Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
The more you reduce the number of workers who are capable of productivity increases the greater the productivity increases the remaining workers will need to achieve to pull the national productivity average up.
At some point those workers still increasing their productivity wonder why they should do so if the gains from their extra productivity are going predominantly to the government or to the executive oligarchy instead of themselves.
Hunt is asking for 2% in the public sector - the point is the public sector consists of a lot of things were efficiency is impossible - can you teach someone more efficiently (well I can give you a 6% improvement by adding 10% to class sizes but is that really a great plan?)
I also think there can be a trade-off between headline public and private sector productivity:
High productivity at HMRC = small business spending hours on the phone talking to AI bot that takes 20x as long
High productivity in NHS = a reduction in elective surgeries that sees people working in the trades waiting years for an operation (or not getting one at all)
High productivity in education = more left behind children who end up with criminal records 10 year down the line
Agree on the HMRC point- some efficiency gains are just about dumping the cost on someone else. Same logic as the North Korean poo balloons.
With the NHS (and chunks of education, I suspect), there is plenty to be said for the prevention being better than cure/stitch in time argument. Catch problems early and you get better outcomes for less cost.
Unfortunately, when one's financial back is against the wall, it's the long-term stuff that has to be cut, because the acute problems have to go to the front of the queue.
See also the sweating of assets and maintenance holidays that characterised the austerity era. It's one thing to do it for a few years, but it's really biting us on the bum after fourteen.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Well at least he is acknowledging the real issue. I linked to some work in the NHS that is being done on this now on the previous thread.
Promising just to spend trivial amounts of additional money supposedly going to be raised by new taxes which may well end up costing money rather than generating it is not the answer.
Richard Burgon doesn't have any reselection issues does he?
I would be truly gutted if he wasn't a Labour candidate.
Going to be an interesting parliament. After the cull there will be no lefties on the Labour side and only hard right brexiteers for the Tories. Lets hope the Scots find some free thinkers
Irrespective of any culls, or even the general election vote itself, a huge number of retirements is going to make it a radically different Parliament than the last one.
With over 100 retirements and probably a higher than usual number of defeats we're probably looking at 1/3 being completely new at least.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
I can see analyzing complex systems and making improvements as something AI might in due course be useful for. In fact I don't see why Sunak doesn't lean in to the tech bro thing and present himself as the White Heat of Technology choice.
The problem with AI in the public sector is that, by definition, it can’t be in-house. So using it creatively on anything public facing is a GDPR nightmare.
Eh? How does that work, your first statement?
Take something like cancer detection, where some interesting work has been done. You can get somewhere within your hospital, or within the NHS, analysing scans or teasing out trends and seeing if you can detect cancers early. But to be really, really effective you probably want a larger data set, and that means sharing patient info outside the system.
I'd have thought that NHS patient info is likely to be the largest available data set.
I don't see why it can't be done in-house.
Global datasets are massively useful. Data can be cleansed of identifying data for this and is/will be be hugely helpful for human health. AI is accelerating the capability and, if proper safeguards are put in place is an amazing opportunity for humankind, particularly in areas such as lifestyle related disease.
Of course, particularly for the rarer problems.
But for common-ish diseases, I'd have thought that the NHS would have enough.
Are patients not also more likely to agree to share their data with 'Our NHS' than GlobalCorp AI?
If the NHS were sensible (probably unlikely as it has a collectivist nationalised industry mindset) it should cleanse the data of personal identifiers and sell it to global business and other governments. It could provide a very substantial income.
Richard Burgon doesn't have any reselection issues does he?
I would be truly gutted if he wasn't a Labour candidate.
Going to be an interesting parliament. After the cull there will be no lefties on the Labour side and only hard right brexiteers for the Tories. Lets hope the Scots find some free thinkers
The Labour MP for Luton South might end up being the one to fly the flag for the left. After all, when MP for Luton North, her dad was one of those who nominated Corbyn....
(He was also the acknowledged expert in the House of Commons on the wines of Burgundy...)
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
I can see analyzing complex systems and making improvements as something AI might in due course be useful for. In fact I don't see why Sunak doesn't lean in to the tech bro thing and present himself as the White Heat of Technology choice.
The problem with AI in the public sector is that, by definition, it can’t be in-house. So using it creatively on anything public facing is a GDPR nightmare.
You can have many in-house AI systems.
When people say "AI", they are sometimes just talking about generative AI like ChatGPT. But you can run in-house large language models like ChatGPT. People currently favour Llama 3. It's not as good, but it works. Government can do something at scale if they wanted to.
Is anyone else prepared to confess that having read 'Your Morning Must Read' they have no idea what Adam Drummond has said, are no wiser, could not explain why it is significant, and are unable to make head or tail of its conclusions?
Is it the emperor or I who have no clothes?
Wasn't it something about looking in his eyes, not around the eyes?
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
I can see analyzing complex systems and making improvements as something AI might in due course be useful for. In fact I don't see why Sunak doesn't lean in to the tech bro thing and present himself as the White Heat of Technology choice.
The problem with AI in the public sector is that, by definition, it can’t be in-house. So using it creatively on anything public facing is a GDPR nightmare.
Eh? How does that work, your first statement?
I’m guessing that your average public body doesn’t have the budget to create its own AI models or, indeed, hardware.
It doesn't need to; it can use no-code/low-code models, aka white label, that they can adapt for their own purpose in the same way as a business builds a website using Wix.
Makes sense. The general UK GDPR point still stands though. Processing and automated decisions are covered by the regs and I can still see how it could, in practice, be a data protection nightmare for the public sector, who additionally have to process ‘sensitive personal data’ within the meaning of the legislation that the private sector normally doesn’t get to touch.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
The more you reduce the number of workers who are capable of productivity increases the greater the productivity increases the remaining workers will need to achieve to pull the national productivity average up.
At some point those workers still increasing their productivity wonder why they should do so if the gains from their extra productivity are going predominantly to the government or to the executive oligarchy instead of themselves.
Hunt is asking for 2% in the public sector - the point is the public sector consists of a lot of things were efficiency is impossible - can you teach someone more efficiently (well I can give you a 6% improvement by adding 10% to class sizes but is that really a great plan?)
In very isolated places it can work. One can imagine making the passport office more efficient through process design and automation, though it’s possible those gains have been made. My God, there’s space to redesign the average A&E for efficiency. But as you say, it’s hard with talking or care work, or policy wonks. You can’t define productivity, never mind increase it.
The passport office is a bad example believe me those gains have been made - last December Mrs Eek got her new passport in 4 days and 1 day of that delay was because I missed the post the night before when sending her old passport back in.
DVLA is an example where improvements could be made but a lot has already been done and what is left is weird areas - where things are manual for reasons that don't make sense until you get into the weeds. 1 example is change of address where the driving license is often the first document updating placing the most awkward checks on the DVLA...
DVLA is incredibly incompetent. I’ve been in ‘correspondence’ with them since January over getting my licence back ….. I surrendered it when I didn’t think I’d ever be able to drive again, but asked for it back when I realised I’d recovered considerably, and had professional advice to that effect ……. but they haven’t answered anything for months. I was on the point of trying to get help from the local MP when the election was called.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
The more you reduce the number of workers who are capable of productivity increases the greater the productivity increases the remaining workers will need to achieve to pull the national productivity average up.
At some point those workers still increasing their productivity wonder why they should do so if the gains from their extra productivity are going predominantly to the government or to the executive oligarchy instead of themselves.
Hunt is asking for 2% in the public sector - the point is the public sector consists of a lot of things were efficiency is impossible - can you teach someone more efficiently (well I can give you a 6% improvement by adding 10% to class sizes but is that really a great plan?)
In very isolated places it can work. One can imagine making the passport office more efficient through process design and automation, though it’s possible those gains have been made. My God, there’s space to redesign the average A&E for efficiency. But as you say, it’s hard with talking or care work, or policy wonks. You can’t define productivity, never mind increase it.
The passport office is a bad example believe me those gains have been made - last December Mrs Eek got her new passport in 4 days and 1 day of that delay was because I missed the post the night before when sending her old passport back in.
DVLA is an example where improvements could be made but a lot has already been done and what is left is weird areas - where things are manual for reasons that don't make sense until you get into the weeds. 1 example is change of address where the driving license is often the first document updating placing the most awkward checks on the DVLA...
DVLA is incredibly incompetent. I’ve been in ‘correspondence’ with them since January over getting my licence back ….. I surrendered it when I didn’t think I’d ever be able to drive again, but asked for it back when I realised I’d recovered considerably, and had professional advice to that effect ……. but they haven’t answered anything for months. I was on the point of trying to get help from the local MP when the election was called.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
I can see analyzing complex systems and making improvements as something AI might in due course be useful for. In fact I don't see why Sunak doesn't lean in to the tech bro thing and present himself as the White Heat of Technology choice.
The problem with AI in the public sector is that, by definition, it can’t be in-house. So using it creatively on anything public facing is a GDPR nightmare.
Eh? How does that work, your first statement?
Take something like cancer detection, where some interesting work has been done. You can get somewhere within your hospital, or within the NHS, analysing scans or teasing out trends and seeing if you can detect cancers early. But to be really, really effective you probably want a larger data set, and that means sharing patient info outside the system.
You can train a model on someone else's (possibly larger) data set and then just buy in that model. That's the usual NHS approach. The NHS uses AI all the time like this.
Or you use the NHS's own data. The NHS has more data than most healthcare systems. The problem is getting at it.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
I can see analyzing complex systems and making improvements as something AI might in due course be useful for. In fact I don't see why Sunak doesn't lean in to the tech bro thing and present himself as the White Heat of Technology choice.
The problem with AI in the public sector is that, by definition, it can’t be in-house. So using it creatively on anything public facing is a GDPR nightmare.
Eh? How does that work, your first statement?
Take something like cancer detection, where some interesting work has been done. You can get somewhere within your hospital, or within the NHS, analysing scans or teasing out trends and seeing if you can detect cancers early. But to be really, really effective you probably want a larger data set, and that means sharing patient info outside the system.
I'd have thought that NHS patient info is likely to be the largest available data set.
I don't see why it can't be done in-house.
Global datasets are massively useful. Data can be cleansed of identifying data for this and is/will be be hugely helpful for human health. AI is accelerating the capability and, if proper safeguards are put in place is an amazing opportunity for humankind, particularly in areas such as lifestyle related disease.
Of course, particularly for the rarer problems.
But for common-ish diseases, I'd have thought that the NHS would have enough.
Are patients not also more likely to agree to share their data with 'Our NHS' than GlobalCorp AI?
The point is they don’t get a choice on “our NHS”, but get twitchy on the cleverer stuff that needs larger data sets and will really help.
You are right that the NHS has (in theory, when the Trusts speak to each other or to GPs) a really valuable data set compared to almost any other jurisdiction, which is why we should be able to negotiate some really good deals around data analysis, if we could be comfortable sharing suitably anonymised data.
We're still in the phony war stage of the general election. People are not paying close attention. That will change when candidates are finalised and manifestos are published. Then the real battle begins.
I do not think for one minute that Labour will win by anything like 20 points. I am a very firm believer in the maxim that the worst poll for Labour is the most accurate because that's generally how it has turned out in the past. The final JLP and Opinium polls are very likely to be the most accurate. However, I also think that tactical voting means a huge poll lead may not be as necessary as it may otherwise have been. We will have to see.
So far, there's nothing in either campaign that makes me think the Tories can win. It's very noticeable what they are not talking about - the NHS, the cost of living, public services, transport, housing etc. VAT on schools, national service, small bungs to pensioners etc is core vote stuff.
Basically, I remain where I have been all along - the most important result is that this destructive, incompetent government loses power. Anything else is a bonus.
I agree. Even if Labour do, in the end, finish up with a lead in single digits, I'd expect them to get a working majority with it - especially now that Scotland is swinging their way.
A small Labour majority is probably the best for the country. If they fail again, even under these circumstances, that will be bad for democracy and cause them to swing back to their extreme left -and there will still be plenty of them - the "purge" is window dressing.
Good morning everyone.
The problem I have with a small Labour majority is that it does not sufficiently annihilate the current nihilistic generation of Conservatives.
If we are to have a decent reformation of the Conservatives to recover some civic values, then it requires that a few be left standing in a blasted political wasteland. The alternative is that we end up with some zombie neanderthal Conservatives with the morality of Ugg the Caveman.
Richard Burgon doesn't have any reselection issues does he?
I would be truly gutted if he wasn't a Labour candidate.
Going to be an interesting parliament. After the cull there will be no lefties on the Labour side and only hard right brexiteers for the Tories. Lets hope the Scots find some free thinkers
Irrespective of any culls, or even the general election vote itself, a huge number of retirements is going to make it a radically different Parliament than the last one.
If the Tory outcome it at the lower end of polling possibilities (under 100 seats) then there have to be a vast number of newbies. If Labour get 450 seats, that's 275 newbies for Labour alone with retirements.
Okay - we're back to the old schtick of the public sector not being productive enough.
Look at the huge range of activities undertaken by, say, a County Council. Quite apart from the obvious (adult and child social care) you have libraries, education, highways and fire services all of that needing to be supported by the same infrastructure of legal, finance, property and procurement support services every other business has.
Then you have the management of a rural estate of farms and smallholdings, a music service helping children learn to play the bassoon (among other instruments) as well as the provision of other community services.
The one thing the Council has in its favour is it doesn't operate to a profit margin - it has a budget within which it has to live but there are no "shareholders" so the cost of the service is the cost of the service.
You can outsource various activities to the private sector but that doesn't end the involvement. Instead of doing the service and monitoring it, you need an active client and commissioning team to monitor the Contractor(s) and ensure they are meeting their contractual obligations and not charging you £120 to change a toilet seat to meet their profit margins.
How do you quantify "productivity"? Yes, you can give staff more work to do and have fewer of them doing it and that's been the public sector response for 30 years but does that mean improved productivity? You end up running harder to stand still. Is there too much form filling and paperwork? In some areas, perhaps but that's often a function of legislative requirement and what is perceived to be good professional practice - one example is RIBA stages and the bureaucracy that generates.
The other problem is accountability or trust - some Councillors micro manage. They want to know a degree of detail which they don't need to know - Members trying to be Officers and Officers trying to be Members never ends well. The centralisation of Member power into Executives or Cabinets hasn't worked and causes more problems - even worse is the Leader role especially when the relationship between said Leader and Senior Officers isn't good.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
I can see analyzing complex systems and making improvements as something AI might in due course be useful for. In fact I don't see why Sunak doesn't lean in to the tech bro thing and present himself as the White Heat of Technology choice.
The problem with AI in the public sector is that, by definition, it can’t be in-house. So using it creatively on anything public facing is a GDPR nightmare.
Eh? How does that work, your first statement?
Take something like cancer detection, where some interesting work has been done. You can get somewhere within your hospital, or within the NHS, analysing scans or teasing out trends and seeing if you can detect cancers early. But to be really, really effective you probably want a larger data set, and that means sharing patient info outside the system.
I'd have thought that NHS patient info is likely to be the largest available data set.
I don't see why it can't be done in-house.
Global datasets are massively useful. Data can be cleansed of identifying data for this and is/will be be hugely helpful for human health. AI is accelerating the capability and, if proper safeguards are put in place is an amazing opportunity for humankind, particularly in areas such as lifestyle related disease.
Of course, particularly for the rarer problems.
But for common-ish diseases, I'd have thought that the NHS would have enough.
Are patients not also more likely to agree to share their data with 'Our NHS' than GlobalCorp AI?
If the NHS were sensible (probably unlikely as it has a collectivist nationalised industry mindset) it should cleanse the data of personal identifiers and sell it to global business and other governments. It could provide a very substantial income.
Not possible with mass data (and very hard with even selected databases). All data are personal identifiers nowadays. Precise location, for instance, and history of moves. Ditto family interrelationships, DNA, etc.. Yet you want all of this for research into environmental and genetic issues and indeed their interaction. And, if you are a commercial firm, precisely the same data to identify and target individual people for marketing.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
I can see analyzing complex systems and making improvements as something AI might in due course be useful for. In fact I don't see why Sunak doesn't lean in to the tech bro thing and present himself as the White Heat of Technology choice.
The problem with AI in the public sector is that, by definition, it can’t be in-house. So using it creatively on anything public facing is a GDPR nightmare.
Eh? How does that work, your first statement?
I’m guessing that your average public body doesn’t have the budget to create its own AI models or, indeed, hardware.
But the government as a whole does have a very large budget. And some individual public bodies are also large. The NHS is immense. It is the fifth largest employer in the whole world. Except it isn't, because the Conservatives split the NHS into lots of competing subentities, which really damages the NHS's ability to develop or commission good AI.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
I can see analyzing complex systems and making improvements as something AI might in due course be useful for. In fact I don't see why Sunak doesn't lean in to the tech bro thing and present himself as the White Heat of Technology choice.
The problem with AI in the public sector is that, by definition, it can’t be in-house. So using it creatively on anything public facing is a GDPR nightmare.
You can have many in-house AI systems.
When people say "AI", they are sometimes just talking about generative AI like ChatGPT. But you can run in-house large language models like ChatGPT. People currently favour Llama 3. It's not as good, but it works. Government can do something at scale if they wanted to.
Definitely not Generative AI. God knows what shit it would come up with that looked credible. Machine learning. Saying you can just buy product X shows me you have never worked within the procurement regs. And the usually issue is having trained staff who understand and can properly use what you just bought, because Acme PLC down the road pays better.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
I can see analyzing complex systems and making improvements as something AI might in due course be useful for. In fact I don't see why Sunak doesn't lean in to the tech bro thing and present himself as the White Heat of Technology choice.
The problem with AI in the public sector is that, by definition, it can’t be in-house. So using it creatively on anything public facing is a GDPR nightmare.
Eh? How does that work, your first statement?
Take something like cancer detection, where some interesting work has been done. You can get somewhere within your hospital, or within the NHS, analysing scans or teasing out trends and seeing if you can detect cancers early. But to be really, really effective you probably want a larger data set, and that means sharing patient info outside the system.
I'd have thought that NHS patient info is likely to be the largest available data set.
I don't see why it can't be done in-house.
Global datasets are massively useful. Data can be cleansed of identifying data for this and is/will be be hugely helpful for human health. AI is accelerating the capability and, if proper safeguards are put in place is an amazing opportunity for humankind, particularly in areas such as lifestyle related disease.
Why do you pick out lifestyle related disease? I would have said that's an area where AI is least helpful.
Most people need to eat better, exercise more and drink less alcohol. You can get an AI system in to tell people to eat better, exercise more and drink less alcohol. Is that going to make any difference? No. Getting people to change their behaviour is difficult!
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
I can see analyzing complex systems and making improvements as something AI might in due course be useful for. In fact I don't see why Sunak doesn't lean in to the tech bro thing and present himself as the White Heat of Technology choice.
The problem with AI in the public sector is that, by definition, it can’t be in-house. So using it creatively on anything public facing is a GDPR nightmare.
Eh? How does that work, your first statement?
Take something like cancer detection, where some interesting work has been done. You can get somewhere within your hospital, or within the NHS, analysing scans or teasing out trends and seeing if you can detect cancers early. But to be really, really effective you probably want a larger data set, and that means sharing patient info outside the system.
I'd have thought that NHS patient info is likely to be the largest available data set.
I don't see why it can't be done in-house.
Global datasets are massively useful. Data can be cleansed of identifying data for this and is/will be be hugely helpful for human health. AI is accelerating the capability and, if proper safeguards are put in place is an amazing opportunity for humankind, particularly in areas such as lifestyle related disease.
Of course, particularly for the rarer problems.
But for common-ish diseases, I'd have thought that the NHS would have enough.
Are patients not also more likely to agree to share their data with 'Our NHS' than GlobalCorp AI?
If the NHS were sensible (probably unlikely as it has a collectivist nationalised industry mindset) it should cleanse the data of personal identifiers and sell it to global business and other governments. It could provide a very substantial income.
Not possible with mass data (and very hard with even selected databases). All data are personal identifiers nowadays. Precise location, for instance, and history of moves. Ditto family interrelationships, DNA, etc.. Yet you want all of this for research into environmental and genetic issues and indeed their interaction. And, if you are a commercial firm, precisely the same data to identify and target individual people for marketing.
Not correct I am afraid. Haven't got time to explain. It is not easy, but it is very achievable.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
I can see analyzing complex systems and making improvements as something AI might in due course be useful for. In fact I don't see why Sunak doesn't lean in to the tech bro thing and present himself as the White Heat of Technology choice.
The problem with AI in the public sector is that, by definition, it can’t be in-house. So using it creatively on anything public facing is a GDPR nightmare.
Eh? How does that work, your first statement?
Take something like cancer detection, where some interesting work has been done. You can get somewhere within your hospital, or within the NHS, analysing scans or teasing out trends and seeing if you can detect cancers early. But to be really, really effective you probably want a larger data set, and that means sharing patient info outside the system.
I'd have thought that NHS patient info is likely to be the largest available data set.
I don't see why it can't be done in-house.
Global datasets are massively useful. Data can be cleansed of identifying data for this and is/will be be hugely helpful for human health. AI is accelerating the capability and, if proper safeguards are put in place is an amazing opportunity for humankind, particularly in areas such as lifestyle related disease.
Why do you pick out lifestyle related disease? I would have said that's an area where AI is least helpful.
Most people need to eat better, exercise more and drink less alcohol. You can get an AI system in to tell people to eat better, exercise more and drink less alcohol. Is that going to make any difference? No. Getting people to change their behaviour is difficult!
Wait until we have health robots to drag people out of bed.
Can we all agree that “cost of living” is a dreadful phrase and should be banned? All oppositions talk about there being a “cost of living” crisis when inflation is high. Just credit people with an ounce of intelligence (hard I know) and use the real word.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
I can see analyzing complex systems and making improvements as something AI might in due course be useful for. In fact I don't see why Sunak doesn't lean in to the tech bro thing and present himself as the White Heat of Technology choice.
The problem with AI in the public sector is that, by definition, it can’t be in-house. So using it creatively on anything public facing is a GDPR nightmare.
Eh? How does that work, your first statement?
Take something like cancer detection, where some interesting work has been done. You can get somewhere within your hospital, or within the NHS, analysing scans or teasing out trends and seeing if you can detect cancers early. But to be really, really effective you probably want a larger data set, and that means sharing patient info outside the system.
I'd have thought that NHS patient info is likely to be the largest available data set.
I don't see why it can't be done in-house.
Global datasets are massively useful. Data can be cleansed of identifying data for this and is/will be be hugely helpful for human health. AI is accelerating the capability and, if proper safeguards are put in place is an amazing opportunity for humankind, particularly in areas such as lifestyle related disease.
Of course, particularly for the rarer problems.
But for common-ish diseases, I'd have thought that the NHS would have enough.
Are patients not also more likely to agree to share their data with 'Our NHS' than GlobalCorp AI?
If the NHS were sensible (probably unlikely as it has a collectivist nationalised industry mindset) it should cleanse the data of personal identifiers and sell it to global business and other governments. It could provide a very substantial income.
Not possible with mass data (and very hard with even selected databases). All data are personal identifiers nowadays. Precise location, for instance, and history of moves. Ditto family interrelationships, DNA, etc.. Yet you want all of this for research into environmental and genetic issues and indeed their interaction. And, if you are a commercial firm, precisely the same data to identify and target individual people for marketing.
Not correct I am afraid. Haven't got time to explain. It is not easy, but it is very achievable.
Remarkable lack of faith in the efficiency of the free market right there.
Have a look at what happened in Iceland wqhen the locals realised what was being proposed in the way of selling data to the commercial firms.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
The more you reduce the number of workers who are capable of productivity increases the greater the productivity increases the remaining workers will need to achieve to pull the national productivity average up.
At some point those workers still increasing their productivity wonder why they should do so if the gains from their extra productivity are going predominantly to the government or to the executive oligarchy instead of themselves.
Hunt is asking for 2% in the public sector - the point is the public sector consists of a lot of things were efficiency is impossible - can you teach someone more efficiently (well I can give you a 6% improvement by adding 10% to class sizes but is that really a great plan?)
In very isolated places it can work. One can imagine making the passport office more efficient through process design and automation, though it’s possible those gains have been made. My God, there’s space to redesign the average A&E for efficiency. But as you say, it’s hard with talking or care work, or policy wonks. You can’t define productivity, never mind increase it.
The passport office is a bad example believe me those gains have been made - last December Mrs Eek got her new passport in 4 days and 1 day of that delay was because I missed the post the night before when sending her old passport back in.
DVLA is an example where improvements could be made but a lot has already been done and what is left is weird areas - where things are manual for reasons that don't make sense until you get into the weeds. 1 example is change of address where the driving license is often the first document updating placing the most awkward checks on the DVLA...
DVLA is incredibly incompetent. I’ve been in ‘correspondence’ with them since January over getting my licence back ….. I surrendered it when I didn’t think I’d ever be able to drive again, but asked for it back when I realised I’d recovered considerably, and had professional advice to that effect ……. but they haven’t answered anything for months. I was on the point of trying to get help from the local MP when the election was called.
Try your local Citizens Advice - it shouldn't make a difference but sometimes these government bodies react better to a call/letter from CA than from a member of the public.
How big a Maj SKS gets depends on the following strategy holding.
First 7 categories don't count and they concentrate all efforts on 8th
It is working so far so maybe it will continue to be successful
Labour Strategy It's okay, we can lose the muslim vote It's okay, we can lose the black vote It's okay, we can lose the socialist vote It's okay, we can lose the anti-racist vote It's okay, we can lose the green vote It's okay, we can lose the trade unionist vote Its OK to lose the Anti Genocide vote We've got the Tory vote
Can we all agree that “cost of living” is a dreadful phrase and should be banned? All oppositions talk about there being a “cost of living” crisis when inflation is high. Just credit people with an ounce of intelligence (hard I know) and use the real word.
But one has to specify what the inflation is in, anyway. Just saying inflation is x% doesn't mean anything in itself - it could be in second-hand Scalextric sets for all one knows.
Also: it's not the differential that matters to people so much as the integrated sum at time = t.
'Cost of living' deals with both of those very nicely.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
I can see analyzing complex systems and making improvements as something AI might in due course be useful for. In fact I don't see why Sunak doesn't lean in to the tech bro thing and present himself as the White Heat of Technology choice.
The problem with AI in the public sector is that, by definition, it can’t be in-house. So using it creatively on anything public facing is a GDPR nightmare.
You can have many in-house AI systems.
When people say "AI", they are sometimes just talking about generative AI like ChatGPT. But you can run in-house large language models like ChatGPT. People currently favour Llama 3. It's not as good, but it works. Government can do something at scale if they wanted to.
Definitely not Generative AI. God knows what shit it would come up with that looked credible. Machine learning. Saying you can just buy product X shows me you have never worked within the procurement regs. And the usually issue is having trained staff who understand and can properly use what you just bought, because Acme PLC down the road pays better.
I work in health informatics, but at a university. I was involved in the main evaluations of both the National Programme for IT and the Global Digital Exemplars. I am aware that procurement is a nightmare. I agree about the lack of trained staff.
What I don't understand is you saying "it can’t be in-house".
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Isn't that going to be exactly the response to any new Tory "initiative"? They have had 14 bloody years to do any of this
I guess the Tories can respond with "Why didn't Blair or Brown do this?" in response to Labour proposals, such as rail renationalisation or putting VAT on school fees.
Richard Burgon doesn't have any reselection issues does he?
I would be truly gutted if he wasn't a Labour candidate.
Going to be an interesting parliament. After the cull there will be no lefties on the Labour side and only hard right brexiteers for the Tories. Lets hope the Scots find some free thinkers
The Labour MP for Luton South might end up being the one to fly the flag for the left. After all, when MP for Luton North, her dad was one of those who nominated Corbyn....
(He was also the acknowledged expert in the House of Commons on the wines of Burgundy...)
Interesting family! Better keep it quiet or Starmer will have her out quicker than you can say Chateau Latour
We're still in the phony war stage of the general election. People are not paying close attention. That will change when candidates are finalised and manifestos are published. Then the real battle begins.
[rest snipped]
There is an early QT tonight, oddly enough featuring Nigel Farage who is not involved in this election but is presumably blackmailing the head of the BBC because he is never off our screens. Then the first tv debate between Sunak and Starmer is next Tuesday.
We're still in the phony war stage of the general election. People are not paying close attention. That will change when candidates are finalised and manifestos are published. Then the real battle begins.
[rest snipped]
There is an early QT tonight, oddly enough featuring Nigel Farage who is not involved in this election but is presumably blackmailing the head of the BBC because he is never off our screens. Then the first tv debate between Sunak and Starmer is next Tuesday.
Farage is involved in this election. He isn't standing, but he is at the forefront of Reform UK's campaigning.
Can we all agree that “cost of living” is a dreadful phrase and should be banned? All oppositions talk about there being a “cost of living” crisis when inflation is high. Just credit people with an ounce of intelligence (hard I know) and use the real word.
But one has to specify what the inflation is in, anyway. Just saying inflation is x% doesn't mean anything in itself - it could be in second-hand Scalextric sets for all one knows.
Also: it's not the differential that matters to people so much as the integrated sum at time = t.
'Cost of living' deals with both of those very nicely.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
I can see analyzing complex systems and making improvements as something AI might in due course be useful for. In fact I don't see why Sunak doesn't lean in to the tech bro thing and present himself as the White Heat of Technology choice.
The problem with AI in the public sector is that, by definition, it can’t be in-house. So using it creatively on anything public facing is a GDPR nightmare.
Eh? How does that work, your first statement?
Take something like cancer detection, where some interesting work has been done. You can get somewhere within your hospital, or within the NHS, analysing scans or teasing out trends and seeing if you can detect cancers early. But to be really, really effective you probably want a larger data set, and that means sharing patient info outside the system.
I'd have thought that NHS patient info is likely to be the largest available data set.
I don't see why it can't be done in-house.
Global datasets are massively useful. Data can be cleansed of identifying data for this and is/will be be hugely helpful for human health. AI is accelerating the capability and, if proper safeguards are put in place is an amazing opportunity for humankind, particularly in areas such as lifestyle related disease.
Of course, particularly for the rarer problems.
But for common-ish diseases, I'd have thought that the NHS would have enough.
Are patients not also more likely to agree to share their data with 'Our NHS' than GlobalCorp AI?
If the NHS were sensible (probably unlikely as it has a collectivist nationalised industry mindset) it should cleanse the data of personal identifiers and sell it to global business and other governments. It could provide a very substantial income.
Not possible with mass data (and very hard with even selected databases). All data are personal identifiers nowadays. Precise location, for instance, and history of moves. Ditto family interrelationships, DNA, etc.. Yet you want all of this for research into environmental and genetic issues and indeed their interaction. And, if you are a commercial firm, precisely the same data to identify and target individual people for marketing.
There is however scope for letting people mess about with data they never see, e.g. the openSAFELY model - or having an in-house consultancy that will answer questions put to them by industry, using NHS and other government data.
The latter would need to compete properly on wages though (which shouldn't be a financial problem as it could easily self-fund, but could be an organisational one).
FWIW, NHS hospital data for research is under-priced, compared to other sources, even other public bodies such as CPRD (primary care) from the MHRA.* Now, a lot of the research is also NHS funded (NIHR) so it's money moving in circles, but there are also commercially funded projects using NHS data and those could be squeezed a lot harder. NHS Digital works on a break-even rather than profit model.
*hard to go directly comparable, but a typical NHS HES data extract costs me <£20k, whereas typical CPRD ones are £40-50k. Within the scope of research projects budgeted at £500k-£1M or so, there's scope to e.g. double the data costs without, probably, impacting demand much. Whether it would make sense depends how much of that is for ultimately NHS-funded studies.
Can we all agree that “cost of living” is a dreadful phrase and should be banned? All oppositions talk about there being a “cost of living” crisis when inflation is high. Just credit people with an ounce of intelligence (hard I know) and use the real word.
Incorrect I'm afraid. Inflation ≠ 'cost of living'.
Inflation is only 2.3% but the cost of living is still an big issue for many because of the relative movement of prices and wages over the past few years (since the Tories took over in fact).
Inflation itself can be a worrying issue even if wages are rising faster - just because you can't keep a track of prices, savings lose value etc. But that's not the issue today.
'Affordability' might be a better term or 'relative affordability' but I suspect we are stuck with CoL to describe the pinch people feel and continue to feel when prices have risen faster than wages for a period.
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
We're still in the phony war stage of the general election. People are not paying close attention. That will change when candidates are finalised and manifestos are published. Then the real battle begins.
[rest snipped]
There is an early QT tonight, oddly enough featuring Nigel Farage who is not involved in this election but is presumably blackmailing the head of the BBC because he is never off our screens. Then the first tv debate between Sunak and Starmer is next Tuesday.
A lot of anger about Farage being on Question Time. What's curious is that the anger is from Labour supporters. I'd have thought they'd be delighted at having him on TV throwing mud at the Tories.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
I can see analyzing complex systems and making improvements as something AI might in due course be useful for. In fact I don't see why Sunak doesn't lean in to the tech bro thing and present himself as the White Heat of Technology choice.
The problem with AI in the public sector is that, by definition, it can’t be in-house. So using it creatively on anything public facing is a GDPR nightmare.
You can have many in-house AI systems.
When people say "AI", they are sometimes just talking about generative AI like ChatGPT. But you can run in-house large language models like ChatGPT. People currently favour Llama 3. It's not as good, but it works. Government can do something at scale if they wanted to.
Definitely not Generative AI. God knows what shit it would come up with that looked credible. Machine learning. Saying you can just buy product X shows me you have never worked within the procurement regs. And the usually issue is having trained staff who understand and can properly use what you just bought, because Acme PLC down the road pays better.
I work in health informatics, but at a university. I was involved in the main evaluations of both the National Programme for IT and the Global Digital Exemplars. I am aware that procurement is a nightmare. I agree about the lack of trained staff.
What I don't understand is you saying "it can’t be in-house".
Well you’re the example - the NHS is insufficiently centralised, and no one invests in analytical teams capable of using any system properly, to any sort of scale. This isn’t an AI point - it’s a data science one. Scratch the surface of any part of Gvt and you’ll find that almost all forms of research are outsourced, because 80% of the staff are scared by simple excel.
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
How big a Maj SKS gets depends on the following strategy holding.
First 7 categories don't count and they concentrate all efforts on 8th
It is working so far so maybe it will continue to be successful
Labour Strategy It's okay, we can lose the muslim vote It's okay, we can lose the black vote It's okay, we can lose the socialist vote It's okay, we can lose the anti-racist vote It's okay, we can lose the green vote It's okay, we can lose the trade unionist vote Its OK to lose the Anti Genocide vote We've got the Tory vote
It bothers me more than I'm comfortable admitting that you've used "okay" six times then switched to "OK" on the last one.
And so it should. It's a bollocks list and you're worried about okay/OK?
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
So they're the most unselfish group? They would rather have fewer immigrants and be forced to pay more for domestic workers.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
I can see analyzing complex systems and making improvements as something AI might in due course be useful for. In fact I don't see why Sunak doesn't lean in to the tech bro thing and present himself as the White Heat of Technology choice.
The problem with AI in the public sector is that, by definition, it can’t be in-house. So using it creatively on anything public facing is a GDPR nightmare.
You can have many in-house AI systems.
When people say "AI", they are sometimes just talking about generative AI like ChatGPT. But you can run in-house large language models like ChatGPT. People currently favour Llama 3. It's not as good, but it works. Government can do something at scale if they wanted to.
Definitely not Generative AI. God knows what shit it would come up with that looked credible. Machine learning. Saying you can just buy product X shows me you have never worked within the procurement regs. And the usually issue is having trained staff who understand and can properly use what you just bought, because Acme PLC down the road pays better.
I work in health informatics, but at a university. I was involved in the main evaluations of both the National Programme for IT and the Global Digital Exemplars. I am aware that procurement is a nightmare. I agree about the lack of trained staff.
What I don't understand is you saying "it can’t be in-house".
Well you’re the example - the NHS is insufficiently centralised, and no one invests in analytical teams capable of using any system properly, to any sort of scale. This isn’t an AI point - it’s a data science one. Scratch the surface of any part of Gvt and you’ll find that almost all forms of research are outsourced, because 80% of the staff are scared by simple excel.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
I can see analyzing complex systems and making improvements as something AI might in due course be useful for. In fact I don't see why Sunak doesn't lean in to the tech bro thing and present himself as the White Heat of Technology choice.
The problem with AI in the public sector is that, by definition, it can’t be in-house. So using it creatively on anything public facing is a GDPR nightmare.
You can have many in-house AI systems.
When people say "AI", they are sometimes just talking about generative AI like ChatGPT. But you can run in-house large language models like ChatGPT. People currently favour Llama 3. It's not as good, but it works. Government can do something at scale if they wanted to.
Definitely not Generative AI. God knows what shit it would come up with that looked credible. Machine learning. Saying you can just buy product X shows me you have never worked within the procurement regs. And the usually issue is having trained staff who understand and can properly use what you just bought, because Acme PLC down the road pays better.
I work in health informatics, but at a university. I was involved in the main evaluations of both the National Programme for IT and the Global Digital Exemplars. I am aware that procurement is a nightmare. I agree about the lack of trained staff.
What I don't understand is you saying "it can’t be in-house".
Well you’re the example - the NHS is insufficiently centralised, and no one invests in analytical teams capable of using any system properly, to any sort of scale. This isn’t an AI point - it’s a data science one. Scratch the surface of any part of Gvt and you’ll find that almost all forms of research are outsourced, because 80% of the staff are scared by simple excel.
That's largely true, I agree. I think we're on the same page with the challenges. But I think you're being overly pessimistic. All that hasn't stopped the public sector from developing in-house AI previously and these issues are, to an extent, fixable, whereas you said the public sector cannot "by definition" do things in-house. We do, and we can do more. There's nothing inherent about the public sector that means this is impossible.
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
Rather worrying that 'living' figures quite highly as a standalone.
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
So they're the most unselfish group? They would rather have fewer immigrants and be forced to pay more for domestic workers.
Unless we know where those votes are from it might not mean much.
Ayanda Hlekwane, one of South Africa's "born-free" generation, meaning he was born after 1994, said despite having three degrees he still doesn't have a job.
“I’m working on my PhD proposal so that I go back to study in case I don’t get a job,” he tells the BBC in Durban.
Well despite all his three degrees and PhD proposal he hasn't learnt the law of diminishing returns.
Normally the DA polls highest in the earlier districts to declare and it declines slowly as some of the larger urban areas that lean ANC (and presumably this time also EFF) take longer to count.
Having said that I've had a look at the map showing results so far, it seems that most of Cape Town is yet to declare (strongest area for the DA) and I would say there are a smattering of extra districts where the DA has won compared to last time. Also noticeable that the new MK party is polling well in KwaZulu Natal.
There is however scope for letting people mess about with data they never see, e.g. the openSAFELY model - or having an in-house consultancy that will answer questions put to them by industry, using NHS and other government data.
The latter would need to compete properly on wages though (which shouldn't be a financial problem as it could easily self-fund, but could be an organisational one).
FWIW, NHS hospital data for research is under-priced, compared to other sources, even other public bodies such as CPRD (primary care) from the MHRA.* Now, a lot of the research is also NHS funded (NIHR) so it's money moving in circles, but there are also commercially funded projects using NHS data and those could be squeezed a lot harder. NHS Digital works on a break-even rather than profit model.
*hard to go directly comparable, but a typical NHS HES data extract costs me < £20k, whereas typical CPRD ones are £40-50k. Within the scope of research projects budgeted at £500k-£1M or so, there's scope to e.g. double the data costs without, probably, impacting demand much. Whether it would make sense depends how much of that is for ultimately NHS-funded studies.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
I can see analyzing complex systems and making improvements as something AI might in due course be useful for. In fact I don't see why Sunak doesn't lean in to the tech bro thing and present himself as the White Heat of Technology choice.
The problem with AI in the public sector is that, by definition, it can’t be in-house. So using it creatively on anything public facing is a GDPR nightmare.
You can have many in-house AI systems.
When people say "AI", they are sometimes just talking about generative AI like ChatGPT. But you can run in-house large language models like ChatGPT. People currently favour Llama 3. It's not as good, but it works. Government can do something at scale if they wanted to.
Definitely not Generative AI. God knows what shit it would come up with that looked credible. Machine learning. Saying you can just buy product X shows me you have never worked within the procurement regs. And the usually issue is having trained staff who understand and can properly use what you just bought, because Acme PLC down the road pays better.
I work in health informatics, but at a university. I was involved in the main evaluations of both the National Programme for IT and the Global Digital Exemplars. I am aware that procurement is a nightmare. I agree about the lack of trained staff.
What I don't understand is you saying "it can’t be in-house".
Well you’re the example - the NHS is insufficiently centralised, and no one invests in analytical teams capable of using any system properly, to any sort of scale. This isn’t an AI point - it’s a data science one. Scratch the surface of any part of Gvt and you’ll find that almost all forms of research are outsourced, because 80% of the staff are scared by simple excel.
How big a Maj SKS gets depends on the following strategy holding.
First 7 categories don't count and they concentrate all efforts on 8th
It is working so far so maybe it will continue to be successful
Labour Strategy It's okay, we can lose the muslim vote It's okay, we can lose the black vote It's okay, we can lose the socialist vote It's okay, we can lose the anti-racist vote It's okay, we can lose the green vote It's okay, we can lose the trade unionist vote Its OK to lose the Anti Genocide vote We've got the Tory vote
This piece of polemic is entirely untrue. If it were true then Bootle would be a close contest.
The current 'Tory' vote for Labour (I am one) is around 14% of those who voted Tory in 2019, which is just under 2 million. (YouGov latest data). To win the election Labour need somewhere around 12-14 million votes.
To win Labour need the larger part of the core vote + the ex Tory switchers. Currently this is what they have. (Even in Hackney Diane Abbott wants to run under a Labour ticket. I wonder why!)
Richard Burgon doesn't have any reselection issues does he?
I would be truly gutted if he wasn't a Labour candidate.
Going to be an interesting parliament. After the cull there will be no lefties on the Labour side and only hard right brexiteers for the Tories. Lets hope the Scots find some free thinkers
The Labour MP for Luton South might end up being the one to fly the flag for the left. After all, when MP for Luton North, her dad was one of those who nominated Corbyn....
(He was also the acknowledged expert in the House of Commons on the wines of Burgundy...)
Interesting family! Better keep it quiet or Starmer will have her out quicker than you can say Chateau Latour
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
I can see analyzing complex systems and making improvements as something AI might in due course be useful for. In fact I don't see why Sunak doesn't lean in to the tech bro thing and present himself as the White Heat of Technology choice.
The problem with AI in the public sector is that, by definition, it can’t be in-house. So using it creatively on anything public facing is a GDPR nightmare.
You can have many in-house AI systems.
When people say "AI", they are sometimes just talking about generative AI like ChatGPT. But you can run in-house large language models like ChatGPT. People currently favour Llama 3. It's not as good, but it works. Government can do something at scale if they wanted to.
Definitely not Generative AI. God knows what shit it would come up with that looked credible. Machine learning. Saying you can just buy product X shows me you have never worked within the procurement regs. And the usually issue is having trained staff who understand and can properly use what you just bought, because Acme PLC down the road pays better.
I work in health informatics, but at a university. I was involved in the main evaluations of both the National Programme for IT and the Global Digital Exemplars. I am aware that procurement is a nightmare. I agree about the lack of trained staff.
What I don't understand is you saying "it can’t be in-house".
Well you’re the example - the NHS is insufficiently centralised, and no one invests in analytical teams capable of using any system properly, to any sort of scale. This isn’t an AI point - it’s a data science one. Scratch the surface of any part of Gvt and you’ll find that almost all forms of research are outsourced, because 80% of the staff are scared by simple excel.
That's largely true, I agree. I think we're on the same page with the challenges. But I think you're being overly pessimistic. All that hasn't stopped the public sector from developing in-house AI previously and these issues are, to an extent, fixable, whereas you said the public sector cannot "by definition" do things in-house. We do, and we can do more. There's nothing inherent about the public sector that means this is impossible.
Oh I agree, it could change, and it should change. I’m just pessimistic that it will.
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
So they're the most unselfish group? They would rather have fewer immigrants and be forced to pay more for domestic workers.
Can we all agree that “cost of living” is a dreadful phrase and should be banned? All oppositions talk about there being a “cost of living” crisis when inflation is high. Just credit people with an ounce of intelligence (hard I know) and use the real word.
Radio 1 does not do inflation. If you station hop you will hear basically the same news item but on r2 and upwards it says rise in inflation, R1 translates to rise in the cost of goods and services
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
Rather worrying that 'living' figures quite highly as a standalone.
I think it's "cost of living" with the word map randomly splitting living and cost up and ignoring of.
What comes of using a word map rather than a phrase map...
We're still in the phony war stage of the general election. People are not paying close attention. That will change when candidates are finalised and manifestos are published. Then the real battle begins.
I do not think for one minute that Labour will win by anything like 20 points. I am a very firm believer in the maxim that the worst poll for Labour is the most accurate because that's generally how it has turned out in the past. The final JLP and Opinium polls are very likely to be the most accurate. However, I also think that tactical voting means a huge poll lead may not be as necessary as it may otherwise have been. We will have to see.
So far, there's nothing in either campaign that makes me think the Tories can win. It's very noticeable what they are not talking about - the NHS, the cost of living, public services, transport, housing etc. VAT on schools, national service, small bungs to pensioners etc is core vote stuff.
Basically, I remain where I have been all along - the most important result is that this destructive, incompetent government loses power. Anything else is a bonus.
I agree. Even if Labour do, in the end, finish up with a lead in single digits, I'd expect them to get a working majority with it - especially now that Scotland is swinging their way.
A small Labour majority is probably the best for the country. If they fail again, even under these circumstances, that will be bad for democracy and cause them to swing back to their extreme left -and there will still be plenty of them - the "purge" is window dressing.
Good morning everyone.
The problem I have with a small Labour majority is that it does not sufficiently annihilate the current nihilistic generation of Conservatives.
If we are to have a decent reformation of the Conservatives to recover some civic values, then it requires that a few be left standing in a blasted political wasteland. The alternative is that we end up with some zombie neanderthal Conservatives with the morality of Ugg the Caveman.
Yes it does seem, that while Starmer is purging his party of extremists, Sunak and the Tory party, are welcoming far right nutters and fruit cakes, with open arms, it is so important for democracy, that the Tories go down this time, whatever Starmer represents
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
The more you reduce the number of workers who are capable of productivity increases the greater the productivity increases the remaining workers will need to achieve to pull the national productivity average up.
At some point those workers still increasing their productivity wonder why they should do so if the gains from their extra productivity are going predominantly to the government or to the executive oligarchy instead of themselves.
Hunt is asking for 2% in the public sector - the point is the public sector consists of a lot of things were efficiency is impossible - can you teach someone more efficiently (well I can give you a 6% improvement by adding 10% to class sizes but is that really a great plan?)
In very isolated places it can work. One can imagine making the passport office more efficient through process design and automation, though it’s possible those gains have been made. My God, there’s space to redesign the average A&E for efficiency. But as you say, it’s hard with talking or care work, or policy wonks. You can’t define productivity, never mind increase it.
The passport office is a bad example believe me those gains have been made - last December Mrs Eek got her new passport in 4 days and 1 day of that delay was because I missed the post the night before when sending her old passport back in.
DVLA is an example where improvements could be made but a lot has already been done and what is left is weird areas - where things are manual for reasons that don't make sense until you get into the weeds. 1 example is change of address where the driving license is often the first document updating placing the most awkward checks on the DVLA...
DVLA is incredibly incompetent. I’ve been in ‘correspondence’ with them since January over getting my licence back ….. I surrendered it when I didn’t think I’d ever be able to drive again, but asked for it back when I realised I’d recovered considerably, and had professional advice to that effect ……. but they haven’t answered anything for months. I was on the point of trying to get help from the local MP when the election was called.
Great to hear you’ve recovered though!
Thanks; I wouldn't say I'd recovered; I never will, but I'm considerably better than I once thought I was going to be.
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
Rather worrying that 'living' figures quite highly as a standalone.
'cost' is same size as 'living' in all four, so looks as if the actual phrase used is 'cost of living' and the algorithm has split it up and binned the 'of' (sorry Biggles).
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
The more you reduce the number of workers who are capable of productivity increases the greater the productivity increases the remaining workers will need to achieve to pull the national productivity average up.
At some point those workers still increasing their productivity wonder why they should do so if the gains from their extra productivity are going predominantly to the government or to the executive oligarchy instead of themselves.
Hunt is asking for 2% in the public sector - the point is the public sector consists of a lot of things were efficiency is impossible - can you teach someone more efficiently (well I can give you a 6% improvement by adding 10% to class sizes but is that really a great plan?)
I also think there can be a trade-off between headline public and private sector productivity:
High productivity at HMRC = small business spending hours on the phone talking to AI bot that takes 20x as long
High productivity in NHS = a reduction in elective surgeries that sees people working in the trades waiting years for an operation (or not getting one at all)
High productivity in education = more left behind children who end up with criminal records 10 year down the line
Yep. 2% is probably quite achieveable in the short term by culling just under 2% of staff and measuring outputs the right way (e.g. - education, measure number of children 'taught' and lose a load of TAs). The worse outcomes will take a little while to become apparent.
Richard Burgon doesn't have any reselection issues does he?
I would be truly gutted if he wasn't a Labour candidate.
Going to be an interesting parliament. After the cull there will be no lefties on the Labour side and only hard right brexiteers for the Tories. Lets hope the Scots find some free thinkers
The Labour MP for Luton South might end up being the one to fly the flag for the left. After all, when MP for Luton North, her dad was one of those who nominated Corbyn....
(He was also the acknowledged expert in the House of Commons on the wines of Burgundy...)
Interesting family! Better keep it quiet or Starmer will have her out quicker than you can say Chateau Latour
She's a Brexiter, Roger, handle with care.
Her grandfather Harold, meanwhile, seems to have been truly remarkable.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
I can see analyzing complex systems and making improvements as something AI might in due course be useful for. In fact I don't see why Sunak doesn't lean in to the tech bro thing and present himself as the White Heat of Technology choice.
The problem with AI in the public sector is that, by definition, it can’t be in-house. So using it creatively on anything public facing is a GDPR nightmare.
You can have many in-house AI systems.
When people say "AI", they are sometimes just talking about generative AI like ChatGPT. But you can run in-house large language models like ChatGPT. People currently favour Llama 3. It's not as good, but it works. Government can do something at scale if they wanted to.
Definitely not Generative AI. God knows what shit it would come up with that looked credible. Machine learning. Saying you can just buy product X shows me you have never worked within the procurement regs. And the usually issue is having trained staff who understand and can properly use what you just bought, because Acme PLC down the road pays better.
I work in health informatics, but at a university. I was involved in the main evaluations of both the National Programme for IT and the Global Digital Exemplars. I am aware that procurement is a nightmare. I agree about the lack of trained staff.
What I don't understand is you saying "it can’t be in-house".
Well you’re the example - the NHS is insufficiently centralised, and no one invests in analytical teams capable of using any system properly, to any sort of scale. This isn’t an AI point - it’s a data science one. Scratch the surface of any part of Gvt and you’ll find that almost all forms of research are outsourced, because 80% of the staff are scared by simple excel.
That's largely true, I agree. I think we're on the same page with the challenges. But I think you're being overly pessimistic. All that hasn't stopped the public sector from developing in-house AI previously and these issues are, to an extent, fixable, whereas you said the public sector cannot "by definition" do things in-house. We do, and we can do more. There's nothing inherent about the public sector that means this is impossible.
Oh I agree, it could change, and it should change. I’m just pessimistic that it will.
The National Programme for IT was this big top-down scheme, which failed in lots of ways (but didn't in others). That made everyone nervous about doing anything top-down. Then the Tories came in with this instinctive belief in the value of an internal market blah blah, but also a deep unwillingness to spend money. That's produced schemes like the Global Digital Exemplars, which has done some good things, but fundamentally just don't involve enough money. I hope a new Labour government will be more willing to (a) invest, and (b) do things top-down where it works, e.g. centralised commissioning of digital health tools.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
The more you reduce the number of workers who are capable of productivity increases the greater the productivity increases the remaining workers will need to achieve to pull the national productivity average up.
At some point those workers still increasing their productivity wonder why they should do so if the gains from their extra productivity are going predominantly to the government or to the executive oligarchy instead of themselves.
Hunt is asking for 2% in the public sector - the point is the public sector consists of a lot of things were efficiency is impossible - can you teach someone more efficiently (well I can give you a 6% improvement by adding 10% to class sizes but is that really a great plan?)
In very isolated places it can work. One can imagine making the passport office more efficient through process design and automation, though it’s possible those gains have been made. My God, there’s space to redesign the average A&E for efficiency. But as you say, it’s hard with talking or care work, or policy wonks. You can’t define productivity, never mind increase it.
The passport office is a bad example believe me those gains have been made - last December Mrs Eek got her new passport in 4 days and 1 day of that delay was because I missed the post the night before when sending her old passport back in.
DVLA is an example where improvements could be made but a lot has already been done and what is left is weird areas - where things are manual for reasons that don't make sense until you get into the weeds. 1 example is change of address where the driving license is often the first document updating placing the most awkward checks on the DVLA...
DVLA is incredibly incompetent. I’ve been in ‘correspondence’ with them since January over getting my licence back ….. I surrendered it when I didn’t think I’d ever be able to drive again, but asked for it back when I realised I’d recovered considerably, and had professional advice to that effect ……. but they haven’t answered anything for months. I was on the point of trying to get help from the local MP when the election was called.
Try your local Citizens Advice - it shouldn't make a difference but sometimes these government bodies react better to a call/letter from CA than from a member of the public.
We're still in the phony war stage of the general election. People are not paying close attention. That will change when candidates are finalised and manifestos are published. Then the real battle begins.
I do not think for one minute that Labour will win by anything like 20 points. I am a very firm believer in the maxim that the worst poll for Labour is the most accurate because that's generally how it has turned out in the past. The final JLP and Opinium polls are very likely to be the most accurate. However, I also think that tactical voting means a huge poll lead may not be as necessary as it may otherwise have been. We will have to see.
So far, there's nothing in either campaign that makes me think the Tories can win. It's very noticeable what they are not talking about - the NHS, the cost of living, public services, transport, housing etc. VAT on schools, national service, small bungs to pensioners etc is core vote stuff.
Basically, I remain where I have been all along - the most important result is that this destructive, incompetent government loses power. Anything else is a bonus.
I agree. Even if Labour do, in the end, finish up with a lead in single digits, I'd expect them to get a working majority with it - especially now that Scotland is swinging their way.
A small Labour majority is probably the best for the country. If they fail again, even under these circumstances, that will be bad for democracy and cause them to swing back to their extreme left -and there will still be plenty of them - the "purge" is window dressing.
Good morning everyone.
The problem I have with a small Labour majority is that it does not sufficiently annihilate the current nihilistic generation of Conservatives.
If we are to have a decent reformation of the Conservatives to recover some civic values, then it requires that a few be left standing in a blasted political wasteland. The alternative is that we end up with some zombie neanderthal Conservatives with the morality of Ugg the Caveman.
Yes it does seem, that while Starmer is purging his party of extremists, Sunak and the Tory party, are welcoming far right nutters and fruit cakes, with open arms, it is so important for democracy, that the Tories go down this time, whatever Starmer represents
Trouble is democracy is a pure numbers game. Purging bad, welcoming good. They all have one vote
5 weeks is a long time. I am happy with my NOM position.
Can we all agree that “cost of living” is a dreadful phrase and should be banned? All oppositions talk about there being a “cost of living” crisis when inflation is high. Just credit people with an ounce of intelligence (hard I know) and use the real word.
Radio 1 does not do inflation. If you station hop you will hear basically the same news item but on r2 and upwards it says rise in inflation, R1 translates to rise in the cost of goods and services
The bit people miss, including almost all of the politicians and media, is that a fall in inflation is still a rise in the cost of goods and services.
Richard Burgon doesn't have any reselection issues does he?
I would be truly gutted if he wasn't a Labour candidate.
Going to be an interesting parliament. After the cull there will be no lefties on the Labour side and only hard right brexiteers for the Tories. Lets hope the Scots find some free thinkers
The Labour MP for Luton South might end up being the one to fly the flag for the left. After all, when MP for Luton North, her dad was one of those who nominated Corbyn....
(He was also the acknowledged expert in the House of Commons on the wines of Burgundy...)
Interesting family! Better keep it quiet or Starmer will have her out quicker than you can say Chateau Latour
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
The more you reduce the number of workers who are capable of productivity increases the greater the productivity increases the remaining workers will need to achieve to pull the national productivity average up.
At some point those workers still increasing their productivity wonder why they should do so if the gains from their extra productivity are going predominantly to the government or to the executive oligarchy instead of themselves.
Hunt is asking for 2% in the public sector - the point is the public sector consists of a lot of things were efficiency is impossible - can you teach someone more efficiently (well I can give you a 6% improvement by adding 10% to class sizes but is that really a great plan?)
In very isolated places it can work. One can imagine making the passport office more efficient through process design and automation, though it’s possible those gains have been made. My God, there’s space to redesign the average A&E for efficiency. But as you say, it’s hard with talking or care work, or policy wonks. You can’t define productivity, never mind increase it.
The passport office is a bad example believe me those gains have been made - last December Mrs Eek got her new passport in 4 days and 1 day of that delay was because I missed the post the night before when sending her old passport back in.
DVLA is an example where improvements could be made but a lot has already been done and what is left is weird areas - where things are manual for reasons that don't make sense until you get into the weeds. 1 example is change of address where the driving license is often the first document updating placing the most awkward checks on the DVLA...
DVLA is incredibly incompetent. I’ve been in ‘correspondence’ with them since January over getting my licence back ….. I surrendered it when I didn’t think I’d ever be able to drive again, but asked for it back when I realised I’d recovered considerably, and had professional advice to that effect ……. but they haven’t answered anything for months. I was on the point of trying to get help from the local MP when the election was called.
Try your local Citizens Advice - it shouldn't make a difference but sometimes these government bodies react better to a call/letter from CA than from a member of the public.
Thanks for the advice. The D1 form went back at the end of January!
I have had to deal with DVLA over a medical thing recently, and they were OK. OTOH I only initiated dealings with them because I had to - there was an issue and I wanted to carry on driving.
But in general never interact with a bureaucrat, especially arms of the state, about anything unless you absolutely have to.
Turning next to the related subjects of banks and smart meters........
Okay - we're back to the old schtick of the public sector not being productive enough.
Look at the huge range of activities undertaken by, say, a County Council. Quite apart from the obvious (adult and child social care) you have libraries, education, highways and fire services all of that needing to be supported by the same infrastructure of legal, finance, property and procurement support services every other business has.
Then you have the management of a rural estate of farms and smallholdings, a music service helping children learn to play the bassoon (among other instruments) as well as the provision of other community services.
The one thing the Council has in its favour is it doesn't operate to a profit margin - it has a budget within which it has to live but there are no "shareholders" so the cost of the service is the cost of the service.
You can outsource various activities to the private sector but that doesn't end the involvement. Instead of doing the service and monitoring it, you need an active client and commissioning team to monitor the Contractor(s) and ensure they are meeting their contractual obligations and not charging you £120 to change a toilet seat to meet their profit margins.
How do you quantify "productivity"? Yes, you can give staff more work to do and have fewer of them doing it and that's been the public sector response for 30 years but does that mean improved productivity? You end up running harder to stand still. Is there too much form filling and paperwork? In some areas, perhaps but that's often a function of legislative requirement and what is perceived to be good professional practice - one example is RIBA stages and the bureaucracy that generates.
The other problem is accountability or trust - some Councillors micro manage. They want to know a degree of detail which they don't need to know - Members trying to be Officers and Officers trying to be Members never ends well. The centralisation of Member power into Executives or Cabinets hasn't worked and causes more problems - even worse is the Leader role especially when the relationship between said Leader and Senior Officers isn't good.
On your latter point, I certainly agree that the cabinet system has been a retrograde step for local government. I'm surprised that more councils are not bringing back the committee system where all councillors effectively shared power (led by committee chairs and vice-chairs) rather than vesting that power in just one cabinet member for each service and relegating most of the rest to pretty meaningless "scrutiny" roles. Why do so many councillors put up with being spare parts?
We're still in the phony war stage of the general election. People are not paying close attention. That will change when candidates are finalised and manifestos are published. Then the real battle begins.
I do not think for one minute that Labour will win by anything like 20 points. I am a very firm believer in the maxim that the worst poll for Labour is the most accurate because that's generally how it has turned out in the past. The final JLP and Opinium polls are very likely to be the most accurate. However, I also think that tactical voting means a huge poll lead may not be as necessary as it may otherwise have been. We will have to see.
So far, there's nothing in either campaign that makes me think the Tories can win. It's very noticeable what they are not talking about - the NHS, the cost of living, public services, transport, housing etc. VAT on schools, national service, small bungs to pensioners etc is core vote stuff.
Basically, I remain where I have been all along - the most important result is that this destructive, incompetent government loses power. Anything else is a bonus.
I agree. Even if Labour do, in the end, finish up with a lead in single digits, I'd expect them to get a working majority with it - especially now that Scotland is swinging their way.
A small Labour majority is probably the best for the country. If they fail again, even under these circumstances, that will be bad for democracy and cause them to swing back to their extreme left -and there will still be plenty of them - the "purge" is window dressing.
Good morning everyone.
The problem I have with a small Labour majority is that it does not sufficiently annihilate the current nihilistic generation of Conservatives.
If we are to have a decent reformation of the Conservatives to recover some civic values, then it requires that a few be left standing in a blasted political wasteland. The alternative is that we end up with some zombie neanderthal Conservatives with the morality of Ugg the Caveman.
Yes it does seem, that while Starmer is purging his party of extremists, Sunak and the Tory party, are welcoming far right nutters and fruit cakes, with open arms, it is so important for democracy, that the Tories go down this time, whatever Starmer represents
Trouble is democracy is a pure numbers game. Purging bad, welcoming good. They all have one vote
5 weeks is a long time. I am happy with my NOM position.
Worryingly, I think you might not be far away, certainly nearer than a Labour 200 seat majority, which is for the birds
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
The more you reduce the number of workers who are capable of productivity increases the greater the productivity increases the remaining workers will need to achieve to pull the national productivity average up.
At some point those workers still increasing their productivity wonder why they should do so if the gains from their extra productivity are going predominantly to the government or to the executive oligarchy instead of themselves.
Hunt is asking for 2% in the public sector - the point is the public sector consists of a lot of things were efficiency is impossible - can you teach someone more efficiently (well I can give you a 6% improvement by adding 10% to class sizes but is that really a great plan?)
In very isolated places it can work. One can imagine making the passport office more efficient through process design and automation, though it’s possible those gains have been made. My God, there’s space to redesign the average A&E for efficiency. But as you say, it’s hard with talking or care work, or policy wonks. You can’t define productivity, never mind increase it.
The passport office is a bad example believe me those gains have been made - last December Mrs Eek got her new passport in 4 days and 1 day of that delay was because I missed the post the night before when sending her old passport back in.
DVLA is an example where improvements could be made but a lot has already been done and what is left is weird areas - where things are manual for reasons that don't make sense until you get into the weeds. 1 example is change of address where the driving license is often the first document updating placing the most awkward checks on the DVLA...
DVLA is incredibly incompetent. I’ve been in ‘correspondence’ with them since January over getting my licence back ….. I surrendered it when I didn’t think I’d ever be able to drive again, but asked for it back when I realised I’d recovered considerably, and had professional advice to that effect ……. but they haven’t answered anything for months. I was on the point of trying to get help from the local MP when the election was called.
Try your local Citizens Advice - it shouldn't make a difference but sometimes these government bodies react better to a call/letter from CA than from a member of the public.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
Oh dont be ridiculous. Arent all the politicians telling us theyre taking the difficult decisions ? As if.
Im afraid its send some sacred cows to the abbatoir and they are all afraid to do it.
I'm sure we'd all like to know which ones.
Remember, the pay/conditions/pension package for public sector workers already makes it difficult to recruit and retain staff.
Quangos
Anywhere between £38 and 82 billion down the Swannee each year depending on whose figures you believe.No accountability, 766 institutions whose rationale may no longer valid, place jobs for pliticians mates. Are they essential ? Probably not.
Then lets start on the BoE a bit of reform to hammer the annual interest bill and then you get some headroom back in the piece.
But the only real way to get productivity moving is investment in infrastructure. Just dont make it IT.
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
Rather worrying that 'living' figures quite highly as a standalone.
'cost' is same size as 'living' in all four, so looks as if the actual phrase used is 'cost of living' and the algorithm has split it up and binned the 'of' (sorry Biggles).
Word clouds usually suck but that is riveting. Why do the youngest cohort (and nobody else) want truth, and what about? And note how cozzie livs completely evaporates for 65 plus and even pensions gets subordinate billing. Perhaps they really are as rich as everyone says.
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
Rather worrying that 'living' figures quite highly as a standalone.
'cost' is same size as 'living' in all four, so looks as if the actual phrase used is 'cost of living' and the algorithm has split it up and binned the 'of' (sorry Biggles).
Word clouds usually suck but that is riveting. Why do the youngest cohort (and nobody else) want truth, and what about? And note how cozzie livs completely evaporates for 65 plus and even pensions gets subordinate billing. Perhaps they really are as rich as everyone says.
The obvious question is where are 'woke' and 'trans', the key issues - as we all surely agree - of this election?
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
Oh dont be ridiculous. Arent all the politicians telling us theyre taking the difficult decisions ? As if.
Im afraid its send some sacred cows to the abbatoir and they are all afraid to do it.
I'm sure we'd all like to know which ones.
Remember, the pay/conditions/pension package for public sector workers already makes it difficult to recruit and retain staff.
Quangos
Anywhere between £38 and 82 billion down the Swannee each year depending on whose figures you believe.No accountability, 766 institutions whose rationale may no longer valid, place jobs for pliticians mates. Are they essential ? Probably not.
Then lets start on the BoE a bit of reform to hammer the annual interest bill and then you get some headroom back in the piece.
But the only real way to get productivity moving is investment in infrastructure. Just dont make it IT.
There’s plenty they can do with IT, but they need to learn to do it in baby steps rather than the Big Grand Project that some senior CS mandarin gets to put at the top of his CV and gets him a CBE.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
The 'last 14 years' question will be tricky for them to navigate throughout this campaign; not helped I think by the fact that Sunak has been trying to campaign from opposition throughout his tenure. The public (naturally) will not buy this, and it doesn't take much thought progression to consider therefore why they aren't campaigning on their record.
Just to let you know the Caspar David Friedrich exhibition was worth a visit. I had been in February when there was a major exhibition of all his works (250 anniversary of his birth ) and it had loads of his paintings in one place. However the exhibition was totally packed out so you didnt get much time before a dutch coach party moved you on.
This time the Kunsthalle was down to its core of about 8 works. But I had Wanderer uber dem Nebelmeer all to myself for as long as I wanted. Bliss
Comments
With the NHS (and chunks of education, I suspect), there is plenty to be said for the prevention being better than cure/stitch in time argument. Catch problems early and you get better outcomes for less cost.
Unfortunately, when one's financial back is against the wall, it's the long-term stuff that has to be cut, because the acute problems have to go to the front of the queue.
See also the sweating of assets and maintenance holidays that characterised the austerity era. It's one thing to do it for a few years, but it's really biting us on the bum after fourteen.
Promising just to spend trivial amounts of additional money supposedly going to be raised by new taxes which may well end up costing money rather than generating it is not the answer.
(He was also the acknowledged expert in the House of Commons on the wines of Burgundy...)
When people say "AI", they are sometimes just talking about generative AI like ChatGPT. But you can run in-house large language models like ChatGPT. People currently favour Llama 3. It's not as good, but it works. Government can do something at scale if they wanted to.
I was on the point of trying to get help from the local MP when the election was called.
Or you use the NHS's own data. The NHS has more data than most healthcare systems. The problem is getting at it.
You are right that the NHS has (in theory, when the Trusts speak to each other or to GPs) a really valuable data set compared to almost any other jurisdiction, which is why we should be able to negotiate some really good deals around data analysis, if we could be comfortable sharing suitably anonymised data.
The problem I have with a small Labour majority is that it does not sufficiently annihilate the current nihilistic generation of Conservatives.
If we are to have a decent reformation of the Conservatives to recover some civic values, then it requires that a few be left standing in a blasted political wasteland. The alternative is that we end up with some zombie neanderthal Conservatives with the morality of Ugg the Caveman.
Okay - we're back to the old schtick of the public sector not being productive enough.
Look at the huge range of activities undertaken by, say, a County Council. Quite apart from the obvious (adult and child social care) you have libraries, education, highways and fire services all of that needing to be supported by the same infrastructure of legal, finance, property and procurement support services every other business has.
Then you have the management of a rural estate of farms and smallholdings, a music service helping children learn to play the bassoon (among other instruments) as well as the provision of other community services.
The one thing the Council has in its favour is it doesn't operate to a profit margin - it has a budget within which it has to live but there are no "shareholders" so the cost of the service is the cost of the service.
You can outsource various activities to the private sector but that doesn't end the involvement. Instead of doing the service and monitoring it, you need an active client and commissioning team to monitor the Contractor(s) and ensure they are meeting their contractual obligations and not charging you £120 to change a toilet seat to meet their profit margins.
How do you quantify "productivity"? Yes, you can give staff more work to do and have fewer of them doing it and that's been the public sector response for 30 years but does that mean improved productivity? You end up running harder to stand still. Is there too much form filling and paperwork? In some areas, perhaps but that's often a function of legislative requirement and what is perceived to be good professional practice - one example is RIBA stages and the bureaucracy that generates.
The other problem is accountability or trust - some Councillors micro manage. They want to know a degree of detail which they don't need to know - Members trying to be Officers and Officers trying to be Members never ends well. The centralisation of Member power into Executives or Cabinets hasn't worked and causes more problems - even worse is the Leader role especially when the relationship between said Leader and Senior Officers isn't good.
Well done to TSE and others
We are going to miss PB when its gone.
@JulianGallie
What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
(I see "triple" skulking in there for the over 65s...but also climate)
Most people need to eat better, exercise more and drink less alcohol. You can get an AI system in to tell people to eat better, exercise more and drink less alcohol. Is that going to make any difference? No. Getting people to change their behaviour is difficult!
Say it ain't so.
I was going to post that the header title seemed a bit redundant. The day's new PB header is always your morning must read
Have a look at what happened in Iceland wqhen the locals realised what was being proposed in the way of selling data to the commercial firms.
I assume you have used the D1 form, not just written to DVLA? https://www.gov.uk/reapply-driving-licence-medical-condition
PS Glad to hear of your recovery!
First 7 categories don't count and they concentrate all efforts on 8th
It is working so far so maybe it will continue to be successful
Labour Strategy
It's okay, we can lose the muslim vote
It's okay, we can lose the black vote
It's okay, we can lose the socialist vote
It's okay, we can lose the anti-racist vote
It's okay, we can lose the green vote
It's okay, we can lose the trade unionist vote
Its OK to lose the Anti Genocide vote
We've got the Tory vote
Also: it's not the differential that matters to people so much as the integrated sum at time = t.
'Cost of living' deals with both of those very nicely.
What I don't understand is you saying "it can’t be in-house".
The latter would need to compete properly on wages though (which shouldn't be a financial problem as it could easily self-fund, but could be an organisational one).
FWIW, NHS hospital data for research is under-priced, compared to other sources, even other public bodies such as CPRD (primary care) from the MHRA.* Now, a lot of the research is also NHS funded (NIHR) so it's money moving in circles, but there are also commercially funded projects using NHS data and those could be squeezed a lot harder. NHS Digital works on a break-even rather than profit model.
*hard to go directly comparable, but a typical NHS HES data extract costs me <£20k, whereas typical CPRD ones are £40-50k. Within the scope of research projects budgeted at £500k-£1M or so, there's scope to e.g. double the data costs without, probably, impacting demand much. Whether it would make sense depends how much of that is for ultimately NHS-funded studies.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/how-the-great-and-good-of-britain-s-boardrooms-refused-to-back-labour/ar-BB1nh2m4?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=7cdaeebfdce846f3b9eeb28fee98041b&ei=9
Inflation is only 2.3% but the cost of living is still an big issue for many because of the relative movement of prices and wages over the past few years (since the Tories took over in fact).
Inflation itself can be a worrying issue even if wages are rising faster - just because you can't keep a track of prices, savings lose value etc. But that's not the issue today.
'Affordability' might be a better term or 'relative affordability' but I suspect we are stuck with CoL to describe the pinch people feel and continue to feel when prices have risen faster than wages for a period.
Back to the days of the Borisgraph
Having said that I've had a look at the map showing results so far, it seems that most of Cape Town is yet to declare (strongest area for the DA) and I would say there are a smattering of extra districts where the DA has won compared to last time. Also noticeable that the new MK party is polling well in KwaZulu Natal.
Pushkin had good taste. They are an appealing mix of Russian cheekbones and Romanian extroversion
The current 'Tory' vote for Labour (I am one) is around 14% of those who voted Tory in 2019, which is just under 2 million. (YouGov latest data). To win the election Labour need somewhere around 12-14 million votes.
To win Labour need the larger part of the core vote + the ex Tory switchers. Currently this is what they have. (Even in Hackney Diane Abbott wants to run under a Labour ticket. I wonder why!)
What comes of using a word map rather than a phrase map...
5 weeks is a long time. I am happy with my NOM position.
SKS fans, please explain
But in general never interact with a bureaucrat, especially arms of the state, about anything unless you absolutely have to.
Turning next to the related subjects of banks and smart meters........
Public services in this country are utterly shite. (Although Leon tells us the country is in great shape, and Leon is an honourable man...)
Anywhere between £38 and 82 billion down the Swannee each year depending on whose figures you believe.No accountability, 766 institutions whose rationale may no longer valid, place jobs for pliticians mates. Are they essential ? Probably not.
Then lets start on the BoE a bit of reform to hammer the annual interest bill and then you get some headroom back in the piece.
But the only real way to get productivity moving is investment in infrastructure. Just dont make it IT.
This time the Kunsthalle was down to its core of about 8 works. But I had Wanderer uber dem Nebelmeer all to myself for as long as I wanted. Bliss
TSE has a FT job and is doing a wonderful job on here since Mike was unable to continue but i cant see how he could do that long term.
Hope i am wrong
Perhaps you could step up rather than taking it for granted