Associate feature: Would you subscribe to a Netflix model for government?

Adrian Fieldhouse is a new voice in the Scottish public sector, providing some fresh ideas to help government address its public finance and public service challenges – and how digital services firm Sopra Steria can be part of the solution.

Fieldhouse, the firm’s managing director for the government sector, envisages a world where government can offer users a multi-tiered system and where basic public services can be enhanced by convenient bolt-ons. Just as you would upgrade from grainy standard definition to Ultra HD for few quid more on Netflix, Fieldhouse proposes a similar model for government.

Such an approach, he explains, can enhance the service provided by government beyond what it would and could normally afford to offer. 

It’s a new model for government, which has traditionally offered a no-frills approach when it comes to public services. Giving citizens the option of ‘added-value’ or premium services delivers a dual function – it both improves the experience for the public and delivers a much-needed revenue stream for stricken public services.

Is the standard fortnightly bin collection leaving your bins spilling over? Upgrade to a weekly service for a bit more money. And Sopra Steria doesn’t stop there.

“Imagine a world where you have an Amazon Echo Dot in every potentially vulnerable elderly person’s home,” says Fieldhouse.

“The Dot can currently switch the lights on and off – but imagine there’s a piece of AI on the Dot which acts like a contactable social worker, if you like, and offers help with their concerns.”

Sopra Steria also envisages a world where personal data is accessible at the touch of a button by separate services that need to work together, like health and social care.

“Let me tell you a story about Freda,” says Fieldhouse. Freda is a fit and healthy 73-year-old who has broken her hip and requires social care before she is discharged from hospital.

“The current system is incredibly paper-based and reliant on human interaction, which is both time-consuming and expensive. In this hypothetical scenario, Freda might spend about ten weeks in hospital after her hip replacement and have lost the equivalent of years’ worth of muscle mass. She’s gone from being fit and healthy to frail and fearful of another fall, agoraphobic, vulnerable and falling into an ever-decreasing spiral of need.

“Now imagine a world where the minute Freda is registered at Accident and Emergency, a piece of AI gathers together everything we know about Freda in the local health economy.

“It could recommend a grab rail and morning visits, send that package as a message to her son’s mobile phone, and her son could then interact and swap, say, morning visits for trips to a community centre twice a week to keep her sociable, and maybe order an extra grab rail.

“The order would be placed with the suppliers at the touch of a button before Freda has even had her operation, and she could be out in a week. That is eminently possible.

“There’s multiple uses for such technology, which we have only just started to explore – the possibilities, and benefits for government and citizens are endless,” says Fieldhouse. 

Imagine for a moment, you may already be pushing a sweaty thumbprint into your biometrically programmed iPhone, or waving your Samsung Galaxy around to activate its facial recognition software in order to access the social network that you upload your thoughts to on a minute-by-minute basis, to warn your thousands of “followers” that Sopra Steria is ‘Big Brother’ made manifest.

“The Man wants to digitise your health records,” you tweet, embedding a link to the Kindle edition of the complete works of George Orwell.

You then return to your 30-page mortgage application form, and then head down to the internet café to print out six months of bank statements (you ditched your printer for a tablet years ago), and photocopy two forms of physical identification to take to the bank.

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On your bank statements, you notice that your take-home pay has reduced in recent months as the government has had to hike taxes to pay for the army of clerical staff required to keep all this paper moving around the health and social care system which is buckling under the pressure of an ageing population.

Dr Garry Young, Director of Macroeconomic Modelling and Forecasting at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), also has a sobering message for you.

“We haven’t seen anything yet,” he told a group of Scotland’s leading digital influencers, at the Sopra Steria government business launch in Edinburgh last week. 

“In Scotland the proportion of people over 70 has already been drifting upwards, but the baby-boomer generation is entering that age bracket so the pressures are really mounting.”

He illustrates this with a chart demonstrating the average public spending per person by age – which appropriately looks like the Loch Ness Monster.

It begins with a small hump between 0 and 20-years-old as people are born, weaned and educated by the state, followed by 45 years of still water as healthy workers pay their taxes and draw little from the social security pot.

Then the maw of the monster rises from 65 onwards, gobbling up billions of pounds of public cash and growing in size as more ageing workers push the ever-elongating neck ever higher.

You might be scared of Big Brother – but this Big Monster should terrify you if you value your health service.

It can only be fed by tax rises, spending cuts, or the kinds of efficiencies that may only be possible with the help of digital solutions and artificial intelligence.

“We believe that improving public sector efficiency by trying to get more out of what you’re spending already will be the most palatable option at Westminster and at Holyrood,” says Young.

Sopra Steria recognises that it might be a hard sell convincing people that algorithms akin to those used by Facebook and Amazon – which have come in for quite a bit of stick in recent months – could hold the key to improving public services.

Mags Moore, Sopra Steria’s Head of Government business in Scotland and Northern Ireland, believes the continuing popularity of these firms and the growing familiarity with biometrics in consumer electronics will help people overcome the technoshock of digital public services.

“Biometrics is second nature to the younger generation who can’t see the point of putting a six-digit code in their iPhone anymore,” she says.

“There is a perfect storm of austerity so things are going to have to change.

“We are an organisation that will work with colleagues to make that change. We’re not going to suddenly get rid of the old and do something different, we will work with people to be imaginative and do things in a different way.

“It’s not going to be easy but a lot of that is going to be driven by policy, and it will be little changes and building the right foundations.

“My brother had strokes, can’t work, he’s disabled, and I would like to think I’m relatively intelligent but it took me ages to fill out all these social security forms, deal with the council, housing associations, the Citizens Advice Bureau.

“Instead, you could ask people’s permission to share their personal circumstances to allow service providers to sort things out at a community level.

“Imagine you had a man called Scott working at the council who took it upon himself to speak to 14 housing associations for you if you gave him a single permission form.

“Then imagine you had an artificial intelligence programme that recorded that someone had become ill or homeless and offered support if they would share their information.

“If you bring it back to the citizens rather than focusing on ‘Big Brother’ – Tesco, Sainsbury’s and John Lewis probably know more about this than the government will ever know.
“Social security in Scotland is a big opportunity for us to help people.”

Associate feature with Sopra Steria. To access the full report from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) please follow this link