If ever there was a burning platform it was the eruption of COVID-19 on the world, cancelling face-to-face interaction and driving people and organisations online. For local authorities it meant years of often painstakingly slow adaptation to digital technology being fast-forwarded in a matter of weeks with cultural obstacles vanishing almost overnight. Managers and staff, previously sceptical about working from home, were enthusiasts of the new flexible arrangements. Within weeks councillors, wedded for years to paper agendas, were working from laptops and holding virtual full council meetings with record attendances.

Over two virtual seminars hosted by The MJ and Capita, six leading local authority chief executives and directors, plus Simon Freeman, managing director of Capita Local Public Services, debated how their organisations had been transformed by the pandemic and in particular how engagement with their residents had also changed.

Perhaps the biggest impact was on the speed of digital change internally. Most councils have initiated some degree of transformation with mixed results, often delayed because of lack of staff engagement or cultural resistance.

Scott Logan, Basildon BC's chief executive, said: ‘What was so remarkable about COVID was that it forced us to prioritise and accelerate change for our organisation. The biggest change was cultural as senior managers were initially sceptical but we all came together for a common cause rather than it just being down to implementing a digital programme.'

Swindon BC chief executive Susie Kemp said: ‘We were printing 15 million pieces of paper annually two years ago. Yet now we're printing less than a million. All of a sudden, you're writing cabinet reports in two hours with everybody in the virtual room instead of going round and round on emails.'

Graham Farrant, chief executive of the new unitary, Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council, created in April 2019, said they were already merging three councils into one when the pandemic arrived, saying: ‘We were 12 months into rewriting our policies and systems when COVID came. It dramatically accelerated some of that transformation. We printed 200 copies of our 770-page budget agenda in February 2019. Now, none of our councillors have paper, none of them see the printed reports. They're all working off of laptops. A number of people said they couldn't possibly work from home and suddenly they've found they can and be more efficient and talk to more people. We've looked at collaborative ways of working. That is beginning to change people's thinking and is beginning to change the way that we shape our policy development.'

Carol Culley, deputy chief executive of Manchester City Council, said: ‘Internally, within the council, we've completely transformed, at pace how we work. Agile working is the new normal. You have to change if you move from being an office-based organisation to having two-thirds of our workforce in a non-office base. It enabled us to look at our core customer offer and change how we respond to our residents' needs at a time where the need for support was greater as we were taking on new areas of work.

‘This is not just about technology, it is about going back to basics and challenging everything we do and why we are doing it, to see if we can do it in a way that means we can continue to deliver using the new model. We implemented a new telephone system within weeks that enabled home working for critical and out of hours staff that we had been talking about for years before.'

Will the workforce return to its old ways once the pandemic subsides? The panel thought otherwise. Susie Kemp said ‘it depends on us as leaders' while Simon Freeman of Capita said: ‘People have seen with their own eyes, the things that they were told were maybe impossible or very hard to do in the past, They say we've been able to do it, and, therefore, if we can achieve that, what else can we achieve? Once you show people that there's a better way of doing this, people will choose not to go back to the past, because it's much easier to consume these services in digital ways in the future.'

Graham Farrant added: ‘A number of the changes that we made will become permanent. Who is ever going to be absent from a council meeting again? How incapacitated do you have to be not to be able to sign in on Teams or Zoom to join a council meeting?'

Ms Culley said: ‘It would be a real shame to lapse back into how we used to work without stopping and thinking about what we need to keep and what we need to do different in the future.'

Dominic Barnes-Browne, head of IT at of Bradford City, said: ‘We won't go back, I don't think people want to move back.' However Duncan Whitfield, director of finance at Southwark LBC, said other priorities that have been ‘parked' could return and shift the direction of travel.

He added: ‘As a sector we need to take the opportunities that were presented quickly, rather than reflecting on them and writing reports about what it felt like for the next two or three years.'

That is not to say the process of digital change is suddenly complete. Capita's Simon Freeman pointed out that while talk of the digital council has existed for a while it has had ‘if we're honest, mixed progress and many millions of pounds spent, and yet it's hard to see, in some cases, the significant resident service transformation.'

He added: ‘The case for digital change, I think, has existed for a long time but I'm talking really about the underlying service delivery journeys that councils need to undertake in order to deliver service for residents.'

Susie Kemp commented: ‘Let's not get too complacent or too cocky that we've done it all this year, because I don't think we have. I think we've just scratched the surface.'

Graham Farrant, also believing ‘there's a lot further we can go', says councils are slow to share innovation. He says his council developed a beach app in six weeks at a cost of £5,000 which tells visitors which beaches are crowded and the rules and regulations.

‘Every other coastal authority could use that app but there doesn't seem to be a network where we can say anybody who wants to take it and share it can do so. There ought to be apps for accessing your council tax, for getting benefits, for reporting waste. I think collaborative working, particularly on digital services, would really help us to get that efficiency throughout and provide a much more uniform delivery of local government services.'

Investment was vital. Mr Farrant suggested the Government relax its rules on capitalisation so investing in systems need not rely on revenue spending. Simon Freeman added: ‘We've got to invest in the systems that allow automation to happen, and the automation of our transactional services.'

One of the lessons of the pandemic was that staff adapted out of necessity and in so doing learned new skills. As Scott Logan said: ‘MS Teams was on the to do list for 18 months. Everyone now has it and no one needed training as they self-trained. Our performance has gone up, sickness has gone down and most people are happier with the way of working. How do we know? We set up focus groups. We had 40 to 60 people that are influencing the organisation. They're not managers, they're people that influence others around services, who are intrigued about change, who want to lead change, and are not afraid of it.'

Ms Kemp said it was important to show staff that digital change was not putting them out of work. On the contrary it was giving them new skills. ‘I always say to people, show that you are transformational. Because when you walk out this door, there will be a hundred doors for you to walk through,' she said.

The acceleration of digital change was not confined to councils. If anything, residents have been driving digitisation. Ms Kemp described how the public enthusiastically took on board her council's new online booking system for visiting local waste recycling centres.

Dominic Barnes-Browne aid: ‘We've seen a massive change in how citizens engage with the council. And that's been very much driven by need. We've also really seen a real willingness to use different social media outlets to engage with us. We saw a 64% increase in web traffic last November compared to the year before and a 1,000% increase in people wanting to know about school closures.' Carol Culley said her council is reviewing its contact centre policy, strengthening the digital offer with video conferencing available in local libraries

Simon Freeman added: ‘COVID has changed what it means to consume services digitally. In the course of doing that many people have found the experience to be easier, to be more convenient, and to have normalised it. And with the budget pressures that we can see coming and the likely recession, I don't think we'll be able to, or can even afford, to go back to how we were doing it in the past.'

Participants

Dominic Barnes-Browne – Head of IT, Bradford City Council

Carol Culley – Deputy chief executive, Manchester City Council

Graham Farrant – Chief executive, Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council

Susie Kemp – Chief executive, Swindon BC

Scott Logan – Chief executive, Basildon BC

Duncan Whitfield – Strategic director for finance and governance, Southwark LBC

Simon Freeman – Managing director, Capita Local Public Services

Michael Burton (Chair), The MJ

Both webinars can be viewed here