The roller-coaster ride isn't over. After a year of accelerated digitalisation, local governments are only at the beginning of reshaping existing services to user demand. What impact has the pandemic had on the future of local government services?
Tariq was speaking at the opening session of the Local Government stream at this morning of GovX Digital, the UK's largest public sector transformation conference running until 26th May.
He explained that at Camden, his team were trying to look at the whole worldview of how residents interacted with the council, and looking for technology to complement the human experience rather than replacing it.
"What Covid has done has illustrated that while we may all have been in the same storm, we weren't in the same boat," Tariq noted. "It's really shone a light on the digital divide. When we're delivering all these digital services we have to factor in that people have different levels of access to technology and to broadband."
Despite the stark reminder of inequality, Tariq observes a number of opportunities for local government that have arisen out of the rapid acceleration of digitalisation across UK society as the country locked down - such as the resurgence of QR codes, and leverage of data.
"It used to be seen as this weird fringe thing happening in Japan and South Korea, but actually we're now seeing it as a cheap and easy way to bridge the online-offline gap," he said. "Another opportunity comes from data, which is the great enabler. At Camden we've got 600 lines of business and that means we have a huge intersection between different kinds of interactions - so if we could harness the power of data in a transparent and ethical way, then I think there's some really cool applications specifically for early intervention and prevention within our communities."
He was part of a plenary panel discussing what the 'Future of Local Government Services' would look like, alongside Dr Deborah Smart the Corporate Director for Digital & Change at Dorset Council, Sandra Taylor the Assistant Director of IT and Digital at Worcestershire County Council, and Glen Ocskó the Head of Local Government at Made Tech.
Dorset Council is a unitary authority formed in 2019 from the merger of five district councils with the previous county council.
"Our transformation programme, which was focused on bringing the councils together and saving some money has now been accelerated three-fold," she explained. "We're now talking about trying to save £10m a year rather than the originally planned £3m, while designing really good new services for customers."
The effectiveness of Dorset Council's Covid response, where the community has been allowed to get involved and the council "hasn't stepped on their toes", is viewed as a model for better understanding what citizens want longer term.
"We've helped provide some of the leadership, but not got in the way of the actual doing," continued Deborah. "I think we can use this approach in future to shape our service delivery, particularly in people services, as we work across the districts to form that one new Dorset Council service."
"We should be building things that can be rolled-out in an hour, and then shared with other partners as well. There's no reason why we don't build things and then share it with other councils. I don't like the idea that a small number of big, big suppliers are charging absolutely everyone for the same tools over and over again."
This requires a high degree of clarity - what services are being delivered, when, and to what level ("something of a bugbear") - but also keeping abreast of changing customer service demands.
"Even before Covid, we were moving from physical phone towards digital services," she continues. "Our customers don't expect to have to navigate through mazes to get to our services - they just expect us to know about previous contacts and their circumstances."