What have the welfare state and the Internet got in common? They both started out by overlooking the proper role of the individual. That’s the case I made at the iNetwork conference in Manchester this week. It’s a big claim, but there’s a lot of weighty evidence for the view, from Beveridge himself (as revealed in Hilary Cottam’s critique of his work), through former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. Now, building on the report by the noble Baroness Martha Lane-Fox and the work of Mike Bracken’s team at GDS, we can start to fix this. iNetwork grew out of a tech conference and is now a practical and focussed gathering of several hundred local public servants in the north west. The mood is one of realism about budgets; the keynote speakers acknowledged that even when the money was flowing they didn’t get everything right. The focus, from the top down, is on individuals and on demand management.
We heard a lot about design and not much at all about technology. I spoke about the role of the individual in digital by default public services. Following speakers including Tameside CEO Steven Pleasant and GMP chief constable Sir Peter Fahy, who both spoke about the changing role and relationship with individuals, I set the “digital by default” imperative in the deeper context of shortcomings of the welfare state and of e-commerce. I argued that the immediate imperative, to empower and activate individuals, is to introduce personal control over personal data. It’s now an easy path to embark on, and the cost benefits are compelling. iNetwork provides a very engaged audience; delegates speak openly and share experiences frankly. There is no cynicism, no moaning, but realism and an appetite for new ideas.
The full text of my talk is below. Thanks to the organisers (who advise us they will also share videos of the talks shortly).
Speakers including Tameside MBC CEO Steven Pleasant and GMP chief constable Sir Peter Fahy centred on the relationships with the individual in their iNetwork talks.
Intro: the welfare state, the individual and the internet
It’s a wonderful thing to live in a welfare state. We have a lot to thank Beveridge for, whose 1942 report attacked the five giants of ‘want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness’ and enshrined a commitment to cooperation between the state and the individual. But as Participle’s Hilary Cottam has pointed out, Beveridge himself recognised one crucial missing dimension in his work: the empowerment and active participation of the individual. This is a fundamental omission. Whether in health, education, keeping streets safe, how people treat each other well and look after themselves and each other it’s the active participation of individuals that makes society.
Rowan Williams made a similar point in his book Lost Icons when criticising the language of “customers” in talking about provision of health, education and social care. He sought to use the word “agents” to convey the essential truth that people have to be actively engaged in managing their own affairs and helping each other.
We are incredibly fortunate to be the first generation living in a world where we’re all connected, and where digital assets can flow seamlessly between people and organisations. This is not without teething troubles, as Ed Snowden has revealed, but let’s all be thankful for the Internet and the growing capabilities of all the digital devices connected to it.
It’s important to remember that the design of the Internet is inherently peer to peer, even if today’s services such as Google, Facebook and Amazon, or indeed your own CRM and other operational systems are not. Peer to peer is the inherent architecture; we just don’t make full use of that yet.
We’re in a brief phase – an aberration if you will – where the P2P quality of the net is largely overlooked in practice. We tend to think solely in organisation-centric terms, in a global, digital repetition of Beveridge’s original oversight. The present e-commerce world, built as Bruce Schneier points out largely on a business model of surveillance, draws us into precisely the mistake Rowan Williams warned us of. It treats individuals as passive customers to be monetised, not as agents who can use the Internet to self-organise and empower themselves and each other.
Consider the six words that Wired magazine founding editor Kevin Kelly chooses to describe the modern Internet. They are screening, interacting, sharing, flowing, accessing, generating. These are active words, from a man with a particular genius for describing the internet and its role in our lives.
The internet supports agents, not merely customers.
Where we are now?
What does this mean for local authorities and the public service challenges they face today? As we keep hearing, demand for services is high, funding is low, and with a poor economy people’s problems are mounting.
The digital imperative is well set out in the LGA’s Rewiring Public Services report to which others have already referred. It states that local government must
Put citizens at the forefront
Give citizens real reason to participate
Co-design services that are affordable, are built around needs and make a visible difference
LGA Chair Sir Merrick Cockell says this requires “a game-changing response”. The LGA adds that people see public services as remote and bureaucratic, but they do at least trust councils. In the digital world, this is an important start.
The consensus from the Coalition, Whitehall and throughout public services is that digital is key. Our national digital champion Martha Lane Fox called in her seminal report not for evolution but for digital revolution at the heart of public service transformation.
There’s an interesting take on where attitudes on this have got to in local government in a survey published last month by UKAuthority among 200 councils called Digital Leaders Today. It found more than four out five of those surveyed feel positive about it: digital will deliver ‘better for less’, help citizens interact and improve customer journeys. They value digital leadership and want to share digital best practice and experience which is what we’re here to do today But two out of three don’t actually have a digital strategy: over half plan to but haven’t done it yet; 15% don’t even plan to have a strategy. Perhaps they’ve seen plenty of strategies come and go before, and achieve relatively little.
The public sector landscape is littered with failed IT projects, over time and over budget, which have achieved little to help the public. Just because everyone agrees digital is the right thing to do does not make it easy to do it right. Some people – thinking here for example Cabinet Office’s Government Digital Service – make doing it right seem easy, but these are rare and valuable people.
For all the progress we’ve made in 70 years, public services today still face a set of problems every bit as daunting as the five giants must have seemed to Beveridge in 1942. And perhaps at the heart of it is the same problem: in working so hard trying to help people, we’ve not just overlooked but compromised their ability to help themselves and each other. We did it with the welfare state for 70 years. And for 10-15 years it’s been happening with digital services.
There is a clear danger that in our rush to adopt “digital by default” public services we exacerbate precisely this problem. I very much doubt that mechanical call centres outsourced to impersonal service providers, dozens upon dozens of government whole population databases and computers that say “no” formed any part of the vision Beveridge had in mind.
We have to rectify this now. And the way to do it is the very opposite of the expensive, top-down grandiose IT projects that do so little to help people. We have to put the citizen – the activated individual or agent – at the heart of a process of agile digital deployment.
To implement this we must now introduce the element of individual control over key personal data.
We have to place the individual at the heart of the digital public services we implement.
Let me stress this point. To start to overcome the challenge of contemporary public services we must put the individual not just at the centre of our thinking and rhetoric, but planning and deployment of live digital services. We must be able to recognise our own organisations as merely one of many that the individual has to connect and transact with to get through life.
Politicians are good at grasping and articulating this simple and powerful idea – it was specifically included in the manifestos of both the largest parties. You may recognise these words (can anyone spot which is which? Labour on the left and Conservatives on the right).
Politically it’s an uncontroversial statement, but when you implement it the implications are profound. Luckily, that’s how the Internet is designed to work, and we can start right now. This is the right way to deliver the digital by default revolution Let’s do this for real.
Let’s turn away from a surveillance state with transparent citizens and impenetrable public services. Let’s create an enlightened digital state, one built on a technical architecture designed for privacy and which puts the individual in control of their own affairs.
The key building block for this next stage is called Mydex. It’s a personal data store for individuals which looks like this, and a trust framework that lets individuals and organisations connect in a way that is technically and legally secure. This short video introduces the personal data store from the perspective of the individual.
What happens next?
Here’s another screen of the individual’s PDS, with focus on specific data for local public services. This is the individual’s end of work we’re doing in health and adult social care with Warwickshire County Council.
Bearing in mind the emerging availability of a personal data store for individuals, and a trust framework which lets individuals and organisations make secure private connections on clearly agreed terms, let’s step back to consider a couple of wider current developments. We may find they start to make a great deal more sense .
Data givebacks
You may have seen the emerging and growing trend of data givebacks, “download my data” services. You’ve seen them from Twitter, Google and Facebook, and also in the US for military veterans healthcare, energy users and in education.
In the UK BIS has collaborated on a Midata policy under which banks, energy companies and telcos will give structured customer records back to individuals. Midata became law in April in the Enterprise Reform Act.
The next thing to watch out for is a Midata policy for government which will see Whitehall records, also health and education records returned to the individual.
ID assurance
To implement digital by default public services government needs a way to verify people’s claims and entitlements. It is doing this with a ID assurance scheme using five third parties for ID assurance providers. Mydex is one of them, and its approach is to empower the individual to hold the credentials – the verified attibutes – they need to take control and get things done. IDAP is currently in a pilot phase, moving to population-scale services within a matter of months (for more see GDS blog).
Data protection
New EU data protection regulation is still taking shape but likely to include stringent requirements that are hard to meet without putting the individual in control.
The unifying theme in these developments; the missing link if you will, is the Mydex trust framework. If you want to know more about Mydex, and why a Council would connect to individuals via Mydex, read on…
What is Mydex?
Mydex is a British personal data services startup with the legal form of a Community Interest Company. It’s rooted in the Young Foundation, the same incubator for social enterprise which created the Open University and the Consumers’ Association Which?
Mydex provides individuals with personal data stores, and a trust framework for connections between individuals and organisations. The end to end service is ISO27001 certified and tScheme compliant. Mydex is a founder member of the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium and the Open Identity Exchange which GDS has entrusted with running government’s ID assurance pilots. The Mydex connection is available via GCloud.
IDAP: Along with the Post Office, Verizon, and Experian Mydex is one of five services contracted by GDS to provide ID assurance for digital by default public services. Mydex does this by letting individuals acquire verified attributes, such as proof of address, bank account or driving licence, from organisations they deal with. The individual can hold these verified attributes, or proofs of claim, and deploy them in the context of trusted connections when they need online services.
The full power of Mydex for councils isn’t just in ID assurance, authentication, or single sign on. It’s the foundation stone for a full range of more efficient and better services based on secure connection with personal data held by the individual.
The individual is the data controller, and can – if they so wish – provide richer data on which better services are based. This supports integrated services across organisational boundaries, privacy-friendly personalisation, and for the first time a proper basis for data sharing. At last you can deliver cross-boundary services with auditable informed consent which are therefore unambiguously lawful under the Data Protection Act.
Mydex is live now. The first connection contracts underline the diversity of its appeal to organisations, spanning as they do the university sector, housing, retail financial services and the BBC.
Three local authorities were at the heart of the original Mydex community prototype trial. The first local authority with a contract to connect to individuals using Mydex is Warwickshire County Council. Staff there have already coded an open source adapter which would allow any council service that works with Mydex personal data stores to work with other personal data stores as they emerge. They’ve made the code freely available on GitHub, the same service where GDS places all its code. Mydex is an agile, cloud-based service. There is no lock-in.
Why would a Council connect to Mydex?
There are a host of practical reasons why local public services would connect to Mydex.
It’s easy to do. It’s a clean, standard API, easier that connecting to Facebook Connect or a credit agency’s data checking service, and without the downside of leeching data to third parties, contributing to the dubious economy of mechanically extracted aggregation of data about people you’re trying to serve, which sees them compared to bland archetypes and subjected to Kafkaesque scoring algorithms. Instead of all that the local authority can connect directly to real people, in all their diversity and complexity, with a single standard connection. It’s inexpensive.
At scale the cost of connection for a local council to a single individual for a decade is less than the cost of sending them one single letter. If you’re still sending out letters, the economies of the secure digital letter box are pretty stark.
But it’s in service transformation based on trusted digital relationships that the economic benefit of direct structured connection to individuals moves beyond evolutionary and becomes, to echo MLF, revolutionary. It’s a better service to individuals. You can offer digital services that are personalised and tailored to their circumstances and preferences at scale without friction and without degrading their private life. In the two-way process of verified attribute exchange you can add to their online assets for example by verifying their address or council tax status. By connecting with them you have already fully equipped them for the GDS ID assurance process which will be required for next generation online public services rolling out within months.
These are all good and valid reasons. But the deeper reason is empowerment and the active participation of the individual in local communities. We’re rectifying deep-seated wrongs here; not just the misuse of personal data that has overwhelmed us since the Internet went commercial. It goes back to 1948 and speaks to the issue identified by Beveridge.
In conclusion and in summary
I hope I’ve made the case that the deliberate and conscious introduction of a measure of personal control over personal data in this information age is
inevitable, desirable and essential
feasible, and an immediate priority (given the IDAP proposition will be deployed at population scale in a matter of months)
immensely valuable to local public services in terms of cost reduction and capability rapidly to deploy new and better digital public services and restoration of trust and agency to individuals.
The role of the individual in "digital by default" public services from Mydex CIC