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little over 150 years in the past, the groundbreaking design feats of London’s greatest-ever engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette laid out clear water and sewerage to energy a century of financial progress.
Right now, a myriad of crises, from local weather change, migration, pandemics and know-how change, want London and the UK to drive innovation to resolve the challenges of our time. But the archaic Victorian buildings that underpin the equipment of presidency should not set as much as ship what’s required – and different cities world wide are operating far forward of us.
We’d like new foundations: modern-day Bazalgettes to create public advantages, however we should always not cease there. In addition to its personal information, the federal government ought to outline and make accessible the public-interest information held by massive platforms and legacy tech suppliers. Sharing information for public profit needs to be the price of doing enterprise in a digital age, and with the data held by Google, Meta and their ilk, London would have the ability to design information flows to form markets and turbocharge its personal economic system.
The advantages of free-flowing information at particular person, metropolis and nationwide stage are huge: accelerating London’s promising Care Document nationally, to present sufferers and medical professionals a single view of well being information might vastly enhance our well being service and enhance the NHS app; start-ups utilizing AI information from drones can present us which buildings are power inefficient and assist us deal with emissions information. At worldwide stage, London can compete with Singapore, Barcelona and cities with muscular information methods. So what’s holding us again?
Our legacy of information administration within the UK is very restrictive to financial progress and innovation. A era of poorly deliberate outsourcing of our public know-how techniques means the old fashioned know-how business ‘owns’ a lot of our information and restricts its use to resolve coverage points. A decade in the past below Francis Maude it took a concerted political and know-how programme to deal with this in Whitehall so we might create GOV.UK and dozens of digital companies which at the moment are a part of day by day life. This drawback is worse at native and regional stage the place the talents and assets are missing.
Unlocking this information is a contractual and procurement nightmare, and 32 London boroughs every lack the size and knowhow to deal with it. We’d like muscular interventions right here, utilizing requirements to form the market to public outcomes. Extending GOV.UK and nationwide platforms into native authorities could be a simple win, and, like Bazalgette’s tunnels and embankments, the foundations of a fairer, thriving economic system.
There’s a mannequin right here. My firm, Public Digital, is a companion within the Bloomberg Philanthropies Metropolis Knowledge Alliance program, which is figuring out 100 mayors from cities throughout North, Central, and South America which can be essentially the most refined, formidable, and superior at harnessing information and serving to them set a brand new normal for native governments dedicated to utilizing information to energy higher outcomes for residents.
However we should do extra. The tech bros have for many years collected particular person information in return for ‘free’ utility software program, to allow them to goal promoting and companies to us. The subsequent authorities must obligate massive firms to open up: we’d like public information trusts to harness the patterns and insights they maintain for public innovation.
These reforms might be key to unlocking billions of kilos of waste in duplicate IT techniques, workaroundsand hundreds of thousands of hours of wasted time within the supply of its missions. The information requirements alone could possibly be agreed earlier than the election, however what is crucial is the political backbone to face as much as the extreme lobbying. These firms have a task to play, however in return for market entry and historic monopoly positions, we have to higher articulate their function in public coverage.
Maybe Labour’s largest problem to ship would be the construction of our UK authorities. Our ‘particular, distinctive and totally different’ political tradition retains us locked right into a Victorian system of buying and selling preparations between authorities companies, every missing scale and experience. Our politics in any respect ranges wants leaders who perceive that institutional reform, not shiny apps, will ship outcomes.
Victorian London thrived due to funding in public infrastructure. We’d like new public establishments the place know-how and information can be utilized in service of tackling the UK’s, and London’s hardest issues.
Mike Bracken is founding companion at Public Digital and former govt director of the UK Authorities Digital Service. Mike@Public.Digital
