AI isn’t scary: Lessons from Ealing Council

Rather than replacing human expertise, the use of new technology can allow it to flourish, Peter Mason, leader of the west London local authority, writes in this piece for PublicTechnology

Small steps in deploying AI in the public sector can unleash huge benefits for local government, for our workforce and most importantly for the public.

Very often, it can be very small and limited applications of AI that can secure the biggest benefits, a far cry from fears that the robots will take our jobs.

Last week, I joined Joanna, one of Ealing’s social workers as she was introduced to the prime minister at 10 Downing Street to explain her own experience using AI in her day-to-day work. I was able to watch with great pride as she walked the PM through the positive difference it has made to her productivity. By reducing the amount of paperwork she has to do, it has allowed her to be a better social worker.

The efficiency gains are enormous, with less time sitting at desks filling out paperwork and vastly more time spent with people.

The application is beautifully simple. Working with Beam, a tech-for-good startup focused on supporting government solve some of our most tricky problems, the council has deployed a note-taking tool that records and summarises the conversations social workers have with the people they support.

In social work, the importance of record keeping can’t be underestimated. It is a highly regulated environment that safeguards vulnerable people by ensuring that their interactions with authorities are well documented. Service users might interact with multiple social workers, healthcare professionals and others. Repeating yourself and your needs time and again breeds frustration and dissolution with public services, especially so in an age when so much of our lives is made easier by technology.

The AI tool can extract from each conversation the key and relevant information, automatically populating report templates like statutory Social Care Act assessments, ensuring that every interaction results in robust and verifiable records. Crucially, the tool supports, rather than replaces the professional judgement of social workers, reserving its role purely as a note taker, and allowing the professionals to continue to take the decisions, exercise their own judgement and reinforce their model of practice.

The efficiency gains are enormous. On average we think that our social workers regain 40% of their time. This means less time sitting at desks filling out paperwork and vastly more time spent with people.

At a time when most local authorities struggle to recruit social workers due to the national shortage of qualified professionals, rather than replacing social workers, it is instead liberating them from paperwork. In this way helping deal with growing waiting lists for people awaiting assessment, and overstretched workers with higher caseloads than is reasonable to expect them to hold.

Joanna’s meeting with the prime minister at a reception to celebrate the UK’s AI ecosystem is timely, as the whole of the public sector continue to find new ways of delivering modern services in a continually tight financial and economic environment.

In Ealing, we are continuing to test and learn with AI to unlock not only greater productivity but also growth. In our Planning Service, AI is being used to validate new, small scale householder applications – automatically checking application forms against supporting documentation and architect drawings. Our town planners can now spend more time assessing the development proposals themselves than assessing whether the correct box was ticked or the measurements on a map are to the correct scale.

The possibilities of the UK’s AI ecosystem are enormous. With the correct application, the right safeguards and the bravery to try, we can continue to secure modern and effective public services that work to meet the modern expectations of our residents and at the same time secure a more productive, efficient and happy workforce.