through work including a sustainable energy substation, a new rail station and a revamped park, interim chief executive Cath Shaw told Socitm’s Sustainable and Innovative Places conference in London on 10 October.
The sustainable energy substation will supply electricity to the entire site, which includes 6,700 new homes as well as offices, retail and leisure space. The substation will generate electricity from Europe’s largest air source heat pump and will also include a district heating and cooling plant. It is already surrounded by a colourful 21 metre high piece of public art, built by contractor Arup with partly recycled steel and lower carbon concrete, that resembles a roller-coaster. “Public art is quite a simple and effective way of getting a sense of excitement and enthusiasm, that it’s a real place,” said Shaw. “It’s a really important part of making this place.”
As well as aiming for net zero carbon emissions, the borough wants Brent Cross Town to be a destination for people across and beyond the capital, rather than just a place that is a convenient journey away from central London. “We want to be the place for sport and play in London,” said Shaw, adding that the Olympic park in east London is focused on elite sport. “Our mantra is participation, particularly for women and girls,” who are less likely to take part in sport and exercise than men and boys. This ambition is supported by Brent Cross West, a new rail station which opened in December 2023 and is 12 minutes away from St Pancras on cross-London Thameslink services.
“We want to be a borough of fun,” added Shaw of the development’s focus on sport and leisure, which includes the redesign of Claremont Park by the borough’s partner Related Argent. “Our residents say that’s really important to us. When times are bleak you need light moments, you need to celebrate, get together with your community and have moments of levity.”
Public art is quite a simple and effective way of getting a sense of excitement and enthusiasm, that it’s a real place
Cath Shaw (Barnet Council)
Norfolk uses bin lorries and backpacks to map mobile coverage

Norfolk County Council is mapping the strength of mobile networks with equipment in council vehicles and a backpack, to help residents and businesses choose the best network for specific locations. It hopes to launch a public version by the end of October but one of its district councils is already using the data to support procurement of services that need mobile connectivity.
For the last six months the council has run 14 units in refuse and green waste lorries, which are rotated between vehicles to extend the mapped area, one in a hydrant survey vehicle run by Norfolk Fire and Rescue Service and one in a mobile backpack that is used to investigate specific areas. The equipment checks and records signal strength every five to 10 metres for all four mobile networks, checking whether it is possible to send a text, make a call or download data.
Kurt Frary, Socitm vice-president and Norfolk’s head of IT and chief technology officer, said the county has particular problems with slow or no mobile connectivity. “If you talk to Ofcom about your region, it gets its data from mobile network operators,” he said. “When we look at that data for Norfolk, it doesn’t match the real-life experience for people and businesses working there. If we can lobby Ofcom with this data to use that with the mobile network operators, then hopefully we can make a difference to the mobile signal in Norfolk.” The council is working with a doctoral candidate at University of East Anglia who is using the raw data to build a predictive model of coverage.
County archive uses AI to find names in USAF war records
Norfolk Record Office has used optical character recognition (OCR) and generative artificial intelligence to catalogue the names of 10,000 American airmen who served during the Second World War, with a process that could be used for other documents such as social care records.
County archivist Gary Tuson told the event that he had used Microsoft Vision Studio’s OCR capability to extract names from existing digital scans of pages from the US Air Force’s Second Air Division Archive, which is held by the council. He then pasted the text from the resulting .json files into Microsoft Word and then took advantage of Norfolk’s trial of Microsoft Copilot to turn these into a spreadsheet that he passed on to interested organisations.
Tuson said the process, which took four days between Christmas and New Year, covered a fifth of the documents of this type in the air division’s archive. It took some time to get the process to work: “It didn’t like people with rude names or that might be perceived as rude. At one stage I found it coming out with the names Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak which I think is some coder having a joke.” He added that the next step is to build an automated workflow which would accept images of documents and return spreadsheet .csv files.
Kurt Frary added that Norfolk County Council has a large volume of paper social care records stored at an old Royal Air Force base that it is legally required to retain. Rather than going to the expense of full digitisation it could use this process to identify and catalogue names in the documents, making it much easier to find records when they are required.
Generative AI can generate cost surprises
Local authorities should be alert to extra costs from using generative artificial intelligence (AI) although some suppliers cover these, according to participants in a panel discussion.
Darren Farmer of cloud provider Amazon Web Services said that large language models tend to have significant compute requirements and organisations paying directly for these may see the impact: “When you are looking at this new shiny thing and the value it brings into your organisation, keep a little eye on what it is going to cost you.” He said that generative AI can be an expensive way to achieve some tasks and that it makes sense to balance performance against costs when choosing, for example, which large language model to use.
Kurt Frary said that Norfolk County Council has found that when it builds an AI process it can make choices on what to use, but if they are part of a packaged service the vendor may decide for them. “It’s quite a minefield at the moment to work out how much this technology is going to cost you. We as the public sector need to understand that more and your organisations need to help us,” he said to the suppliers on the panel.
Rubrik’s Grant Dinning said that the data security company uses AI to support customers undergoing cyberattacks and does not charge extra for this: “We differentiate by using AI to guide you through the process,” he said, applying it to ransomware files rather than customer data. Julian Smith of Juniper Networks said it licences use of an AI-driven assistant but that other services which incorporate AI are included.
Empowering Women groups tackle neurodiversity and inclusion
Two groups completed Socitm’s Empowering Women course by presenting the conclusions of their research to the event. Team Sunshine, which focused on supporting people with neurodiversity in the workplace, said that leaders can use openness, active listening, emotional intelligence and empathy to help achieve this. More specifically, quieter work areas and access to noise-cancelling headphones can help those who find background noise distracting.
Kathie Anderson of Derbyshire County Council argued for “spicy ideas”, based on ‘neurospicy’, a word adopted by some as a positive description for their neurodiversity. “People with neurodiverse conditions are incredibly creative,” she said. “We want to think about creating activity days including story-telling and community gardens with sensory sections.” Anderson added that she is in the process of creating a team self-care basket for neurodiverse colleagues which will include healthy snacks to eat when they need a short break.
The Ruby Red Team, which researched how diversity and inclusion affects businesses, said that the issues need to be considered in policies on recruitment, infrastructure, personal development, leadership as well as in organisational strategic plans. Challenges include resistance to change, lack of policies, problems with infrastructure, lack of representation and unconscious bias.
Landa George of Barnet Council said that research suggests that most people prefer people similar to themselves but that more diverse friendship groups can develop community cohesion. “How can we get out of our echo chambers and develop relationships with people who don’t think like us?” she asked, adding that options include volunteering, attending talks or taking courses. “So for the next 10 weeks I’m going to be having in-depth conversations about life with complete strangers,” she added, through taking an introductory course on philosophy.
“For the next 10 weeks I’m going to be having in-depth conversations about life with complete strangers”
Landa George (Barnet Council)
Social start-ups helping Londoners into employment
The event heard from three organisations which have won support from the Greater London Authority’s No Wrong Door open innovation challenge, a programme designed to help Londoners into good work, in particular those with disabilities, women, refugees and those of all ages. “We set this challenge to look for organisations that are finding really innovative ways to tackle that challenge,” said Sandy Tung, a principal policy officer at the authority. “The goal is to help Londoners no matter what their circumstances to be able to find a job.”
The following are edited extracts from the three speakers’ introductions to their organisations.
MyPocketSkill
“It’s very tough for young people to get work experience and job opportunities. These challenges really resonate with the work we do at MyPocketSkill, a platform for young people between 13 and 24 [which connects them with paid work opportunities]. We encourage them to save as they earn and upskill themselves around financial literacy and general employability.
“As an example of what we do, one young digital designer who was working long hours in a job that didn’t match her skills and qualifications joined MyPocketSkill, found work with small businesses and has made £8,000 on the platform. The most important thing is that she found relevant work experience that will really help her get good work.”
Annabel Talco (Policy and impact analyst, MyPocketSkill)
Facework Group

“Lewisham is a dormitory borough – before Covid people slept there then went to Canary Wharf. Now we’re seeing people leaving because the property prices are high. The foundational economy of our area is really struggling; it’s the Old Kent Road, the cheapest square on the Monopoly board. So our vision is to look again at co-working.
Any discussion about helping people make places better has to think about how do we get work social. We run a workspace in a Peckham car-park where people can come in daily for £12.50. We have refugees who volunteer – they work one day and get two days free – and we are creating a maker space for them. If anyone is interested in how you create places of work in a local area, come and talk to me.”
Stephen Carrick-Davies (Founder and chief executive officer, Facework Group CIC)
GetZero

“One of the bigger barriers [to meeting net zero targets] is simply not having enough people to do the work. By 2030 we will need 60,000 people to do heat-pump installation and 230,000 to do retrofit fabric work on buildings. We can get young people to do that, or other people who are currently disadvantaged in the skills system, but they aren’t picking up on these jobs.
“What GetZero is trying to do is get them curious about the green jobs which are available, with our current solution which I call Duolingo for green skills. We’re now starting to work on ‘this sounds interesting, how do I get one of these jobs’ using generative AI, trusted resources and a chatbot to give young people a journey to these green jobs.”
Matt Robinson (Co-founder and chief executive officer, GetZero)
Also at the event
Barnet planners discuss climate change risk maps
Councillors on Barnet Council’s planning committee have discussed the findings of a map which shows the relative risks to areas of the borough from climate change. Bloomberg Associates, a New York-based philanthropic adviser to city governments, established a London-wide climate risk map in 2020 with the Greater London Authority which has used this in making funding decisions, such as where to locate water butts and water-absorbing rain gardens.

Andrea Partenio, a consultant for Bloomberg Associates, said it wants to get this data into the hands of boroughs and is working with Socitm vice-president and Barnet’s culture and sustainability programme director Yogita Popat. “We’re hoping we can produce local-level maps and share the data publicly so that community groups and local individuals who are passionate about resilience can start to understand what the risk looks like in their neighbourhoods,” she said.
The maps combine data on heat, air pollution, tree cover and and surface flooding with demographics, with for example more children and older people increasing the population’s vulnerability, using lower layer super output areas (LSOAs) with between 1,000 and 3,000 residents. Compilers have not yet been able to incorporate the Environment Agency’s data on river flooding risks, however.
University uses digital twin to consider heating options
Middlesex University created a digital twin of one of its main buildings to evaluate different options for renovation, finding that ground source heat pumps would provide the most efficient heating and air conditioning.
The university built a virtual copy of its Ritterman building with technology provider IES, using plans, photos, materials used, occupancy levels and data on the power usage of heating, air conditioning, lighting and other equipment. A digital twin allows a dynamic simulation of how a building will behave throughout the day and the year as well as how it will react to changes.
Dr Homeira Shayesteh, a senior lecturer at the university, said that the project faced challenges including shared meters for multiple buildings, making it harder to track energy use in specific buildings; issues accessing and exporting data from the building management system; incomplete and inconsistent data; and problems with integration.