Plato allegedly wrote, ‘our need will be the real creator' which has been moulded over time into the English proverb, ‘necessity is the mother of invention'.

As the UK's public sector responded to the COVID pandemic in 2020, local authorities played a critical role in meeting the extra call on already stretched services. One of the weapons in their armoury was technology and its use showed how they could respond and think in different ways and that ‘necessity became the mother of ingenuity'.