Welcome letter Dr Andrew Larner, Chief Executive at iESE and iESE news
Page 3-5
Reflections from Canada: a tour of transformation ‘in the wild’
Page 6
Public sector collaborates on Covid-19 response
Pages 7-8
London Borough of Barking and Dagenham scoop UK Council of the Year 2020
Pages 9-10
Councils face double deadly virus threat as cyber crime rises during lockdown
EDITORIAL CONTACTS
TRANSFORM IS PRODUCED BY:
iESE, www iese org uk, Tel: 08434 878 026
Email: enquiries@iese org uk
@iESELtd
CREDITS:
Editorial by: Vicki Arnstein
Designed by: SMK Design
Views expressed within are those of the iESE editorial team iESE is distributed on a triannual basis to companies and individuals with an interest in reviewing, remodelling and reinventing public services
no time in recent history has the UK public sector faced such unprecedented challenge For local authorities, the weight of responsibility is enormous Necessary public services have found ways to continue with a fragmented workforce as councils endeavour to help their most vulnerable residents
Even before the Coronavirus, local authority was facing increased levels of threat from cyber criminals, leading iESE to team up with experts Assurity Systems and Cyber Security Associates to offer Cyber Security Checks Now, with more employees working on home-based systems than ever, taking steps to minimise the risks faced is vital (see pages 9 and 10)
But it isn't all bad news We've started to see communities pulling together in a way local authority was already keen to encourage, taking steps to allow councils to move away from being the pater nalistic provider of all services to more of an enabling role The NHS Volunteer Responders scheme, for example, was halted while it processed applications from 750,000 volunteers just days after the Gover nment put out a call hoping to get 250,000 responses The sector is also pulling together in a way the Local Digital Declaration sought to encourage by collaborating to aid the crisis (see page 6)
In a sector that has seen dramatic changes through austerity, the pandemic has shown that we can still respond fast And with this response comes new opportunity Departments that might have resisted home working may now move forward with allowing employees greater flexibility Services that were not previously online may now become so Services local authorities felt unable to cut or reduce may now have that option as residents seek new solutions There is a high chance that our new normal will look slightly different and, for local authorities, this could be the chance to grab the momentum and keep on running
Dr Andrew Lar ner and the iESE team
Pilot delivers significant children's services savings
A PILOT OF CARECUBED CHILDREN'S HAS SHOWN THE TOOL CAN DELIVER SIGNIFICANT SAVINGS
CareCubed Children's was launched at the end of last year, building on the success of the existing adult version The secure online tool is designed to give care commissioners clarity on the cost of care and help manage care spend
The feedback gained when building the children's version of the tool is that it is often difficult to reach a clear understanding regarding what is included in the price
Placements can often be quoted in the region of £3-5,000 a week, while figures show councils overspent on children's social care budgets by £800m in 2018
iESE Associate Consultant Diana Sherwood ran the informal pilot as part of her other role as an interim at two London Borough Councils The pilot looked at seven
placements and saved £325,000 One of the boroughs is now in the process of procuring a Children's CareCubed licence, while three other councils (two county and one unitary) have also signed up
"The pilot raised awareness of historic overspend in the commissioning of children’s care Unfortunately, many local authorities feel defeated, believing there is little room to reevaluate costs However, the pilots raised awareness and highlighted need to improve and widen negotiations with providers," she said
However, she stresses it is a transparent tool rather than one to 'beat providers up with' "It is to ensure placements are value for money and there is sustainability on both sides This tool is something new for all local authorities and there is a real appetite for it," she said
CareCubed can help renegotiate emergency care packages
THE FINANCIAL PRESSURE BEING PLACED ON COUNCILS AND CARE PROVIDERS BY COVID-19 COULD LEAVE MANY AT BREAKING POINT.
Many emergency placements have been made to enable patients to be discharged to social care settings from hospital to free up beds within the NHS The care packages being delivered have also changed with service users needing to be socially distanced and with providers facing greater demand for certain products and services such as assistive technology and a massive increase in PPE costs
Craig White, Business Development Manager at iESE, said: "These placements will need to be revisited, reconciled and renegotiated as we move forward to ensure the best care for the individual is provided and at a fair price We will support customers through this because the financial pressures felt by all involved are significant and
already stretched budgets could leave many councils and providers at breaking point Every day and week that goes by without this reconciliation happening is critical and will translate into devastating consequences for all involved "
He said iESE had received multiple examples from customers about the benefits of having a tool such as iESE's flagship digital product CareCubed® to document the care packages agreed, the correct price and consideration of how this splits between councils and Clinical Commissioning Groups
iESE is already engaging commissioners and providers in online workshops designed to share ideas "The workshops will direct our short-term development roadmap and see iESE investing in further development to CareCubed aimed at specifically helping with COVID-19 related issues both now and in the months and years ahead "
New Business Development Manager: Craig White
Craig White joined iESE in October 2019 as Business Development Manager and will provide strategic sales leadership going forward His initial focus is on growing and supporting the customer base of CareCubed® He brings more than 20 years' experience building software businesses and providing innovative solutions that make a real difference to all parts of the public sector His knowledge and learning will feed into and help shape our future strategy “I am excited to be taking up this role and diving straight into helping health and social care organisations through these very challenging times with a proposition that is low cost, quick to implement and offers significant and measurable immediate benefits to the sector,” he said ● You can contact Craig at: craig white@iese org uk
Dr Andrew Larner, Chief Executive
@LaverdaJota
Reflections from a tour of public sector innovation 'in the wild'
Earlier this year iESE hosted Nick Scott, Executive Director of Open Government and Innovation in New Brunswick, Canada and Dr Jules Maitland, founder of All In, a user-experience research and service design firm in New Brunswick, Canada Here, in an letter to iESE, Nick and Jules reflect on their visit
Dear iESE,
As practitioners and facilitator of public sector innovation, it's magical to see the theories and frameworks that underpin your work unfolding in the real world
That's the feeling we were left wi after visiting the UK before the COVID-19 lockdown. We're writing this letter to thank you for shar your time, experience and passion communities better places to live, work and play.
About Nick and Jules
We want you to know how special you are, so we thought we'd share some 'aha' moments we had when listening to your stories of innovation 'in the wild'. We've already shared many of these with colleagues to inspire and support their efforts to help New Brunswick thrive.
You lead from the future by exploring
the adjacent possible
By going where few public organisations would dare, your teams have created public value most could only dream of As author Stephen Johnson described it: “The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself” 1
Discovery requires a kind of leadership that gets through the uncertainty and hardships of ‘losing sight of shore’ We observed this leadership in several projects Bracknell Forest Council, for example, was a first mover in the e-card world with its e+ Card The multi-use card gives holders access to libraries, leisure and the ability to pay for public transport services
The resulting uses and benefits of having implemented the card are examples of realising the “adjacent possible” Beyond the obvious uses of
the card, Bracknell Forest has demonstrated a number of less obvious uses The ability to allow vetted users to access the library after hours, variable pricing on parking and incentivising desirable behaviours, such as exercise or recycling, are all made possible by adoption of the e+ Card; adjacent possibilities As Stephen Johnson noted: “The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations” Bracknell Forest e+ Card is an example of the mindset and behaviours needed to explore the boundaries of possibility Another example is the MySense initiative Inspired by first-hand experience of watching a loved one’s independence decline alongside their health, MySense is a disruptive innovation in the healthcare space It provides healthcare providers with information previously unavailable to them and the MySense team have recognised the need to work with healthcare providers to understand the implications of this new information for their clinical decision making, care planning and workflow
DR JULES MAITLAND
Dr Jules Maitland is a people person who can also speak geek Her career started in nursing before going on to study software engineering and gaining a octorate for her work in digital health After orking in industry as Director of User Experience or several years, she joined NouLAB, New runswick's Public and Social Innovation Lab, as uman-Centred Design Lead She founded All In January 2020 to help organisations work with he people they serve to create effective humanentred services, programs, and products
NICK SCOTT
Since 2017 Nick Scott has been leading transformational change at the Government of New Brunswick in his role as Executive Director of Open Government and Innovation n this role he established an Innovation Team, collaborative workspace and a public innovation framework, facilitating initiatives addressing mobility, literacy, second language acquisition, natural resource development, municipal reform and child protection Previously in his role as Executive Director of the NB Social Policy Research Network, Nick launched the GovMaker Conference to explore the theory and practice of public innovation and open government, cofounded NouLAB - a public and social innovation lab facilitating collaborative problem-solving across sectors - and co-chaired the 2016 Canadian Open Data Summit
The organisations Nick and Jules visited with iESE on their tour of the UK:
• Lewes and Eastbourne Council: A two-day visit about the joint transformation programme, including a Seeing Is Believing Tour
• London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea: Waste management department and low-code in partnership with Netcall
• Innovation club meeting featuring Durham Constabulary and the Isle of Wight Council
• Workshop session with MindOfMyOwn, MySense, MHCLG, CareCubed, Cultural Compass
• The MET police: Exploration of their One Met Model and beyond
• Bracknell Forest Council: SmartCard project and Town Centre redevelopment
• Assurity Systems
You work with early adopters to accelerate innovation
Transformative solutions are not immediately implemented at scale Innovation is an adaptive and iterative process of change and adoption The Dr Everett Rogers’ Innovation Adoption Curve, is a theory that depicts how new technologies are introduced and diffused throughout society The theory identifies five archetypes in a population along a bell curve from introduction to full scale adoption:
1. Innovators introduce new concepts, tools, behaviours
2 Early Adopters join when ideas are fuzzy, technology is buggy They want to be part of the innovation story
3 Early Majority join when they see value
4 Late Majority join when there is plenty of support
5. Laggards join only when they have to, and
6. (Bonus) Resistors maintain the status quo
following the 2008 recession which created significant business challenges Faced with a reduction of officers and staff, the MET began a transformation jour ney Consisting of a portfolio of 15 change programmes and 80 projects, the Business Change Team works with smaller sites and early adopters to test changes and interventions This approach allows the Business Change Team to take a focused “show-don’t-tell” approach; whereby the benefits of an intervention are experienced and demonstrated, thereby reducing the usual friction that occurs in implementation
You demonstrate agility versus doing agile
Agile has become the method du jour in many organisations, with no shortage of books and consultants selling “how to do Agile” This can often result in a performative-approach with a focus on process, roles, tools and steps By putting residents at the centre of their work, the teams we visited are not simply doing agile, they are being agile
By working with the Early Adopters, Innovators are able to lear n more about their solutions and the problems they aim to solve The patter n depicted by this theory is the story of culture change and can be applied to organisational transformations like those pursued by the MET Police
Like most organisations and local authorities, the MET Police was faced with austerity measures
Along with the majority of the other projects we saw, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea project started when the team had to make savings by changing their paperbased processes Their IT teams had too much on, and so the team partnered with Netcall to build the solution themselves They utilised the low-code application environment to launch the solution within four months of mapping out the process and continue to make
iterative improvements to the system in response to issues the public or field officers experience
The collective sense of ownership of the solution by the team was evident during the visit Perhaps most significant was the team’s decision to send field officers for training so they themselves will be able to modify the solution This opens up the potential for them to design/develop other
4 Adaptation of the Design Council’s double diamond model of design,
solutions as they see the need arise
Typically people in the field have to submit “change requests” and wait at the mercy of centralised (and often overstretched) development or innovation teams Equipping all levels of staff with the skills and tools to develop digital solutions to challenges that they experience or observe, disrupts traditional power dynamics in systems It is refreshing to see staff at all levels have autonomy and feel empowered to make decisions to fix problems being faced by the public It is also encouraging that it was a recurring theme throughout our visit From Durham Police Constabulary recognising the impact of having a Chief Inspector who wants staff to “find problems and fix them”, to the Isle of Wight Council advocating to “seek forgiveness, not permission” One of our favourite examples came from Lewes and Eastbourne Council The local authority received a call about some bricks which had fallen from a wall A staff person was dispatched to remove the bricks but instead of moving the bricks and waiting for another department/jurisdiction to fix it, took the initiative to get a labourer to fix the wall
You amplify impact through inclusion
Human-Centred Design works from a relatively simple premise: that “the process of design begins with the people being designed for and ends with solutions tailored to meet their needs ”3 From the framing of the problem being addressed, to the implementation of the developed solution, there are many ways a human-centred approach may be adopted; each introducing varying degrees of engagement of the people being designed for in the design process itself Human-centred design is
a mindset as much as a suite of methods The projects we visited embodied the human-centred design mindset regardless of whether they were familiar with the model or methods
PROBLEM SPACE - DISCOVER INSIGHTS INTO THE PROBLEM
The discovery phase of the design process, sometimes referenced as the empathy phase, aims to increase our understanding of the problems we seek to address from the perspective of the people most impacted by them
As decision makers it can be easy to assume we know what is needed in our communities or organisations Indeed, it is often expected that we know what needs to be fixed (and how we should fix it) Therefore the decision to engage in discovery work requires a degree of humility and acknowledgement that while we may be experts in our fields, we are not experts in the daily lives of our service users or service providers and there is much we can lear n from them Engaging in discovery work can provide new insights upon which meaningful action can be taken and can also build relationships with the people you serve
We observed this in Lewes and Eastbourne Council, where the incoming leader met business owners and asked what one thing the council could do for them This allowed efforts to be directed towards a problem impacting a significant portion of the community; demonstrating it was open to listening and taking action
Durham Police Constabulary worked closely with stakeholders in the foster care system to understand the underlying factors that contributed to wasted time during an amber alert This led to a solution that embodied the constabulary’s knowledge of what was needed to bring a child home, while addressing the needs of stakeholders in a way that has had a significant impact on the foster children themselves
PROBLEM SPACE - DEFINE THE AREA TO FOCUS ON
There are multiple ways to frame a problem and the way a problem is framed will inform the approach taken to understand and ultimately address it Most commonly, we adopt an institutional view of a problem This can lead to solutions that are tightly bound to the priorities and current structure of the institution Alter native views that lend themselves to more transformative explorations of the problem
space are that of the i) user/human and ii) the system
For example, iESE's CareCubed tackles the institutional problem of the rising cost of care, while addressing the human/user element of the problem experienced by providers of determining the appropriate plan of care for service users
By providing the service providers with a tool that helps them get their work done, the CareCubed team incentivises adoption and high-quality data entry, which the institution then benefits from through data-informed decision making In addition, they have disrupted the systemic issue of marketdriven pricing of services, which impacts the industry as a whole
SOLUTION SPACE - DEVELOP POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS
As problem solvers, it is very tempting to run with the first idea from sticky-note to implementation While our first idea may well be a great idea, we may miss out on a game-changer if we commit prematurely In addition to the “simple” act of dedicating time to explore the solution space, we can enrich the diversity and quality of our ideas through collective ideation activities to prompt creative thinking and co-creation with service users and service providers
It would have been very easy for the Mind of My Own team, given their years of experience working in the field as social workers, to assume they knew what was needed to help children articulate their needs Instead, they worked with children to coproduce 90 per cent of the platform
By opening up the design process to the children, the team demonstrated humility (that their expertise alone was not “enough”), respect (of the expertise and perspectives of the children themselves), and trust (in ceding control of the design process) The influence and value of the children’s participation in co-production is evident in the platform’s design and global impact
SOLUTION SPACE - DELIVER SOLUTIONS THAT WORK
In contrast to traditional “waterfall” approaches to solution delivery, whereby a design is fully architected upfront and then built in isolation from its intended context of use, a human-centred design delivers solutions through iterative cycles of design, development and user testing These cycles can starts as early as when a concept is first formed and
can continue through the development lifecycle to test solution desirability, feasibility and viability By taking the minimum viable step to solution delivery before testing, teams can de-risk innovation by reducing the overall investment of effort before validation and reduce the cost of correction
You connect, nourish and illuminate innovation
By identifying bright lights, supporting local authorities, and connecting innovators iESE is transforming the local public service system Your suite of activities and initiatives work in concert to help local authorities fix problems and elevate service delivery This was made evident by the Innovation Club, the Seeing Is Believing Tours and the Public Sector Transformation Awards These efforts are highlighting bright spots and shedding light on positive deviance in public service throughout the UK
The Two Loops Theory of Change is a model
inspired by the cycle of living systems introduced by Deborah Frieze and Margaret Wheatley Frieze and Wheatley observed: "as one system culminates and starts to collapse, isolated alter natives slowly begin to arise and give way to the new " iESE is identifying, connecting, nourishing and illuminating the public service alter natives in local gover nment
You are doing the critically important work of cultivating new practices and innovation in the shell of the old system
And that’s why we love you.
With appropriately socially-distanced hugs from Dr Jules and Layman Nick
Collaborating and making applications available for wider use is something The Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Gover nment (MHCLG) Local Digital Declaration (LDD) sought to encourage and there is evidence this is happening as part of the Covid-19 response Local authorities can access support provided by The MHCLG's Local Digital team online, which is seeking to ensure sharing and discussion can continue and that open products can be reused where possible To aid this it has published a list of reusable products shared openly by councils and is also hosting weekly calls to aid collaboration across digital teams in local gover nment too Technology companies are also seeking to help the national crisis Low-code platform provider Netcall has launched a Covid-19 package to help digital teams in local authorities share apps created using its platform During the Covid-19 situation, Netcall is providing access to low-code apps built by its members and in-house to help councils meet the needs of communities quickly, easily and at low cost The monthly subscriptions are based on council size and start at £600 per month to meet cloud hosting charges If customers need support Netcall’s professional service teams are able to help with set-up at a daily rate Richard Billington, Chief Technology Officer at Netcall, said he was delighted with the interest shown in the COVID-19 apps from existing and new customers "The Digital Declaration showed that local gover nment was ready to share They want to move past doing the same things over and over again so they can focus on customers' real needs " At the time of writing, the Covid-19 package offered access to four applications but as members create additional applications it is hoped they will share these with the wider community or engage the community to build them "Low-code is emerging as a very useful tool in delivering rapid outcomes Our customers hope that many other organisations will join in so sharing can accelerate
Digital collaboration aids Covid-19 response
With the Covid-19 pandemic requiring rapid responses, many local authorities have turned to digital tools to help manage the crisis and meet the demand for information and answers from residents, businesses and charities. Time pressures and reduced workforces have made knowledge sharing in the sector more important than ever
We have innovative customers that have created working apps in under two weeks because low-code is five-to-ten times faster than ordinary code Other councils may be using spreadsheets or manual systems to support services These can make for clunky customer jour neys and be prone to errors
We know there is a better way," added Billington The initial four apps have been unbranded and can be further tailored to an organisation's requirements They are:
• COVID-19 Business Grants app designed by Croydon Council to manage business applications and payments
• COVID-19 Volunteer Co-ordination app designed by Adur and Worthing Councils to connect volunteers with those who need help
• COVID-19 Workforce Monitoring which allows an organisation to monitor who’s working and who’s unwell
• COVID-19 Emergency Alerts provides mass communication to employees and offers a crisis response capability
Another organisation providing a solution to help local authorities meet the huge rise in queries from residents surrounding Covid-19 is ICS AI, a supplier of Artificial Intelligence technology to the public sector
Following a 500 per cent increase in requests to the Cheshire West and Chester Council's Chatbot Digital Assistant AIDA, supplier ICS AI developed a Covid-19 skill which it has made available to other local authorities to add to their website - something which can be done quickly with no additional IT resources
Ben Cummins, Managing Director of Qwest which runs the Cheshire West and Chester Council’s contact centre, said: “Fortunately we had a 24/7 AI Digital Assistant on the Council’s website, so when our agent capacity was suddenly redirected to deal with a huge increase in demand relating to Coronavirus, we were able to switch to using our AI Digital Assistant to help hundreds of our residents When we looked at the detailed logs from the Assistant, we saw more than 300 different questions related to Coronavirus, so it was clear we needed a specific Coronavirus skill "
Martin Neale, CEO of ICS AI, said the company was able to take thousands of Coronavirus questions from Chester West and Cheshire's chatbot to populate and train the Assistant It has a priority store of hundreds of Coronavirus voiceready answers and can fall back on multiple trusted and curated Coronavirus knowledge sources, such as the Council’s own website, the World Health Organisation, NHS 111 and Public Health England Clients can also optionally create and manage their own dedicated local Coronavirus knowledge store ” The use of apps may become even more prominent in the fight against Covid-19 in the coming months with speculation around whether the UK Gover nment will launch an app designed to track the spread of the virus South Korea, Singapore and Israel among the countries that have already deployed such technology
• Read more about the Gover nment's local digital help for local gover nment digital teams: https://localdigital.gov.uk/coronavirus-response/
• Find out more about the Netcall Covid-19 package here: community.netcall.com/appshare n
Barking and Dagenham scoop Council of the Year
The iESE Public Sector Transformation Awards were held this year on 4th March in London. This was their 11th year and saw hundreds of fantastic entries from the public sector across the UK The awards now include 15 categories, including the overall Council of the Year award To see a full list of winners and photos from the award's night visit: www iese org uk/ events/public-sector-transformtion-awards-2020
The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham (LBBD) has been driving change hard since 2016/17 when it kickstarted its Ambition 2020 Transformation Programme to implement a Council fit for the 21st Century with a mission to 'leave no resident behind' There is strong evidence the strategy is working and we were delighted to name the LBBD Council of the Year 2020
The challenge faced by LBBD is, by its own admission, an enormous one It is one of the most deprived communities in the UK with poor outcomes for many of its residents For years, it has scored low on some of the key outcome measures for its residents in comparison to other London Boroughs
It is also experiencing huge demographic change In 2001, 90 per cent of its population was White British, compared with less than half in 2017 Thirty per cent of its population is under the age of 18, and half of these are aged seven or younger, placing huge demand on children's services As a borough which still has relatively affordable housing and a large private rental market, LBBD faces additional pressure from other boroughs housing deprived families there
The impact of austerity, legislative change and increasing demand means the Council has had a £63m funding gap to close With few businesses, and large number of residents on benefits, the ability to close this gap through taxation has been limited
LBBD's transformation jour ney was first bor n from a Local Gover nment Association peer review commissioned in spring 2014, the conclusions of which led to the appointment of a new CEO, Chris Naylor He initiated a wide-scale workforce review and the findings and feedback from staff were clear - the Council needed to think differently, be bold, be innovative and stop the incremental yearon-year salami slicing The Council needed to change the relationship it had with its citizens, from pater nalistic provider to empowering enabler
The Council of the Year award was just one of three awarded to the borough LBBD also won the Community Focus and Intelligent Council
categories, adding to a growing awards collection it has amassed since completing its transformation agenda two years ago Publicising this particular win has been overshadowed by the Covid-19 response, but Meena Kishinani, Transformation Director at LBBD says the Council sees great value in award applications "When we first started applying for awards people were cynical but changed their attitude after we won our first set of awards and realised why it was important Now when we win an award our Leader takes it around our buildings to show staff what we’ve collectively achieved, and insists on having the awards displayed "
Winning awards is a huge morale boost for staff, none of whom have been left unaffected by the Council's complete transformation process Kishinani says winning awards also helps with recruitment "We have seen that the calibre of applicants for senior roles in the last three years is significantly different They are aware of our awards and give this as a reason for applying "
While the transformation is complete, LBBD still has huge challenges but has a leadership team that has huge aspirations and a real vision for wanting to change the lives of residents The borough has been identified as London's Growth Opportunity It is less than 20 minutes from the centre of London, has space for 60,000 new homes and is proof that economic growth is moving eastwards towards the borough
The Council is top in London and fourth in the country for replacing homes sold through Right to Buy Stock in its own housing company, Reside, is providing affordable rents to local people, with numbers set to rise from 300 properties to more than 2,000 in the next three years The income from this, and the other significant investments the Council has made, will deliver a net retur n of £5 1m a year
Kishinani believes the transformation's success has been down to buy-in from the senior leadership team and members and making sure services continued whilst designing the transformed organisation "You need to have a clear vision, the right capability and capacity
Barking and Dagenham Council of the Year 2020
Barking Town Hall
Community focus GOLD Award
iESE Awards 2020
Awards drinks reception
around you and buy-in from the Leader and Chief Executive so they are absolutely behind it and owning it We had 27 strands of the original transformation programme and every single one was sponsored by one of the senior leadership team
"We went big bang but while we were building the new ship, we kept the old ship sailing That is important You have to keep your services running and at some point bring the two together seamlessly "
A new commercial model is helping close the £63m funding gap through the Council's whollyowned companies channelling profits back, whilst contracted services are increasing revenues through har nessing the capabilities of private sector providers It has so far closed approximately £40m of its £63m funding gap and is on course to close the rest
But Kishinani is clear it was never all about money "We definitely had a bur ning platform but we made sure this wasn't all about the money If it had been we would have taken services and slashed them but we didn't do that, we thought about what residents needed to really change their outcomes and what the structure of the Council needed to be to deliver that "
The launch of Community Solutions, one of the new services developed as part of the transformation programme, aims to resolve complex needs by tackling root causes rather than just signposting residents towards traditional service blocks to receive a service the usual way Whilst the Council hasn't marketed the changes it has made to residents, it sees success in the evidence Complaints have gone down, evictions have reduced, the number of residents in temporary accommodation has reduced, households are being supported with finance plans so they can get themselves out of debt, and residents are receiving quicker responses with a more efficient and informed response "We don't have a housing department anymore but people don't know that, they just need someone to help with a housing issue, they don't care where it is coming from We dissolved those hierarchies very deliberately so we didn't have the silos we had before in Adults, Children's, Housing, Environment etc "
The Council has also invested in and revolutionised its social media presence, moving from 133rd in the country to 3rd in just two years (GovRank), communicating with residents in the way they want to communicate, about the things they want to talk about In addition, the borough’s schools continue to go from strength to strength, with 93 per cent of them now classed as good or outstanding The Council also holds Silver Investors In People status, with a recent assessment finding Council employees had a high degree of understanding and support for the organisation's vision, with the Employee Engagement Index score at 74 per cent and rising through a period of massive change
Whilst LBBD is a borough with a population on the rise, the Council continues to strive to reduce demand on its services and to seek new ways to make an impact on its communities "One of our big areas now is predictive analytics We have a small team of data scientists who have made a huge difference in a short period of time We are now able to really understand where our demand is coming from and target our limited resources in the most effective way,” added Kishinani
LBBD scooped two further Gold awards: Community Focus Award and Intelligent Council
COMMUNITY FOCUS AWARD: GOLD WINNER
LBBD took the Gold award in the Community Focus category for its flagship transformation programme Community Solutions Formally launched in April 2018, it brought together 16 distinct and traditional people-based Council services, comprising 500 staff
The service acts as the ‘front-door’ to the Council - a single integrated offer for early help, prevention and targeted support Skills and expertise across a breadth of areas such as housing, welfare reform, children and adult social care, youth services, work and skills are pooled, supporting residents through blended teams, reducing hierarchy, streamlining referral processes and enabling stronger integration with services and wider partners
The Homes and Money Hubs show how Community Solutions is working Provided in partnership with Citizens Advice Bureau, Job Centre Plus and other partners, it provides support for people experiencing or nearing financial difficulty and, in the worst case, crisis Since its launch in early 2018, the Hubs have helped more than 2,500 people, 52 evictions have been prevented, 89 people have been supported into employment, and 217 people have been helped to manage their rent and/or council tax arrears
Community Solutions is also securing better outcomes for less To date, £3 8 million in savings have been delivered, with a further £1 2 million on track for delivery by 2021
INTELLIGENT COUNCIL: GOLD WINNER
The Intelligent Council Gold award was given to the LBBD Insight Hub - a team of data and behavioural scientists who are the analytical driving force behind the entire Council's operating model First established in 2017 with a mission to 'tur n data into insight-led action' the team’s projects have had global acclaim in the past two years
LBBD’s mission to 'leave no resident behind' is underpinned by an evidence base known as the Social Progress Index (SPI) produced by the Insight Hub; just one example of their pioneering work The SPI has been instrumental in decision making around resource allocation and predicting area-based service demand The tool is also currently being embedded into the Council’s social value policy
The SPI started as a global index comparing the social progress of countries against GDP LBBD’s Insight team are the pioneers of a ward level application of this index, which brings together more than 50 datasets into the SPI framework First published in October 2018, LBBD’s SPI includes four years’ worth of data across each of its 17 wards Due to the world’s first nature of this project, the team is frequently asked to present its work on a global stage In the past year, the team has presented its work in Iceland, Sweden and the United States The project has inspired other cities and local gover nments to build the same model, with the latest local SPI being developed by the City of San Jose, Califor nia
Sector faces double deadly virus threat
The public sector was at high risk from cyber attacks before Covid-19 But now, with whole workforces working from home, experts warn the likelihood of a successful attack is greater with potentially devastating consequences Implementing gold standard security solutions may not be practical or affordable short term, but there are a number of actions that could and should be taken right now
Local councils faced as many as 263 million cyber attacks in the first half of 2019, averaging 800 attacks every hour, according to freedom of information requests made by insurance broking firm Gallagher Most are thwarted, but a successful attack, which can occur from a new unblocked threat or because anti-virus protection is outdated, can have far-reaching consequences for employees, service users and budgets
Ransomware continues to be a huge threat, with a successful attack able to scramble and encrypt key files and spread across a whole infrastructure in minutes The number of avenues cyber criminals can target to activate these attacks has rocketed
Do you know the fair cost of care ?
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with entire workforces now linking into company systems on potentially unsecure and unprotected devices
David Woodfine, partner at cyber security company Assurity Cyber Associates (ACA), war ned that there had been a 500 per cent increase in the number of phishing emails since the pandemic began and an increase in smishing (text messages) and vishing (voice calls) too The National Cyber Security Centre has war ned it is seeing a growing use of Covid-19 related themes by malicious cyber actors, while INTERPOL issued a notice to 194 member countries war ning it had detected a significant increase in the number of attempted ransomware attacks against key organisations and infrastructure engaged in the Covid-19 response It said the ransomware seemed to be spreading primarily through emails, often falsely appearing to be from a gover nment agency regarding the Coronavirus
"The cyber attacker has realised that people are very scared and is using Covid-19 phishing emails to get us to interact," says Woodfine Typical attacks include: trying to get an individual to divulge user name and password directly, getting a user to click on a malicious link, open a malicious document or visit a malicious website and tricking an individual into providing financial details or paying an invoice
While ransomware remains one of the biggest risks, there are other types of malicious software designed to do harm One clicked link or opened file, for example, can lead to an attacker downloading software known as a key logger onto an individual's device This can then capture key strokes as an individual inputs a user name and password, giving the attacker access to an organisation's network
Two weeks into the lockdown there were news reports that Rotherham Council's IT system had been compromised by an employee accidently clicking on a spam email with "COVID-19" in the subject field, although the council said no data or information was compromised and the issue was quickly resolved
Kevin Borley, also a partner at ACA described the situation as "a perfect storm" "We have massively
increased risk, huge vulnerability and reduced ability to respond as we would otherwise do," he says Borley advised that local authority leaders and IT departments should adopt the mindset that they will be attacked "The public sector is always at the bottom end of the scale in terms of investment in infrastructure and technology, always having to make do and mend and do more with less There is an inherent issue in terms of realistically what they can do, how close they can get to best practice and how close they can get to being ahead of an issue They need to take a perspective that they will be hit and invest in technology that won't allow ransomware and malware through A sophisticated attack could wipe out everything, including the backup infrastructure "
And while we might have an image of a lone figure in his or her bedroom launching these attacks, Woodfine and Borley describe a much more organised enterprise "Anyone with bad intent can buy a ransomware attack with a target in mind, have it tested by a customer support group and then have a post-attack review This is a highly commercialised industry, this is not kids in their bedroom, this is big business," says Borley
While it sounds like a no-win situation, there are steps local authorities and the public sector as a whole should and can take as a matter of urgency to minimise their risks
With limited budgets, it pays to remember employees are the first line of defence The best place to start is end-point protection (over and above anti-virus software) using technology that
deals with zero-day threats, followed by e-lear ning about cyber safety and ongoing communication of articles, facts, figures and blogs It is also important to check employees have device encryption enabled and are working with secure connections
Ensure employees who suspect they have been subject to phishing, vishing or smishing, or have any other sign that their system is compromised, know who to contact immediately Check that they are being vigilant for suspicious requests and ask them to double check anything that raises suspicions with other colleagues or a line manager Other good advice includes:
• Don't rely solely on email for communication, use phone calls and video conferencing as well
• Do not give anyone your password or user name at any time
• Regularly change home router admin logins and wi-fi password to something complex and strong
• Change home router names
• Set up a guest network for home devices to keep work networks separate if home networks are hacked
• Log in as an admin regularly to check how many devices are connected to the home wi-fi network and which devices they are
• If attacked councils should report to the National Cyber Crime Unit or local Cyber Crime Units
According to research, 70 per cent of all security breaches occur at end points (computers) so ensuring employees home devices and networks are secure is key iESE has partnered with ACA to offer a trial of unique and patented anti-malware technology "This is an alter native solution to anything else available at the moment It is fundamentally different to what has been in place for the last ten to 15 years at end-point PC level and is guaranteed to stop ransomware attacks in particular," says Borley Unlike older technologies that rely on lear ning from previous attacks this technology operates at a behavioural level and
CASE STUDY – Redcar & Cleveland Borough Council
In February this year, Redcar & Cleveland Borough Council in the North-East of England suffered a disastrous ransomware attack on its IT systems It affected online public services for 135,000 locals, reportedly leaving council workers using pen and paper A statement released by Leader Cllr Mary Lanigan confirmed it had experienced a ransomware attack There was no indication the council had paid or intend to pay
the ransom, but news reports indicated the damage could take several months and cost between £11m and £18m to repair "We have built a new server and website and mobilised a temporary call centre We notified the relevant authorities of the attack swiftly and the investigation is being led by the National Crime Agency," Cllr Lanigan said She added that there was no evidence that any personal information had been removed from the council's servers
won't let bad programmes execute "With this technology in place, even if it was a zero-day attack, it would cut off the device from the network meaning a virus can't spread," adds Woodfine
Dr Andrew Lar ner at iESE said the technology had been tested by replicating a number of serious threats, including the WannaCry cyber attack that successfully hit the NHS costing £92m "We ran the trial once and watched WannaCry take over the network within seconds and deny access to all users We then re-ran the trial using a version of the technology released before WannaCry was created The threat was identified and neutralised instantaneously "We are now setting up a trial of this technology with ten local authorities with a view to bringing it to our wider market If you are interested in being a trial site let us know," he added
• Contact annabelle spencer@iese org uk for more information n
• Advice on cyber security and case studies, including one on Copeland Borough Council which was hit by a zero-day ransomware attack during the August bank holiday in 2017, can be found here: https://www.local.gov.uk/oursupport/efficiency-and-income-generation/ cyber-security n
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