Podcasts about croydon council

Building Affordable Housing: Colm Lacey's Journey in Real EstateIn this episode, of Accelerating Careers in Real Estate, I get to sit down with Colm Lacey, Founder and Director of Soft Cities, Chair of London's CLT, and Group Director of Capital Projects for New City College. Colm discusses his impressive career in housing and regeneration, sharing insights from his time at Brick by Brick, Lambeth, Newham, and Croydon Council. Colm talks with honesty about periods of huge growth, and success but also how he handled a very public downfall of Brick by Brick. Colm also reflects on his educational background, the challenges of delivering affordable housing, and his passion for improving public sector processes. The conversation offers a detailed look at Colm's professional journey, his vision for urban development, and the lessons learned along the way.Come and join our LinkedIn community: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/9054319/Leave a review on the platform of choice if you've enjoyed this episode00:00 Introduction to the Guest: Colm Lacey01:00 Colm's Early Life and University Days02:02 First Steps in the Professional World03:14 Transition to Regeneration Projects04:32 Master's Degree and Career Realization07:57 Challenges and Successes in Brixton12:48 Strategic Role at Homes and Communities Agency18:11 Return to Newham and Olympic Legacy24:55 Transforming Croydon with Brick by Brick30:41 Career Challenges and Successes31:37 Brick by Brick: Context and Controversy33:41 Ambitions and Achievements36:25 Public Criticism and Reflection38:35 Political and Economic Challenges48:36 Transition to Soft Cities48:58 Quickfire Questions and Insights56:59 Future Plans and Final Thoughts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hesketh is doing the Gabor Kiraly guided tour of Budapest this week so Carl steps in to join Albert and Terence.What is the next level for Palace and how do we get there is up for discussion along with transfer strategy, the HF vs Croydon Council, VAR, points deductions and more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dive into the world of accents, languages, multilingualism, and peace with Adriana Morvaiová in this episode. Originally from the Hungary-Slovakia border, Adriana moved to Northern Ireland without knowing any English. Now fluent in multiple languages, she shares how we can look beyond accents to find our shared humanity. Discover fascinating insights on psychological safety, self-awareness, embracing silence and finding your inner kaleidoscope of colours. Join an uplifting discussion on redefining peace as a human right and civic responsibility.CHRISTINE AND ADRIANA DISCUSSThat we don't choose our accents; they reflect our diverse upbringings.Why self-awareness helps us understand our biases and filter our perceptions.How creating guidelines around psychological safety aids communication in diverse teams.Why learning to embrace silence allows people space to express themselves fully.How to see every human as a kaleidoscope of experiences, cultures and colours.That peace links the mind and heart; it's a human right and civic responsibility.Why connected communication serves the greater good through self-awareness.BEST MOMENTS"We don't pick our accents. We're born with them. As babies, we're born with a clean palate.""Somewhere I can relate to how the Irish people felt when they moved to, let's say, America, and they had no rights.""Peace sits between the heart and the mind. It's that lump in your throat that you shouldn't have.""I think psychological safety has a cultural filter. I think every single culture or country or community or tribe has a different understanding of psychological safety.""Connected communication is when I'm unselfishly communicating, very aware of myself and others, with the purpose of the greater good.""My secret to live is in giving love, time, presence and forgiveness."ABOUT THE GUESTAdriana Morvaiová is an accomplished Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Specialist, a TEDx Speaker, and NLP Practitioner. Originally from Slovakia with Hungarian heritage, she embarked on a transformative journey to Northern Ireland in 2005. She serves as a dedicated trustee on the board of Mediation NI, having completed Mediation Theory & Practice in 2022. Adriana takes pride in leading a Lean In Circle established in 2023, fostering a vibrant community of professional multicultural women across NI. She has previously collaborated with esteemed organizations such as Transport for London, Croydon Council, and Wine & Spirit Education Trust.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Upzfpf_3BWY ABOUT THE HOSTChristine Mullaney is a certified cross-cultural trainer, coach, teacher and mentor with cross-continental life experience. Alongside her private Communication & Presentation Collectives, she teaches industry-leading organisations how to unlock the power of inclusive expression across teams, enhancing awareness, understanding and collaboration. Offering individual and team profile analysis using “Culture Active: The Lewis Model”, Christine partners with individuals and organisations who "walk their diversity and inclusion talk”. She designs bespoke training programmes and workshops on Neurocultural Communication, presentation skills, and inclusive, persuasive expression.Through the Connected Communication Supporters' Club, Christine shares unpublished public speaking and communication lessons, aiming to make communication expertise accessible to all.  Supporters' Club: www.connectedcommunication.clubLifetime Member: www.phenomenalpresenters.com Contact: christine@languagecouragecoaching.com  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We are joined by Zachary Stiling, a local Heritage Party activist and previous Council candidate in Croydon, as we discuss the news that various Conservative MPs have announced that they are standing down at the next General Election and we bemoan the fact that Croydon Council has declared bankruptcy for the 3rd time. We also chat about the wokery and hypocrisy engulfing the FIFA World Cup.Get in touch:Twitter: @CroydonConst Email: croydonconstitutionalists@gmail.comFacebook: facebook/CroydonConstitutionalistshttp://croydonconstitutionalists.uk/

Finn Williams talks about architecture public practices and the role of local government in managing inclusive everyday places. Finn Williams is City Architect Malmø in Sweden. He is Co-founder of Public Practice, the social enterprise which is transforming the status of public service in the built environment sector. He previously worked for the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, Croydon Council and the Greater London Authority. He is a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Innovation & Public Purpose at UCL, a Design Council Built Environment Expert, and was co-curator of the British Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale. Ⓒ Images: Public Practice Portrait: UCL

We are joined by Alasdair Stewart, the newly elected Conservative Party Councillor for Purley Oaks & Riddlesdown, as we discuss the latest in the Conservative Party Leadership campaign and Croydon's Directly Elected Mayor, Jason Perry's, first 100 Days in office. We then chat with Alasdair about his initial experiences as a Councillor on Croydon Council.Get in touch:Twitter: @CroydonConst Email: croydonconstitutionalists@gmail.comFacebook: facebook/CroydonConstitutionalistshttp://croydonconstitutionalists.uk/

PiXL's Leadership Bookclub returns for Series 3. In this episode, Rachel Johnson discusses 'The Checklist Manifesto' by Atul Gawande with senior leaders Miriam Sechere (Secondary and Sixth Form School Improvement Education Advisor, Croydon Council) and James D'Souza (Head of Psychology, Ewell Castle School). In truth, many see a checklist as basic, and oftentimes beneath them: 'my job is too complicated to be reduced to a checklist'. However, Gawande and our trio of school leaders make the case that checklists could provide a solid foundation, from which magic can happen – be it in the classroom or in leadership meetings. How can they be crafted intentionally to reduce cognitive load and, potentially, bring about better school cultures? PiXL is a partnership organisation of thousands of schools, colleges and alternative education providers spanning KS1-5. Find out more about how you could gain value from a PiXL subscription: https://www.pixl.org.uk/membership PiXL Leadership Bookclub is a We Are In Beta production. Subscribe now to download every episode directly to your phone automatically.  

We are joined by Andrew Allison, the Chief Executive of The Freedom Association, as we discuss the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the latest financial woes at Croydon Council. We then chat with Andrew about his background and the great work of The Freedom Association.Get in touch:Twitter: @CroydonConst Email: croydonconstitutionalists@gmail.comFacebook: facebook/CroydonConstitutionalistshttp://croydonconstitutionalists.uk/

The staggering scale of London's ‘golf belt' revealed, a redevelopment row erupts next to Ernö Goldfinger's iconic Trellick Tower, a fortnight of Extinction Rebellion climate protests target the City, and Croydon Council abandons its Westfield dream after a decade of disputes.Merlin gets the community perspective from Robin Hutchinson; activist and director of The Community Brain.As ever, listen, like, share, subscribe and this week complete our survey and tell us what you think.The Londown is produced in association with the Architects' Journal. If you enjoyed the show, we recommend you subscribe to the AJ for all the latest news, building studies, expert opinion, cultural analysis, and business intelligence from the UK architecture industry. Listeners can save 15% on a subscription using this link. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Plans to create a Westfield in the south were officially binned this week, as Croydon Council confirmed that the mega project, so long in the making, was not in its post-Covid future for the London suburb. Who is to blame for this apparent inability for Croydon town centre to get its much needed facelift? Is it the developers - Hammerson and Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield? The council? Could it even be John Lewis's fault? In this special episode of EGLSM, editor Samantha McClary dials in for a chat with a man who spent his formative years in Croydon, Damian Wild, to get his very special and personal take on just what went wrong and what Croydon and the real estate community need to do now.  

We are joined by Steve Kelleher, the London Mayoral Candidate for the SDP, as we discuss the opening of Beer Gardens, the London and local election campaigns and the nominations in the 5 Croydon Council By-Elections. We then chat with Steve about the SDP, his Mayoral campaign and his Vision for London.Get in touch:Twitter: @CroydonConst Email: croydonconstitutionalists@gmail.comFacebook: facebook/CroydonConstitutionalistshttp://croydonconstitutionalists.uk/

We discuss the Government's confused lockdown exit strategy and the announcement of a referendum on a Directly Elected Mayor for Croydon along with other developments at Croydon Council. We then chat about Sir Keir Starmer's apparent wish to replace the free market system, the fact that he is not woke enough for some of his comrades and Sadiq Khan's “Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm".Get in touch:Twitter: @CroydonConst Email: croydonconstitutionalists@gmail.comFacebook: facebook/CroydonConstitutionalistshttp://croydonconstitutionalists.uk/

There is a 30% shortfall in ethnic minority representation amongst Members of Parliament in the UK. In this episode we discuss breaking the mould with local Labour Councillor, Janet Campbell. The UK Parliament report ‘Ethnic diversity in politics and public life Research Briefing' (2020), can be found here: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01156/‘Operation Black Vote' information was taken from: https://www.obv.org.uk Please note the following corrections to this episode: Janet is the Cabinet Member for families, health and social care in Croydon (not the ‘Cabinet Minister'). The story concerning an individual losing their job is not related to Croydon Council. 

This week Neil, Richard, Andy and I talk about the British Property Federations tantrum over CVAs, Croydon Council's bankruptcy (and yes that is the right term) and which Netflix series we would recomend to comfort you through the cold lonely nights of lockdown. Happy listening!

Oliver Cromwell once described English land law as “an ungodly jumble”. More than 350 years later, Dag Detter has a similar view of the way cities and countries value what they own. Their property and assets represent two times global GDP – almost twice the size of equity capital markets. Grouped in public wealth funds, they could release capital equal to 3% of annual GDP – $600bn in the US – for vital infrastructure spending.The fundamental problem, according to Detter, is that the public sector globally still uses cash accounting. This is a medieval method long left behind in the private sector by the accrual accounting innovation that helped develop capital markets, limited liability companies and the industrial revolutions that catapulted The Netherlands and Britain beyond Italian city states, funding transatlantic adventures and burgeoning empires.Detter, a Swedish former investment banker at BZE, Credit Suisse and BNP Paribas, now runs an eponymous corporate advisory consultancy advising on unlocking value from public assets and is not impressed with what he finds. “The public sector has no clue what it owns,” he says. “It doesn't have a balance sheet for its infrastructure, so doesn't understand what's coming in and what's going out. If you operated like this as a company or private individual, you'd probably go to jail.”Britain is a particularly egregious example. “They can't even find their real estate a lot of the time,” groans Detter. There's no Land Registry record of London's Liverpool Street Station and countless other pre-war public buildings, because they haven't changed hands in the last 50 years. “It's very convenient. If something isn't on the balance sheet, nobody will care to manage it. No-one will make sure you're using it in the best possible way.”Detter believes this led to Britain privatising its water utilities so cheaply in 1989. With century-old pipes leaking up to half their contents, the vast state borrowings needed to finance urgent investment were politically unacceptable. “The balance sheet wasn't connected to the profit and loss account and the budget, so the Government privatised the water utilities for next to nothing,” he says. “If it had a proper balance sheet, it could have carried out maintenance and registered at market value the increase in the value of the assets, which would be higher than the debt incurred. The Government would have looked like the prudent owner of a commercial asset.”Detter also criticises local authorities borrowing heavily from central government as well as paying top prices for commercial real estate without possessing institutions that can manage risk with proper accounting, capacity and professional management. “Governments throughout the world don't have that,” he says, pointing to Croydon Council in South London, which is facing effective bankruptcy after a series of property deals. The result is an awkward engagement with private capital through public-private partnerships. In Britain, Detter says the Private Finance Initiative has “screwed up and transferred undue wealth to the private sector”.No change of ownership needs to take place. Assets would simply be “placed into relevant packages” in public wealth funds operating as holding companies and using private sector accounting standards and transparency and governance models. Government-owned property would constitute two-thirds of the assets, with the remainder coming from operational assets, such as water and electricity utilities and public transportation systems. A report co-authored by Detter for University College London Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, published in November, suggested separate public wealth funds for public venture capital, climate change mitigation and environmental protection and regional and urban economies. The cost to the public sector in the UK example is put at a maximum of 0.12% of GDP – £2.7bn a year.Public wealth funds are not a new idea. In Europe, they have been utilised in various different ways in Austria, Italy, Sweden, Denmark and Greece. In Asia, they have been spectacularly successful in Singapore. In the US, Detter says they could enable a city like Boston, with reported assets in 2014 of $3.8bn, including just $1.4bn of property, to leverage hidden wealth of $55bn in its real estate alone. He says accounting for market value at current use is “the first step towards quality asset management”. The next stage involves understanding the returns that could be earned on such trapped value.Detter was drawn into the public sector in the 1990s, helping restructure his nation's public assets as president of the Swedish government holding company, Stattum,. “It helped save Sweden from bankruptcy,” he says. He went on to advise private equity group Terra Firma Capital Partners and consulting firms McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group. “Financially, this is not rocket science,” he says. “It's very simple, but politically it's incredibly hard to do, unless you have a crisis, because it's all about political will. In the private sector, the game's about holding people responsible to deliver a certain result within a defined time. Politics is about promising things that can never be quantified.”“Whole of government accounts” have not helped much. “They don't include real estate and are published nine months after the fact, which means they're completely useless,” says Detter. “It's information that's nice to know, but you can't make decisions with it. It's like publishing English Premier League scores six months after matches have been played. Who cares? But nearly all governments do their accounting this way.”Except for New Zealand. This nation of 5m people manages its public assets “brilliantly,” according to Detter, publishing monthly public finance statements plus five and ten-year forecasts before elections or major policy decisions. Any policy suggestions in the run-up to an election are matched against forecast statements on the balance sheet. “The balance sheet comprises all the assets at market value, not historical value,” says Detter. “If Britain did things New Zealand's way, the discussion around Brexit would have been completely different. Instead of using silly numbers, arguments would have been based on net worth.”COVID-19 is an even better example. “One of the reasons New Zealand could act so quickly was because it could measure accurately, taking quick and hard action in the knowledge of whether it would pay off and whether it had the money to pay for it,” says Detter. “The Western world is going to be shocked and paralysed by debt incurred to fight COVID-19. Creating public wealth funds are one way of releasing capital without raising additional taxes or returning to austerity.”The idea may be catching on. With Citigroup seeing a need for global infrastructure spending of $58.6 trillion over the next decade, its special economic adviser Willem Buiter believes public wealth funds “make economic sense”. Financial Times commentator Martin Wolf adds that they're “an idea whose time has come.” Corralling capital in this way may be particularly suitable for governments determined to ‘level up' regional inequalities and ‘build back better' after COVID-19. “I've been trying to do this for the last 20 years and you could say it's been with limited success,” says Detter. Now this man from the nation of the midnight sun may get his moment in the limelight.

Joseph Costello from The Tunics joins us this week on The Boys in the Band Podcast and tells us about the rapid rise of his band who were signed almost immediately after their first central London gig.  They'd actually been banned from playing live by Croydon Council when they were starting out but, taking their inspiration from the Libertines and similar London bands, they were soon snapped up by a record company.  When track Shine On was used in a German film, their popularity on the continent boomed and Joseph reflects on the band moving to Berlin to capitalise on that interest, and talks us through the band's albums.  The Tunics fan? Share your memories of the band with us:  Twitter: @TheBITBpod Instagram: @boysinthebandpod Facebook: The Boys In The Band Podcast Or drop us an Email - boysinthebandpod@gmail.com Written, presented and produced by Peter Smith and Richard Gallagher Pod thumbnail design by Daniel Curtin *Recorded on 30 October 2020* FREE BEER! Our sponsors Beer 52 have a great offer for Boys in the Band Podcast listeners! If you fancy a free case of 8 craft beers go to beer52.com/band and all you have to do is cover the postage costs of £5.95. 

This lockdown is DRAGGING and so is the weekly news: not making sales from art, the racist UK Latina Agency, Croydon Council's Bankruptcy, Dominic Cummings leaving his post as Boris Johnson's Chief Advisor, Marcus Rashford buying property. Our first topic we run through known superstitions (34:36) and we end the pod covering on why people are given their flowers (42:41) after they have passed away. Join the conversation and use the hashtag – #LastOrdersPod ENJOY THE POD! Episode 037: “Cummings & Goings” Streaming now! Connect with us on Instagram | Follow us on Twitter | Like us on Facebook | Watch us on YouTube Have you got a question for the team? Get in touch with us via email: lastorderspod@gmail.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/lastorderspoduk/message

We are joined by Dick Delingpole as we discuss the US Elections Results, Lockdown 2, some "Despite Brexit" news and the fact that Croydon Council is now officially bankrupt.We then chat with Dick about his new found stardom and we play the Yes/No game with him.Get in touch:Twitter: @CroydonConst Email: croydonconstitutionalists@gmail.comFacebook: facebook/CroydonConstitutionalistshttp://croydonconstitutionalists.uk/

We are joined by Chris Wilkinson, the host of The Libertarian Listener podcast, as we discuss the EU Trade Talks, the Covid Tiers, the latest assault on free speech and developments on Croydon Council. We then chat with Chris about his experiences in politics, The Libertarian Listener podcast and his future plans.Chris' contacts:www.christopherjwilkinson.comwww.facebook.com/ChristopherWilkinsonLibertarianwww.facebook.com/TheLibertarianListenerwww.twitter.com/LichfieldChriswww.youtube.com/channel/UCIM3KjbS7e6eexoKx9y8K4QGet in touch:Twitter: @CroydonConst Email: croydonconstitutionalists@gmail.comFacebook: facebook/CroydonConstitutionalistshttp://croydonconstitutionalists.uk/

We are joined by Dan Liddicott, the former Chairman of the Libertarian Party UK, as we discuss the wearing of facemasks in pubs and other Covid restrictions, Croydon Council's Emergency Budget and 2 new political parties. We then chat with Dan about his resignation from the Libertarian Party and his new initiative: Independent Libertarians.Get in touch:Twitter: @CroydonConst Email: croydonconstitutionalists@gmail.comFacebook: facebook/CroydonConstitutionalistshttp://croydonconstitutionalists.uk/

We are joined by Peter Sonnex from the Brexit Party as we discuss the latest COVID restrictions, the Internal Market Bill and whether it breaks "International Law" and the recent revelation of the wages of the BBC's "stars". We also consider the latest developments at Croydon Council and yet another leadership change for UKIP. Finally Peter talks to us about the Un-locked Group and how people can get involved.Un-locked Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/groups/unlockeduk/Youtube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMvZbjbyUsh9T505aiPpv9wTwitter:@Unlocked_UK_Get in touch:Twitter: @CroydonConst Email: croydonconstitutionalists@gmail.comFacebook: facebook/CroydonConstitutionalistshttp://croydonconstitutionalists.uk/

We discuss recent developments at Croydon Council, Brexit and some interesting appointments to the Board of Trade. We then consider various recent protests, the latest on the US Presidential Election and whether or not the BBC has a Death Wish.Get in touch:Twitter: @CroydonConst Email: croydonconstitutionalists@gmail.comFacebook: facebook/CroydonConstitutionalistshttp://croydonconstitutionalists.uk/

We visit The Woolpack in Banstead and chat about recent developments at Croydon Council and the dire state of their finances.Get in touch:Twitter: @CroydonConst Email: croydonconstitutionalists@gmail.comFacebook: facebook/CroydonConstitutionalistshttp://croydonconstitutionalists.uk/

We discuss the reopening of pubs and gyms, the Mini-Budget, Croydon Council job cuts, the Purley Skyscraper and the BBC's latest antics. We then have an interview with Jayde Edwards, a local Conservative Party activist who stood in the Fairfield ward by-election last November. We chat with Jayde about her campaign, issues affecting young people in Croydon, the Black Lives Matter movement and how she is inspiring more young people to get involved in politics locally.Get in touch:Twitter: @CroydonConst Email: croydonconstitutionalists@gmail.comFacebook: facebook/CroydonConstitutionalistshttp://croydonconstitutionalists.uk/

We are joined by Dr Lee Jones, Reader in International Politics at Queen Mary University of London and founder of The Full Brexit, as we discuss the reopening of pubs, the Immigration Bill passing through the House of Commons, Boris' "New Deal" and the situation in Hong Kong. We then chat with Lee about The Full Brexit and the left-wing case for leaving the EU, his career in Academia, the woke culture in universities and the challenges facing Higher Education. We also discuss Croydon Council and the potential for an elected mayor.Get in Touch::Twitter: @CroydonConst Email: croydonconstitutionalists@gmail.comFacebook: facebook/CroydonConstitutionalistshttp://croydonconstitutionalists.uk/

We are joined by Alasdair Stewart, the former Chairman of the Croydon Conservative Federation, as we discuss the media's reaction to the COVID crisis and in particular their recent treatment of Dominic Cummings. We also consider the great news about the Nissan plant in Sunderland, Croydon Council's dire financial position and some recent developments in the 2020 US Presidential campaign. We then chat with Alasdair about his experiences in politics, his time as the Chairman of the Croydon Conservative Federation and his thoughts on politics in Croydon.Get in touch:Twitter: @CroydonConst Email: croydonconstitutionalists@gmail.comFacebook: facebook/CroydonConstitutionalistshttp://croydonconstitutionalists.uk/

We discuss the proposed COVID Border Controls, the Brexit Trade Talks & Labour's flip-flopping along with the upcoming Lib Dem Leadership contest. We then consider Croydon Council's financial woes and the potential political fallout.Get in touch:Twitter: @CroydonConst Email: croydonconstitutionalists@gmail.comFacebook: facebook/CroydonConstitutionalistshttp://croydonconstitutionalists.uk/

A wide range of professionals from the world of planning and development convened at December's MapLondon event to explore how cities might be made better through more data sharing and wider use of digital maps. The podcast, captured against the background hubbub of the event, features contributions from a range of speakers at the event in this order: 00:12 Sowyma Parthasarathy, Director, Arup 00:33 Theo Blackwell, Chief Digital Officer for London 00:54 Lisa Taylor, Director, Coherent Cities 01:15 Rebecca Lee, Senior Architect, Pollard Thomas Edwards 03:04 Euan Mills, Head of Digital Planning, Connected Places Catapult 04:02 Miranda Sharp, Innovation Director, Ordnance Survey 05:09 Sowyma Parthasarathy, Director, Arup 06:52 Theo Blackwell, Chief Digital Officer for London 07:43 Euan Mills, Head of Digital Planning, Connected Places Catapult 08:24 Lucy Webb, Head of Regeneration, Croydon Council 09:10 Sowyma Parthasarathy, Director, Arup 09:48 Alicia Francis, Director, Newman Francis 11:10 Lucy Webb, Head of Regeneration, Croydon Council 12:21 Alicia Francis, Director, Newman Francis 12:41 Euan Mills, Head of Digital Planning, Connected Places Catapult 13:06 Lisa Taylor, Director, Coherent Cities 13:52 Rebecca Lee, Senior Architect, Pollard Thomas Edwards

Nick Pendry, the Director of Children & Safeguarding at Croydon Council speaks to us about journey, and how after just a few years in the job, he left as he didn't feel he was well equipped enough to be a social worker. He sought out those extra skills he needed to be the best he could, and returned to the industry he is still today so passionate about. Support the show (http://www.socialpersonnel.com/podcast)

First episode of 3 truths of mother, where we attempt to make sense of what little information we have from Croydon Council social services.

We discuss the Tory Party Leadership Contest and the ongoing political journeys of Chuka Umunna and Sam Gyimah. We reflect on our recent Leavers of Croydon Drinks, our upcoming Taxpayers' Alliance Street Stall and Croydon Council's ongoing war against the motorist.Get in touch:Twitter: @CroydonConst Email: croydonconstitutionalists@gmail.comFacebook: facebook/CroydonConstitutionalistshttp://croydonconstitutionalists.uk/

We discuss the EU Parliamentary Election results both nationally and locally, our recent Debate for Democracy and Croydon Council's vindictive new parking proposals.Get in touch:Twitter: @CroydonConst Email: croydonconstitutionalists@gmail.comFacebook: facebook/CroydonConstitutionalistshttp://croydonconstitutionalists.uk/

Chris sits down with Kerry Crichlow, the Director of Improvement at Croydon council to discuss the journey this borough has been on to get to where it is today. This is a great eye opener and behind the scenes episode for those who don't know what the role of Improvement actually does.Chris flies solo on this first part of a 2 part Croydon special - watch out for the second instalment, coming soon! A message from Croydon....We have a fantastic offer for staff who join us on our journey to outstanding. Find out more at www.croydonsocialworkjobs.co.ukIf you like what you’ve heard e-mail your CV to socialworkjobs@croydon.gov.ukWe are passionate about developing and stimulating our staff. If you’d like to attend our next Excellence in Practice seminar featuring Dr. h.c. Jenny Molloy, BASW England Patron on 29th March please email ChildrenLearning@Croydon.gov.uk with your name and current position. This event will take place on Friday 29th March from 1.30pm – 4pm with registration and coffee from 1.30pm. The event will be held central Croydon.Support the show (http://www.socialpersonnel.com/podcast)

We discuss the latest shenanigans in Parliament and the impact not only on Brexit but on our constitution.We discuss recent and upcoming Leavers of Croydon events.We announce the Debate for Democracy that we are hosting in Croydon.We bemoan Croydon Council's latest tax rise and suggest some areas for savings.Finally we comment on the recent council by-election in Norbury & Pollards Hill.Get in touch:Twitter: @CroydonConst Email: croydonconstitutionalists@gmail.comFacebook: facebook/CroydonConstitutionalistshttp://croydonconstitutionalists.uk/

We discuss the delay in the Meaningful Vote and the implications for Brexit. We also discuss the hosts' decisions to leave UKIP.Further afield we discuss Mike's recent trip to California.Back on Croydon matters we talk about our New Year's Message for Croydon Council and Review 2018 in Croydon politics.Get in touch:Twitter: @CroydonConst Email: croydonconstitutionalists@gmail.comFacebook: facebook/CroydonConstitutionalistshttp://croydonconstitutionalists.uk/

In this episode, senior writers Angus Montgomery and Sarah Stewart look back at the year at GDS. A full transcript of the episode follows: Angus Montgomery: Hello, and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name’s Angus Montgomery, I’m a senior writer at GDS, and today I’m joined by Sarah Stewart, who is also a senior writer at GDS. Sarah Stewart: Hello, and thanks for having me. Angus Montgomery: It’s really great to have you here, Sarah. I mean, we spend all week sitting opposite each other across a desk and now we’re going to sit across from each other and speak into microphones. Sarah Stewart: I quite like the idea that I’m assuming the role of guest speaker with specialist knowledge of any one subject. Angus Montgomery: You are the one with the expertise here, let’s face it.The reason that it’s me and Sarah doing this podcast… If you’ve listened to GDS podcasts before you’ll know that what we’ve done previously is, kind of, either Sarah or I have interviewed an expert speaker, so we’ve had Neil Williams on GOV.UK, Terence Eden on open standards and emerging technology, and we’ve also spoken to the GDS Women’s Network. But, what we want to do with this podcast, because it is the final podcast of 2018, is do a look at the year in review at GDS, what GDS has done over the last year, the things it’s achieved, the things it’s launched and kind of just go back through those and our take on them, we’ve even got some audio clips from the people who were involved as well. I think Sarah and I, because we work across GDS and our job is to help people, kind of, tell the story of their work, we’ve kind of had a ringside seat for a lot of this stuff. GDS’s work has kind of been split, broadly, into three themes this year, and this podcast is going to split into those three themes as well. Those three themes are: Sarah Stewart: Transformation; collaboration and; innovation. Angus Montgomery: Full marks for that. Sarah Stewart: Thank you very much. Angus Montgomery: So, transformation, collaboration and innovation is, kind of, how GDS talks about its work. when we first started to use those terms, at Sprint ’18, which was the big event that we held back in May, where we, kind of, talked to the rest of government and the rest of the wider public about what we were doing. So, let’s get into it… Oh yes, sorry, just to… Someone who did also speak at Sprint, as you well know, and you’ve worked closely with him throughout this year… Sarah Stewart: It’s Minister for Implementation Oliver Dowden. Angus Montgomery: It’s Minister for Implementation Oliver Dowden, and here’s what he had to say about us: [Audio starts]‘Though transformation innovation and collaboration you’ve not only saved billions of pounds across government, but you’ve changed the way people interact with government every day. What you do really matters, it really does genuinely improve people’s experience of government in their day-to-day lives.’[Audio ends] Angus Montgomery: Oliver Dowden there really summing up what GDS does and why it’s here, and it’s really nice to hear that sort of thing from senior backing. Sarah Stewart: Yes, exactly. I think the really encouraging thing about having Oliver Dowden overseeing the work of GDS is that he really understands the link up between creating a modern government and involving the tech sector. We have to be honest about the limits of government, we don’t have all the answers, but what we do have, in this country, is an amazing tech sector that’s attracting billions of pounds of inward investment. We’ve got some amazing companies just literally down the road, of course we should be partnering with them. It just makes sense for us to all link up, the tech sector, the public sector, and push our digital agenda forward. Angus Montgomery: I think he’s been really heavily involved in GDS, particularly recently with the innovation stuff as well. Sarah Stewart: Yes, I suppose we’ll come to that in a bit, but he’s been really behind… He announced the Innovation Strategy, I think the emerging themes from that will really address things like how we connect more with the private sector and how we focus on upskilling existing civil servants, and also policy makers so that they understand emerging tech. I was thinking about it the other day, about how if people are buying technology, so people are utilising technologies in government, those people who are buying also need to understand what those technologies do.So, in the same way that you’d go to the doctor and say, “I’ve got this ailment” and the doctor prescribes the information and the medicine, and you expect them to know how it works as well, it’s not just going in and taking something off the shelf. So, I think that’s a really encouraging thing that’s he’s championing as well. Angus Montgomery: Brilliant. Top marks Oliver. So, the first theme we’re going to discuss is transformation. We published a Transformation Strategy at the beginning of 2017, and I think 2017 and 2018 have been the years when we’ve really started to deliver against it. I think we’re now halfway through it as well? Sarah Stewart: Yes, that’s right. Angus Montgomery: Growing common components is a big thing, because I think one of the aims of the Transformation Strategy was to drive common components across government, and by common components, obviously, we mean things that can be built once and used again and again by departments, like GOV.UK Notify and GOV.UK Pay. This year has seen some really impressive examples of services using those things. Sarah Stewart: Yes, like the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, they’re using GOV.UK Pay to help people who need to pay for emergency passports. Also, increasingly, GP surgeries are using GOV.UK Notify to remind patients of their appointments, which I really need. I mean, it’s improving efficiencies as well, because of the amount of people who don’t turn up to appointments and just that little reminder is so helpful, and it’s on your phones. Angus Montgomery: They always show those dire warnings in GP surgeries, don’t they, of the number people who’ve missed appointments that month. I know GP’s surgeries aren’t over resourced a lot of the time, so it’s a real drain on them if that happens. I think things that will prevent that from happening are amazing. Sarah Stewart: The really cool thing about these common components, and especially Notify, is that it’s really meeting people where they’re at. People are looking at their phones, people spend so much time on their phones it makes sense to have that reminder to your phone. It’s just efficient and it just works. So, I’m not surprised that take-up has been so incredible. Angus Montgomery: One of the other things that’s quite exciting is because a lot of these common components are reaching maturity now, like they’ve been around for a year or so, but what’s starting to happen is you’re starting to see services using them all together. I think in the Disclosure and Barring Service are one of the first people to do that, and we’ve got some audio: [Audio starts] ‘We’ve relied heavily on GaaP components. We’re the first service to integrate with three of the GaaP components all at once.’[Audio ends] Angus Montgomery: There you go, the first service to integrate all three GaaP components at one. So, I think that’s really exciting, seeing these things not used in isolation but seeing whole services built on these things as well. Sarah Stewart: Yes, and that’s been a huge emphasis this year, end-to-end service design, and if you can incorporate those common components… It just makes sense, doesn’t it, going offline and online might be an option for your particular service, but it’s nice to have that option to integrate more if you need them to. Angus Montgomery: Yes, and making it easy for the teams as well. I think if you’re starting to use Pay and Notify platform as a service you, as a developer working on that team, have got all this stuff just to hand that you can build a service really quickly around. That was, kind of, always the government’s platform vision, and it’s really amazing to see that starting to happen. Sarah Stewart: I can’t remember where I was, actually, I went to do some filming this year and think it might be with DVSA, but they talked about how it’s not just having common components that you can just take off the shelf and your relationship with GDS is done, there is a continued relationship. They invite feedback and they want to support you in your use of it. So, I think we’ve done quite a lot of work in terms of… Maybe helping isn’t the right word, but like guiding people and being a supportive friend of take-up and how they’re going to integrate it into their systems. Angus Montgomery: Again, that is, to me, exactly that. That’s one of the reason these things are so amazing, is because they’re designed and built for government, but you’re not just designing and building something and handing it over to a team and saying, “Go ahead and use that.” You have a relationship. If you’re using Pay you have a relationship with that Pay team, you can give your feedback on it and they can make the product better based on your feedback. It’s this symbiotic thing which is really cool.The other thing that we should probably mention, which happened, I think, a couple of weeks ago, is that GOV.UK Notify won a civil service award, or the team that build it. Sarah Stewart: Wowser, that’s really cool. Angus Montgomery: Wowsers indeed. A big hats off to that team, who are awesome. They won an award, I think, for operational delivery. But, basically, the award recognised the work that that team has done, not just to develop a product but also to support it and work with government services to make sure that Notify is a great thing to use, so that’s really cool. But one of the things we’ve started to do a lot more this year is work more closely with local authorities. What is it about local authorities? Why should we work closely with them? Sarah Stewart: I suppose, it’s because they’re the ones who are delivering user-focused services, and because the needs of the people that they’re dealing with are so complex, and the services that they use are so complex as well. So, of course it makes sense to help them simplify how they’re interacting and give them the tools that make that process a lot more straightforward and a lot more efficient. Angus Montgomery: That’s brilliant. A lot of the challenges that the government has had that GDS has been working on, those are replicated in local authorities and, like you say, they’re the ones that are, kind of, delivering a lot of these services, like blue badges and collecting bins and things, the things that, kind of, really rile you up if they’re not done properly. So, GDS being able to get involved in that is really exciting. I think there’s a clip from one of the local authorities we’ve been working with, and they use the Digital Marketplace, that’s Hackney Borough Council, and they’re doing some really exciting stuff as well. [Audio starts]‘One of my personal favourite projects that we’ve used Digital Marketplace for in the last year was a piece of work to examine what the opportunity is to use digital to improve the recruitment and retention of foster carers, which was incredibly valuable for the council and for our residents, but also could develop a true partnership as well as long at some longer-term opportunities to use technology very differently.’[Audio ends] Angus Montgomery: That’s Matthew Cain who’s, I think, head of digital at Hackney Borough Council, and that’s a really interesting example of the kind of thing a local authority does. The recruitment of foster carers and using digital, and in that case a digital marketplace, to improve something like that is really cool. Sarah Stewart: The other thing that’s going to support that, so it’s not just an ad-hoc relationship that we’re having with local authorities, is the publication of the Local Digital Declaration as well, which shows our commitment to working with local authorities across the whole of the public sector. I think it has 100 signatories on it now? Angus Montgomery: I think there are 100 signatures. So, we’re one of the co-publishers, I think with the Department of Housing, Communities and Local Government and various local authorities, and there are something like 100 signatories already. Yes, it’s a commitment from all the signatories that they will follow these principles of digital development, which are the things that you would hope they’re talking about, like focusing on user needs, using the right technology, and all that sort of thing. Yes, you’re right, it’s really interesting. I think the world of local authorities is so big, there are so many and they’re delivering so many different, often quite small and challenging, services. It, kind of, seems like a world that is really hard to get a handle on. I think that it’s really interesting to see GDS approaching that in a kind of structured way, through the Local Digital Declaration, but also giving really tangible things that can help, like common components. It’s amazing to see the progress that has already happened with it as well. Sarah Stewart: Just on that, I used to work for a charity and when people were interacting with their local authorities it wasn’t just the case that they were going just for one thing, they had a host of different needs that needed to be addressed, and local authorities are the people who are servicing those needs and making sure that all of those things get done. Angus Montgomery: Also, 2018 was a year in which GDS launched quite a few things and updated quite a few things as well. Sarah Stewart: Yes, like the GDS Design System. Angus Montgomery: The GDS Design System, which I think is really… This appeals to the geek side of me because this is, basically, a collection of all the patterns and components that a designer or a front-end developer and, for the most part, would use to create a government service. So, you’ve got things there telling you about how to design a button, which typeface to use, which colours to use- Sarah Stewart: Why is that important? Angus Montgomery: It’s important because, in much the same way as GaaP components, it’s about making it easier for those teams to use something so that they don’t have to design their own button style or design their own dropdown menu, or whatever. There is one that they can just pull the code from and put it into their service. Also, then it provides consistency. So, if all the government services are using the same things… And the things in the design system are heavily user researched, so, it’s the kind of GDS principle of, like, “Do the hard work for service teams, but also provide a consistent experience across all things.” If you want to lose an hour or two then go and have a mess about in it, because there’s something really cool stuff to find and look at. Sarah Stewart: The geek emerges. Angus Montgomery: Exactly. Sarah Stewart: It’s been a year of launching and relaunching at GDS, so we introduced a new spend controls process and we’re rewriting the service standard, which you know more about than I do, Angus. Angus Montgomery: Yes, the service standard is really exciting, and we’ve blogged quite a bit about this already, I think Stephen Gill and Lou Downe, who are both working on it, have written quite a lot. The Digital Service Standard has been around for quite some time, and was initially developed, primarily, to help develop digital touchpoints and digital services, and is focused on that. The idea of the rewrite is to help government and teams within government to think about whole end-to-end services, what that means and how they can help the user do something from the very start of a service to the very end of it. It’s going to be really exciting and interesting to see what that means and how that works. There are quite a lot of blog posts about it as well, if you should go to the GDS blog to find out more, as you should do for all of the things that we’ve discussed. Sarah Stewart: Excellent plug. Angus Montgomery: Excellent plug... there is plenty of amazing writing about all of these things, even if I do say so myself! Sarah Stewart: I’ll tell you what else is exciting. Angus Montgomery: What else is exciting, Sarah? Sarah Stewart: GOV.UK is exciting. Angus Montgomery: GOV.UK is never not exciting. Sarah Stewart: It’s been a big year for the team behind GOV.UK because they’ve been doing some super-cool work with organising their content. So, they’ve been doing supervised machine learning to organise all of the content on GOV.UK, or in certain sections they’re organising their content. That means that we can do cool things, like voice activation. And the example is, if you speak into a Google Voice system and say, “How old do I need to be to drive a car?” the information that is surfaced is GOV.UK content, and this content is the best, it’s the most authoritative. Angus Montgomery: That is amazing. I think what is really amazing is, like you say, they sorted out the structure of the sites and then they did the fixing the basics, solving hard problems and all that stuff that GDS says all the time. This is a really good example of that. Like, sorting out the content, which was a really hard and a really challenging thing to do, but having done that they can do really exciting whizzy stuff on it. We were discussing the word whizzy just yesterday, I think. Sarah Stewart: Yes, the amount of times… Angus Montgomery: But, it is whizzy. I think you said it was a public-school boy word, which I’m pretty- Sarah Stewart: Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you. Angus Montgomery: No offence taken. But, it is whizzy stuff, like voice activation and like the step-by-step work that they’re doing as well, which kind of takes all the content involved in a particular service, like you used the learning to drive example, and puts that all in order for the user to be able to navigate really quickly and easily, and to understand where the are in the process. Sarah Stewart: It’s so brilliant, because when you think about things, life impacting things, like learning how to drive, it can be so daunting. If you can just shine a light in the darkness and say, “Look, these are the eight steps that you need to get your driving license, let’s tackle step one. Let’s do it all in the same journey, and at least you can tick that off.” How amazing is that? You don’t need to rootle around the internet, you don’t need to Google the internet, that’s another phrase we’ve been using a lot recently, to find the answers. It’s just all in one place. It’s bliss. Angus Montgomery: It is, and it’s great. It has been a really big year for GOV.UK and it’s really amazing to see them developing this stuff and the new stuff that’s happening. Plug time as well, if you want to find out more about this, we did a podcast with Neil Williams, who, up until recently, was head of GOV.UK, he left in September, I think it was, to go and be head of digital at Croydon Council, but before he left we recorded a podcast with him in which he said this: [Audio starts]‘Absolutely, we’re iterating widely again, I’d say, so it’s back to that feeling of early GOV.UK, where we’re actually able to turn ideas into working software and working product relatively quickly, again. So, some of the stuff we’re doing now is actually greenfield stuff, again, we’re back to a lot of the ideas we had, way back when in the early days of GDS, around making the publishing system really intuitive and giving data intelligence to publishers so that they can understand how services are performing and see where to prioritise and get that really rich insight about how their stuff, as a department, is working for users.’[Audio ends] Angus Montgomery: So, yes, we talked a lot about transformation, and it’s time to talk… Sarah Stewart: About collaboration. Angus Montgomery: About collaboration. Sarah Stewart: What do we mean by collaboration? Angus Montgomery: What do we mean? Well, collaboration, basically, means working together, which is the thing- Sarah Stewart: I do actually know the answer to this, sorry, in case the audience don’t think I don’t know what collaborative means. Angus Montgomery: Let’s just be clear, this is an interview trope which is to ask a question that you know the answer to in order to illicit a comment from the person that you’re talking to. Just because we’re asking each other these things doesn’t mean that… Sarah, tell me about GDS and what it does… We do actually know what this means, or I think we know what this means, anyway. Collaboration, in order to answer your question, Sarah, basically means working together, which is, of course, what GDS has done since the very beginning. So, GDS was set up to work with and across government to help them develop digital services, transform what they’re doing and make things better for users. We can’t do this stuff unless we are collaborating, unless we are working together. We mentioned Sprint earlier as well, which is the big event that we held back in May, where GDS and other people from across movement talked about the really cool things that they were doing, and there was a strong collaboration angle throughout that. And there were a lot of really good case studies, interesting case studies of work that was going on. After the day we were looking back on Twitter and talking to people who’d been at the event and they were saying, “This is one that made me cry, and I didn’t expect to,” “I went to this workshop, I came out and I was so emotional that I was weeping.” It was a workshop about open standards, and this was the case study that they used: [Audio starts]‘Hands off. He’s got a belt on, get his belt. Up… Okay. In you come, fella. Alright.’[Audio ends] Angus Montgomery: So, for the benefit of people who obviously couldn’t see what was happening, because that was a video clip and we played it on a podcast, which is an audio medium, so it was quite a lot of indiscrete splashing, but what was actually happening there was that was someone being rescued- Sarah Stewart: A real person. Angus Montgomery: That was a field video-clip, or however you describe it, from the RNLI, rescuing someone from the River Thames. The reason that was played in an open standards workshop is open standards is super important when it comes to things like emergency services, because you might get various emergency services, like the police or RNLI or the Maritime and Coastguard Agency responding to various incidents at the same time, and they need to be able to share information about those incidents really, really quickly. Sarah Stewart: The profound takeaway from this is, obviously, people’s lives are being saved, but the launch time for lifeboats is reduced from 10-15 minutes to under 2 minutes. Angus Montgomery: That’s incredible. Sarah Stewart: If you can think of what can happen, even in two minutes, to someone who’s in the water for that long… Angus Montgomery: Yes, falling in the Thames in December, and you don’t want to be in there for 10-15 minutes. So it’s amazing. I mean, obviously this got people really emotional because you’re seeing a video of someone, literally, getting pulled out of the Thames, and the work that you have done to develop and open standard or to develop a common system for sharing information, which seems like a really abstract thing, but then you see the real-world example of this stuff and that’s really amazing. Sarah Stewart: We spoke to Terence Eden, who’s the open standards lead at GDS, about open standards, and if you want to find out more listen to that podcast. There are some things that you think are so mundane, in a theoretical sense, but the real-world practical outcome is so so important. So, I highly recommend you listen to that. Angus Montgomery: Yes, another plug for the podcast, which is a good thing. Also, one of the big things, staying on this collaboration theme, that we’ve been doing is helping government work together and build capability through things, like the GDS Academy, which has gone from strength to strength this year. Sarah Stewart: There have been some big milestones. We’re nearing 10,000, would we call them students? Colleagues? Angus Montgomery: Students/colleagues/civil servants/people trained through the- Sarah Stewart: Those with a thirst to learn. We hit almost 10,000 who have passed through the GDS academy and about 1,000 of those students have been through the Agile foundation course. Angus Montgomery: This is really important work because it’s showing people the opportunities that a digital government brings for their skills and capabilities, and for their jobs as well. I mean, people are training in new and interesting jobs because of the GDS Academy, and that’s really exciting. Sarah Stewart: What I think is super-cool about it is that people can feel left behind when things move forward and when people move from different processes. Digital can be quite a daunting thing and something that they feel like might be a stumbling block to them or might prevent them from continuing their work in the civil service, but what the academy does is say, “Actually, we can support you in your knowledge and we can support you in your growth, and if you want to learn about all these really cool and interesting things that we’re doing, and the ways of working that are open to you as well.” So, we’re not just abandoning people who don’t have those digital expertise, we’re saying, “Here is a foundation course that will help you get up to speed and give you the confidence to go and bring it back to your departments and deploy it.” Angus Montgomery: You’re right. I think one of the things about digital, and not just in government, I suppose, but in general, is that it can be seen as quite a clique-y thing, it’s like, “If you understand this digital thing then you’re part of it, but if you don’t then,” you know, as you say, “You might get left behind.” The idea that we’re, through the GDS Academy, able to bring people into this is really cool, and makes it not a clique-y thing but make it a big, kind of, community, potentially, of civil servants, and that’s really cool. Like we say, we’re approaching 10,000 students, we’ve got new academy classrooms in the GDS building, I think just the floor below us as we speak. Sarah Stewart: It looks very swish. Angus Montgomery: Which does look very swish, indeed. They did a pop-up in Canada as well, which was quite good. Sarah Stewart: Did they? Angus Montgomery: Yes, they went over there and spoke to the Canadian government about what they’d done at the GDS Academy, and after that the Canadian government set up their own. So, there you go… And it’s been an exciting year for GOV.UK Verify as well, the government’s online identity assurance programme, because the standards and guidelines which currently underpin the way Verify works are now being opened up to the private sector to build on. And what this means is that in principle, the same digital identity platform that helps you check your state pension could in future also help you check your savings account too and other things that you do in your kind of day to day non-government life so that’s really exciting as well. So... we’ve done transformation… Sarah Stewart: We’ve done collaboration. Angus Montgomery: Let’s move onto innovation. Sarah Stewart: Which I feel is my specialist subject. Do you want to do the music? Angus Montgomery: What? Is this innovation music? Oh… Sarah Stewart: No, that was Mastermind. Angus Montgomery: Sorry, that reference just went straight over my head. Sarah Stewart… Sarah Stewart: ...on innovation. So, 2018 has been a big year for innovation, and not just in this government but in governments all across the world. So, in summer, I’m sure you heard, that the French government announced a £1.5 billion investment in research into artificial intelligence. The Singaporean government, or actually the prime minister said, that innovation was an obsession for them, not just an interest, an obsession. Countries like Norway are doing some really interesting things, actually, the prime minister launched this programme calling it a kind of Tinder… Angus Montgomery: Nice. Sarah Stewart: So the government is helping clean tech industries reach out to international markets. Angus Montgomery: To literally hook up with those markets. Sarah Stewart: Exactly. Oh God… But, what we’re interested in is the UK, sorry, let me bring you back. Let’s land at Heathrow and tell you about what’s happening in this country. So earlier this year we published a survey of all emerging tech activity across government, so we know the extent and where innovative activity with emerging tech is happening. So, we know, for example, like we mentioned earlier, that GOV.UK is using supervised machine learning, as is the UK Hydrographic Office, and that BEIS, DFID and Defra are using big data and sensors to improve agricultural yield and protect crops. Angus Montgomery: So, lots of cool stuff happening, but I think one of the things that we talk about a lot that’s really interesting is that all this work going on in isolation is great and really exciting, but for it to have an effect you kind of need to have an overarching strategy, you need to be able to do it in the right way you need to be able to make sure that you’re not just chasing after the latest shiny thing… Sarah Stewart: Whizzy things. Angus Montgomery: Whizzy things, to make it a theme. Sarah, you interviewed Terence Eden, as you’ve already mentioned, for the podcast that we published a couple of months ago, and Terence had some words about this as well: [Audio starts]‘How do we make sure that government doesn’t just grab at the new fashionable tech, because it’s new and fashionable?’‘It’s a good question. The author William Gibson has a beautiful quote, which is ‘The future is already here, it’ just not very equally distributed yet.’ That’s not really the case. The future isn’t here. We’ve got glimpses that if we can build this huge dataset, then we will be able to artificial intelligence the blockchain into the cloud and magic will happen. Yes, you’re right, people just go a little starry eyed…’[Audio ends] Angus Montgomery: So, Sarah, how do we avoid people being all starry-eyed and just chasing after the latest whizzy new technology? Sarah Stewart: We use a strategy, Angus, which is exactly what the minister announced after the publication of the survey. So, it was good that we had a landscape and we had a much better understanding of the emerging tech that was being used across government, but we needed to round it up with a strategy. To ensure that we’re moving forward in a clear and sensible way the strategy was the thing. So, GDS is leading this, but the minister has been attending quite a few engagement meetings to get the expertise from tech leaders, academics and practitioners in the field about what this strategy needs to address, because we don’t want to get into the situation where, in five years’ time or ten years’ time, we’re playing catch-up. So, I think that’s going to be published in the spring. Angus Montgomery: Brilliant, I look forward to it and look forward to seeing what we have to say in that.One more thing, we talked about this earlier on but the idea of the academy and GDS as a whole, upskilling and helping build capability across the civil service and digital, we’ve been taking that into emerging technologies as well, through the pilot Emerging Technology Development Programme. Sarah, you spoke again to Terence Eden about this, because I think he’s one of the first people who went through the pilot. Sarah Stewart: Yes, that’s right. The idea is that there are going to be people who are skilled up and specialists in emerging technologies, so they can go into departments across government to help other teams and spreading the word. The pilot was run earlier this year, and you’re right, Terence Eden was on there, and here’s what he thought of it: [Audio starts]‘I think that’s what the Emerging Technology Development Programme is about, is making sure that civil servants can code, making sure that they understand how they would build an AI system, understand what the ethics are, learn about what the reasons for and against using a bit of technology like distributed ledgers are, because otherwise we end up with people just buying stuff which isn’t suitable.’[Audio ends] Angus Montgomery: So, super important stuff. Just one final, but super important, part of the innovation work that GDS has been doing over the last year is the GovTech Catalyst Challenge. Sarah Stewart: Yes, that’s right. This is a £20m fund which is designed to incentivise tech companies to help the public sector with challenges that they may face. Angus Montgomery: So, two really cool things about this is it’s dealing with really interesting public sector challenges, like how do you deal with loneliness and isolation in rural areas, or how do you help track a waste chain across its whole process or how do you help to keep firefighters safe when they’re out on emergency calls? But, what it’s also doing is bringing in the interesting emerging technologies, so things like artificial intelligence or location sensing or wearable tech and, kind of, using them on these specific examples, but by doing that it’s proving the value to the wider public sector as well. So, if you use that emerging technology in one particular incident or in one particular incidence you might then find other applications for it in the public sector. So, it’s kind of like a testing ground for stuff as well, which is really exciting. I think what is really cool about this is that the GovTech Catalyst Fund has been going now for some time and, as you mentioned, there have been a number of challenges launched. We’re starting to see potential where it could tackle real issues, like I mentioned earlier about keeping firefighters safe. Sarah Stewart: The other really cool thing as well is that it’s a London team, so the team is based in London, but the challenges that are coming in are not solely London based challenges, they’ve come from all over the country as well. Angus Montgomery: Let’s hear from Wales. [Audio starts]‘If I was to wear the tracking device and I was committed to a building it would make me feel safer, because I know that if any of my other communications fail or if I’m needing assistance then they’re going to know where I am.’[Audio ends] Angus Montgomery: So that’s Mid and West Wales Fire Service, who have a GovTech Challenge competition out for the moment, for tracking for firefighters when they’re out on emergency calls. Sarah Stewart: The other beautiful thing, if I can call it beautiful, if I can call boosting the economy beautiful, is that it gives small, kind of, nimble SMEs a chance to do business with government. So, it’s not just monopolised by massive companies, it’s really helping the burgeoning GovTech sector to grow, and this is one very tangible way in which is happening. Angus Montgomery: It’s helping the right people work on the right problems, which is what it’s all about. That was innovation. So, we’ve done it all. Sarah Stewart: Yes, we’ve done it. Angus Montgomery: We’ve done transformation, collaboration and innovation, and that was an overview of 2018 at GDS. What was your favourite moment of 2018, Sarah? Sarah Stewart: Good question. I think it was April, when the late Jeremy Heywood, came in to talk to the organisation. I was impressed by the amount of stuff that he knew because his portfolio must’ve been enormous. To know in very precise detail exactly what’s happening in every part of government was really inspiring, not only from a digital perspective, but also as a civil servant. You just think, “Wow, that’s colossal intellect deployed just brilliantly.” Angus Montgomery: Yes I think I’d agree with you about when Lord Heywood came in. Like you said, he was such an impressive speaker and showed such a massive intellect, but also a real interest and passion about what GDS was doing. Like you say, his brief was so massive that he would’ve had to have a handle on so many different parts of government, for him to come in and be really interested, engaged and talking to individual people and talking to the organisation as a whole was super-impressive. So, I think that was definitely a highlight for me. I think the other highlight was something we’ve talked about quite a lot, which was Sprint, which was super hard work, I think, for everyone involved, but really amazing and really amazing to see people at GDS and people from across government get the opportunity to talk about the work that they’ve been doing and see the reception that that got. Having a workshop about open standards that left people in tears and things like that were really amazing. Sarah Stewart: For the right reasons. Angus Montgomery: So that was really cool. Next year, what are you most looking forward to? Sarah Stewart: Spring, because in spring the Innovation Strategy will be published. Angus Montgomery: Ah, the strategy. Sarah Stewart: The strategy… How about you? Angus Montgomery: For me, I guess, it’s a bit of a cop out answer, but more of the same. I think what I really value about GDS is that there are lots of organisations that use words like transformation, collaboration and innovation, and other words like that, but use them in quite intangible ways, and just don’t really deliver against them. I think what we’ve proved over the last year is that we are delivering loads of really tangible, amazing things. There are things that we and other parts of the government have done this year that are changing people’s lives. That, to me, is the reason GDS exists. We talk to the talk but we’re delivering this stuff as well, we’re actually doing stuff, and more tangible things. The Innovation Strategy is a part of that, obviously, and seeing tangible outcomes from that, more people using common components, more services that have been transformed in a way that it’s going to help people go about their lives and make people’s lives better. I think just the stuff that we’ve done over this last year has been brilliant, and I’m looking forward to seeing more of its next year. So, that wraps up 2018 and the 2018 year in review podcast. Sarah Stewart: What a year it’s been. Angus Montgomery: What a year it’s been. Sarah Stewart: Wait. We’ve forgotten to mention the most exciting thing that’s going to happen in 2019. Angus Montgomery: What’s that? Sarah Stewart: The continuation of the GDS podcast series. Angus Montgomery: Of course. As I mentioned before, this is the fourth episode of the GDS podcasts that we’ve done, and we’ve got plenty more exciting ones planned. So, if you’ve enjoyed this one and you enjoyed the previous ones that we’ve done, then go to wherever it is that you listen to your podcasts and subscribe to the GDS podcasts because we’ve got a ton more exciting stuff happening next year. Sarah Stewart: Oh yes. Angus Montgomery: Oh yes.Thank you very much for listening. Thank you for joining me, Sarah. Sarah Stewart: Oh, you’re welcome. Angus Montgomery: And goodbye. Sarah Stewart: Goodbye.

We discuss the latest developments in Brexit, Canada's legalisation of cannabis, new Hate Crime proposals and Croydon Council entering the hotel business.Get in touch: @CroydonConst croydonconstitutionalists@gmail.comfacebook/CroydonConstitutionalists

We discuss recent developments in the Brexit negotiations, Croydon Council waste and how you can get involved in campaigning with us.

    In this episode, we interview outgoing head of GOV.UK Neil Williams about his time at GDS, learning about agile and scaling the nation's website. The full transcript of the interview follows: Angus Montgomery: Hello and welcome to the very first episode of the Government Digital Service podcast. My name’s Angus Montgomery, I’m a senior writer at GDS and for this episode I’m going to be talking to Neil Williams, who is the head of GOV.UK. And Neil is leaving GDS shortly for an exciting new job, so we’re going to be talking to him about that and also talking to him about his time at GDS, because he’s been here since the very beginning. So I hope you enjoy this episode and let’s go straight into the conversation. Neil Williams: I'm going to Croydon Council. So leaving not only GDS- Angus Montgomery: South London? Neil Williams: South London. South London is the place to be, I have to say. Yes, not only leaving GDS, but leaving the Civil Service actually, because local government is not the Civil Service of course, to go and work in Croydon as Chief Digital Officer for the council there. They've got a lot of ambition, and it’s a really exciting time for Croydon. People laugh when I say that. Angus Montgomery: I just laughed as well. I didn’t mean to. Neil Williams:  Croydon has this reputation that is completely unwarranted, and we’re going to prove the world wrong. It’s changing massively. It’s already gone through a lot of change. You're probably aware of some stuff. It’s got a Boxpark. There’s a lot of reporting around the Westfield/Hammerson development that might be happening, which we very much hope is happening. Also Croydon Tech City. So Croydon’s got a lot of growth in the tech industry, tech sector. Fantastic companies starting up and scaling up in Croydon, and that’s all part of the story. Plus the stuff that’s more in my wheelhouse, that I've been doing here in GDS around transforming services. Making the public services that Croydon provides to residents and business to be as good as they should be. As good as everything else that people expect in their day to lives using digital services these days. Angus Montgomery: So not much on your plate then? Neil Williams: It’s quite a big job. I'm excited about it. There’s a lot about it that’s new, which is kind of giving me a new lease of energy, the fact that I've got this big challenge to face and lots of learning to do. Which reminds me a lot about how I felt when I first working with GDS in fact. Just how exciting I found the prospect of coming and working for this organisation, and being part of this amazing revolution. I'm feeling that again actually about the job in Croydon, [00:02:33] about the work to be done there. It seems like the right time. It’s a perfect time and place, where I am in my career, those things coming together. It’s a really good match. So it came up, and I put in for it, and lo and behold I am now Chief Digital Officer in Croydon Council from mid-October. Angus Montgomery: You’ve been at GDS since before the beginning, haven’t you? Seven, eight years? Neil Williams:  Yes, I was working it out this morning. It’s seven years and two months. I was 34 when I started working in GDS. I'm 42 now. I just had my birthday last week. Angus Montgomery: Full disclosure. Neil Williams: Yes. That’s maybe too much information to be sharing. I didn’t have grey hair when I started. My youngest child was just born, and he’s nearly eight now. So yes, it’s been a really big part of my life. Angus Montgomery: So you can track your late 30s and early 40s through images of you standing in front of number 10? Neil Williams: Yes, and unfortunately quite a few embarrassing pictures of me on the GDS flicker. (Laughter) There have been a few regrettable outfits for celebrations and milestones launching GOV.UK, and celebrating GOV.UK birthdays, where looking back on it I may not have worn those things if I had known it was going to be on the internet forever. (Laughter) Angus Montgomery: Now you say that, there’s an image of you… I'm trying to remember. I think it’s at the Design Museum, when GOV.UK won the Designs of the Year, and you're wearing a Robocop t-shirt. (Laughter) Neil Williams: Yes, I am. I can tell that story if you like. That’s one of my proudest GDS moments, I think. Maybe we will get to that later. Do you want me to do it now? Angus Montgomery: Well, no. Let us know where that came from, because this is… Well, just as a bit of context, because I've gone straight into that, but you’ve been head of GOV.UK since the beginning, and in 2012, shortly after GOV.UK launched, it won the Design Museum’s Design of the Year Award, which is an incredible accolade. I can’t remember what it beat, but I think it beat several…  That’s one of those awards where they judge things like buildings, and cars, and new products, and mad graphic design. So for a government website to win that award was really incredible, I think. Neil Williams: Yes. Actually, we were talking about it the other day, and Mark Hurrell, the head designer on GOV.UK, he said it’s actually the first time a website ever won that award, which I had completely forgotten. Yes, it was amazing. That was 2013. We had launched GOV.UK in 2012, as in replacing Directgov and Business Link, which were the previous big super sites for public services. Then we were well into the next phase, which was shutting down and replacing all of the websites of departments of state. I was very much working on that bit of it at the time. My head was down and working very attentively, in this fairly crazy timescale, to shut down those websites, and starting to look at how we were going to start closing down the websites of 350 arms-length bodies. A huge project. In the midst of that, in the midst of that frantic busy period, someone approached me. It was Tom Loosemore, Etienne Pollard. One of those early GDS leaders. Saying, “Oh, there’s an award ceremony. We’ve been nominated for an award, and we need some people to go. Can you go to it?” Angus Montgomery: “We need some people to go.” That’s an attractive… (Laughter) Neil Williams: Yes. It was just like, “We need a few people to make sure we’re going to be represented there.” Angus Montgomery: “To fill the seats.” (Laughter) Neil Williams: I now know that they knew that we were going to win, but I didn’t know that, at all, at the time, and I didn’t really think much of it. “Oh, yes, fine. Yes, I will go along to that. That’s no problem at all.” I think it was the same day. I'm not sure whether it was that same day or a different day when I was given notice, but anyway, I didn’t think much of it. I didn’t dress up for the occasion. So I rock up to the Design Museum in my jeans and in my Robocop t-shirt, an OCP logo on it. The evening included quite a lot of free alcohol. It was quite a glitzy affair, and I was definitely under-dressed for the occasion, but I thought, “That’s fine. We’re just here to be part of an audience.” Hanging around at the back, having the free canapes, partaking of the plentiful free wine that was being distributed. Then Griff Rhys Jones, who was presenting the award, gets up on stage and announces the winners in each category, and we won our category. Much triumphant jubilation and celebration. Then went on to reveal that we won the whole thing. We won the Design of the Year Award as a whole. Which then led to this photo call. By which point I was quite drunk as well. I had no idea this was going to happen. Yes, so there’s that famous photo of a bunch of GDS people accepting the award, all quite smartly dressed, apart from me letting the side down with my Robocop t-shirt. Angus Montgomery: Tell me how you got involved in this thing in the first place. You’ve been in the Civil Service before, but you're not a career civil servant, are you? Or you hadn’t been. Neil Williams: Well, yes. I would like to think of myself as not being a career civil servant. I started in the private sector, in a communications publishing agency. It was a magazine agency. I thought I wanted to be a journalist actually. I did English at university. I thought I wanted to be a journalist. Went into publishing. Was passionate about publishing and the power of the printed word. Distributing information to people. Equipping them with information. Informing people and so forth. I went into corporate publishing, as a way to learn about publishing, but whilst I was working for that company the internet was becoming a bigger deal, a bigger thing. I was also mucking around in my spare time with comedy websites. That was known by my employers, who then said, as they were starting to think about, “How do we get in on this?” they asked me if I wanted to run the London office of their new digital offering to their clients. I leapt at the chance. That was a really good leg up for me. That’s where I learnt about digital, about building websites. So that was a great place, where I learnt… I said I wanted to be in publishing and journalism. The information is power thing excited me, and of course doing that digitally, doing that online, massively more so. More empowering people. I fell in love instantly with the immediacy of what you get with publishing to the web, and providing services over the web, and getting the feedback, and being able to improve based on the fact that you can see in real time what users are doing. That’s been my passion ever since. After a few years of doing that… That is now a dwindling small part of my career, when you look back on it, so it’s probably true to say that I am a career civil servant. A few years in a digital agency. Then I wanted to see the other side of things, and be client side, and see something through to its outcomes, rather than just build a thing and hand it over. I joined the Civil Service. I joined the government communications profession. Angus Montgomery: I know it well. Neil Williams: And my first gig was in the Department for Trade and Industry, as it was then, as an assistant information officer. A young, eager civil servant. There were some digital elements to that job, but actually quite a lot of my earliest Civil Service gig was going to Number 10 every week to do the grid meeting, which is the Alastair Campbell era. It’s still the process now. And I was moving around within the department. So there’s an eight-year period, which I'm not going to go into in any detail,where I moved around between different departments, doing digital things. I worked my way up the greasy pole of the Civil Service. From a web manager, managing a bit of a website and looking after the content and the information architecture, through to running whole teams, running the website, intranet, social media side of things. During those years I did a lot of work on product development, around online consultation tools and digital engagement platforms. And lots of frustration actually. So this brings us to the beginning of the GDS story. Angus Montgomery: This is the 2010 Martha Lane Fox bombshell? Neil Williams: Yes. The old way, the traditional way, and this is pretty common not just in government but everywhere, websites sprung out of being a thing led by communications teams. “It’s just another channel for us to do our communications.” And it is, but it is also, as we all now know, the way that people do their business and transact. People come to your website to do a thing, to use a service, to fulfil a need. It took a long time for the Civil Service to recognise that. For many years myself and others in the digital communications teams within departments were getting increasingly frustrated. A lone voice really. Trying within our departments to show them the data that we had and go, “Look, people are coming for things that we’re not providing them with. We need to do a better job of this.” A lot of that falling on deaf ears, not getting prioritised in the way that it needed to, and also clearly fragmented across thousands of websites, across all of these organisations. A lot of great work was done before GDS, and this story has been told on the History of GDS series of blog posts, which if people haven’t seen are really well worth looking at. Tom Loosemore has talked about this before, about standing on the shoulders of giants. There was enormous effort, over many, many years, to digitise government, to centralise things, to put users first. Directgov and Business Link were the current incarnations of that, of a service-led approach, but it was just a small proportion of the overall service offering from government, and it was still really quite comms focused. The conversations were about reach, and there was advertising to try and promote the existence of these channels, etc. Lots of it was written from the perspective of the department trying to tell people what they should do, rather than understanding what it is that people are trying to do and then designing things that meet those needs. So GDS. In 2010, this is a really well-told story, and people are pretty familiar with it now, but 2010 Martha Lane Fox was commissioned to review the government’s website, particularly Directgov. She took a broader remit, and looked at the whole thing, and, in summary, said, “Start again.” Angus Montgomery: ‘Revolution, not evolution’. Neil Williams: ‘Revolution, not evolution’. Yes, that was the title. Angus Montgomery: And everyone at GDS, or who has been at GDS, has said, like Tom, that we’re standing on the shoulders of giants, and huge amounts of work was done beforehand, but why do you think Martha’s report was such a turning point? Because it was, because it led to a huge amount of change. Neil Williams: Yes. It’s a really pithy, succinct little letter. It’s not reams and reams of paper. It was just quite a simple call to action really. Which was to say, “You need to take ownership of the user experience, in a new organisation, and empower a new leader, and organisation under that leader, to do that, to take a user-led approach.” That was the different thing. Take a user-led approach, and to use the methods that are being used everywhere used. Government had not yet really caught up to what was going on in the wider technology industry around ways of working, agile and so forth, around working iteratively, experimentally, and proving things early. Rather than upfront requirement specs, and then out comes something at the end which you then later discover doesn’t work. Those were the two things really. It was that focus on user needs, and work in that different way, which was bringing skills into government that hadn’t been here before. Design, and user research, and software development skills that hadn’t previously been done in-house. It had always been outsourced. Angus Montgomery: So it was a clear and simple strategy, or strategic direction, from Martha Lane Fox’s report. There was a clear mandate. This has been talked about a lot, that we had, or GDS had, Francis Maude backing it at a very high level, and giving it the mandate to- Neil Williams: Yes, absolutely. That was the other thing. It wasn’t just Martha’s letter. It was absolutely a kind of perfect storm of political will and the timing being right. Yes, the Martha letter came out when I was Head of Digital Comms, or some title like that, at the Department for Business. I had moved around between departments. Ended up back in the Department for Business again. It was advocating something pretty radical, that would be a threat really to the digital comms view, to a comms-led view of controlling our channels. That was an interesting situation to find myself in, right? I was reading this stuff from Martha and thinking, “This is brilliant. This is what we’ve been waiting for. This is absolutely the right thing.” But then internally my job required me to do some more maybe circumspect briefing to the minister and to the director of comms about, “Actually, well, this is a risk to us.” So I was doing both of those things. I was talking internally about the positives of what this could mean for government, but the risks to our organisation, but publicly I blogged… I thought, “This is brilliant.” I blogged enthusiastically, because I had a personal blog at the time, about my thoughts on how this could be the beginning of something really exciting. That’s the thing that led me to meeting Tom Loosemore. Tom Loosemore, who as we all know is one of the early architects of GDS, saw my blog post, and got in touch and said, “Let’s have a chat.” And that’s how my journey into GDS started. It started by answering that email from Tom Loosemore and going for pizza with him. Angus Montgomery: The power of blogging. Neil Williams: Yes. We had a chat over pizza, where he was talking about his ideas for getting an alpha. Getting a team together that could produce something quickly, as a sort of throwaway prototype, that would show a different way of working. Tom was saying stuff that was exciting but contained many new words. (Laughter) He was talking about alphas and agile ways of working. I don’t know what these things are. Angus Montgomery: Now we’re at a stage, at GDS and throughout government, where agile is a touchstone of how we work, and it’s accepted that doing things in agile is doing things better, and there’s lots of opportunity for people to learn how that works, and what that means, and apply that to the things that they do, but at the time, as you said, this didn’t really exist in government. You, as someone who had worked in government, probably didn’t know what agile was. Neil Williams: No. Angus Montgomery: How did you learn about it, and how did you know that this was the right approach? Neil Williams: A mix of reading up on it. Initially just going home and Googling those new words and finding out about these ways of working. But also it immediately spoke to me. I had been through several years of several projects where I had felt just how awful and frustrating it is to build websites in a waterfall way. I've got some very difficult experiences that I had at [BEIS], when we rebuilt the website there, and it was project managed by a very thorough project manager in a waterfall way. I was the Senior Responsible Officer, I think, or Senior User I think it is in PRINCE2 language, for the website. As the website was progressing we had a requirements document upfront, all that way of working. We were specifying, with as much predicting the future and guesswork as we possibly can, a load of stuff, and writing it down, around, ‘This is what the website needs to do. This is what the publishing system needs to do’. Then handing that over to a supplier, who then starts to try and interpret that and build that. During that process, seeing as the thing is emerging, and we’re doing the user acceptance testing and all of that stuff on it, that this is just far away from the thing that I had in my head. So there’s already a gap between the written word and then the meaning that goes into the heads of the people who are then building that thing. Then also all of the change that’s occurring at the same time. Whilst we are building that thing the world is not staying still, and there is an enormous amount of change in our understanding around what we want that thing to do. Trying to get those changes in, but facing the waterfall approach, rigid change control process, and just feeling like I'm banging my head against a brick wall. It was really frustrating. Then when I… Back to the question about how do I learn about agile, and some of these new concepts, it was really only when I got in there. I knew what the bad thing felt like, and I knew that that wasn’t right. I knew that you absolutely need to embrace the change as part of the process, embrace learning as part of the process of delivering something as live and ever changing as a website. Then I came in as a product manager, initially part-time, and then full-time when GDS was properly established and able to advertise a role, and started working with Pete Herlihy, who is still here now in GDS. Angus Montgomery: Yes, on Notify. Neil Williams: Yes, he’s lead product manager on Notify now, but back then he was delivery manager. Again, Tom Loosemore was making stuff happen behind the scenes. He was the person who introduced me and Pete. He said something along the lines of, “Neil’s the guy who knows what needs to happen, and Pete’s the guy who knows how to make it happen. You two should talk.” So we did. I learnt a lot of what I now know from working with Pete and working as we then built out a team. Working with some terrific talented software developers, designers, content designers, and so forth, and user researchers, in a multidisciplinary way. Learning on the job what it meant to be a product manager. Obviously, reading up about it. I went on a few courses, I think, too. But mostly learning on the job. Zooming back out a little bit to the GDS career experience, I've learnt so much here. I've never learnt as much probably in the whole of the rest of my career as I've learnt in my time here. Angus Montgomery: Because that first year was learning about agile, putting a team together. Learning how to build this thing. Learning how to land it. At what stage did you realise, “Oh, we’ve done this now. This thing is landing, and it’s getting big, and it’s successful. Oh, wow. We’re in charge of a piece of national infrastructure now”? Neil Williams: That’s an interesting question. I always knew it would. We knew what we were building at the start. We knew we were building something- Angus Montgomery: So you never had any doubts that this was going to work? Neil Williams: Oh, God, yes. We had absolute doubt. The prevailing view when we started was that, “This will not work.” Not internally. Internally, it was certainly a stretch goal. (Laughter) It was ambitious, and it felt a little bit impossible, but in a really exciting way. That is one of the key ingredients of success, is you want your team to feel like something is only just about doable. (Laughter) There’s nothing more motivating than a deadline and a nearly impossible task. Also a bunch of naysayers saying, “This will never work.” And that really united us as a team. Angus Montgomery: So what then happened? Because I think we talk quite a lot about the early years, and a lot has been written, obviously, and GDS was blogging like crazy in those days about the early stages, and how quickly you built the thing, and how quickly you transitioned onto it. One thing that we have talked about as GDS, but probably not in as great detail, is what happened when it then got big, and you had to deal with issues of scale, and you had to deal with issues of… Something a lot of people on GOV.UK have talked to me about is tech debt. That you built this thing very quickly and you had quite a bit of tech debt involved. How did you deal with that? Presumably you always knew this was a problem you were going to have to face. Neil Williams: Yes, to a degree. That 14 people that did a bit on alpha scaled very rapidly to being 140 people. There were lots of teams working in parallel, and building bits of software just in time, like I was just talking about. Just in time for… “We’re not going to build anything we don’t have to build. We’re just going to build what’s necessary to achieve the transition, to shut these other websites down and bring them all in.” But that approach means you're laying stuff on top of other stuff, and things were getting built by different teams in parallel, adding to this growing code base, and in some cases therefore duplicative stuff happening. Where maybe we’ve built one publishing system for publishing a certain kind of format of content, another publishing system for publishing another kind of format of content. Then in the process we’ve ended up with two different ways of doing something like attachments, asset management. Then we’ve got complexity, and we’ve got bits of code that different teams don’t know how to change without quite a steep learning curve, and so on. And that was the case everywhere. Given the pace of how fast we were going, and how ambitious the timescales were for shutting down what turned out to be 1,882 websites… (Laughter) Exactly. It was incredible. We knew, yes. We knew. It was talked about. It was done knowingly, that, “We are making things here that we’re going to have to come back to. That are going to be good enough for now, and they’re going to achieve what we need to achieve, but they will need fixing, and they will need replacing and consolidating.” So we absolutely knew, and there was much talk of it. Quite a lot of it got written down at the time as ‘This is some tech debt that we’re going to definitely need to come back to’. Yes, we weren’t blind to that fact, but I think the degree of it, and the amount of time it took to resolve it, was slightly unexpected. That’s partly because of massive personnel change as well. Straight off the back of finishing… Well, I say finishing. GOV.UK is never finished. Let’s just get that out there. Always be iterating. GOV.UK’s initial build, and the transition, and the shutting down, the transition story of shutting down those 1,882 websites, had an end date, and that end date felt like a step change to many people. As in lots of people came into GDS in those early days to do the disruptive thing. To do the start-up thing. To do Martha’s revolution. Then at that moment of, “Actually, we’ve now shut down the last website,” to lots of those people that felt like, “Now we’re going into some other mode. Now we’re going into actually we’re just part of government now, aren’t we? I don’t know. Do I necessarily want to be part of that?” So there was some natural drifting away of some people. Plus, also, the budget shrank at that point. The project to do the transition was funded and came to an end. So actually we were going to go down to an operational smaller team anyway. So a combination of attrition, of people leaving anyway, plus the fact that we did need to get a bit smaller. Also, at that time, that’s when the early founders of GDS left. Mike Bracken, Tom Loosemore, Ben Terrett left around that time. Which also led to some other people going, “Well, actually, I came here for them. I came here with them. And I'm leaving too.” So that meant that we had the tech debt to deal with at a time when we also had quite a lot of new stuff. We had all of this unknown and not terribly well-documented code, that was built really quickly, by lots of different people, in different ways. Plus people who weren’t part of that joining the team, and looking at it and going, “Oh, what have we got here? Where do I start with this?” (Laughter) So it took a long time. I think it’s common in agile software development to underestimate how long things might take. It’s an industry problem that you need to account for. Angus Montgomery: Well, this is the interesting thing, because it feels to me as an observer that there have been three main stages of GOV.UK so far. There’s the build and transition, which we’ve talked about quite a lot. There’s the growth and sustainability years, I suppose, where you were sorting out the tech debt, and you were making this thing sustainable, and you were dealing with departmental requests, and you were putting in structures, and process, and maturing it. Now it feels like we’re in a new stage, where a lot of that structural stuff has been sorted out, and that means you can do really exciting things. Like the work that Kate Ivey-Williams, and Sam Dub, and their team have been doing on end-to-end services. The work that’s been going on to look at voice activation on GOV.UK. And the work that’s been done that Nicky Zachariou and her team have been looking at, machine learning, structuring the content. And it feels like now, having sorted out those fundamentals, there’s a whole load of stuff we can do. Neil Williams: Yes, absolutely. We’re iterating wildly again, I would say. (Laughter) We’re back to that feeling of early GOV.UK, where we’re able to turn ideas into working software and working product relatively quickly again. Some of the stuff we’re doing now is greenfield stuff. Again, a lot of the ideas we had way back when, in the early days of GDS, about making the publishing system really intuitive, and giving data intelligence to publishers, so that they can understand how services are performing, and see where to prioritise, and get really rich insights about how their stuff as a department is working for users, we’re getting to that now. We’re starting to rebuild our publishing tools with a proper user-centric design. Which we didn’t do enough of, because we had to focus on the end users more in the early days. It’s great to be doing that now. We’re also deleting some stuff, which were the mistakes that I made. (Laughter) Which feels good on my way out. Some of the things that we did, that have stuck around way longer than we intended them to, are now being deleted. We’re now able to go, “Actually, we know now, we’ve known for a while, that this isn’t the right solution,” and we’re able to change things more radically. Yes, we’re doing really exciting stuff. Thanks for mentioning it. Angus Montgomery: What are you most excited about? Because Jen Allum, who was lead product manager on GOV.UK for a couple of years, I think, she’s taking over now as head of GOV.UK after you leave. What are you most excited about seeing her and the team do? What do you think is the biggest challenge that they face? Neil Williams: I'm thrilled that Jen is taking over the job. She obviously knows the product, knows the team really, really well, and she’s absolutely brilliant. There is some incredibly exciting stuff happening right now, which I will be sad not to be here for. You mentioned one of them. That’s the step-by-step navigation product, which is our solution for, “How do you create an end-to-end holistic service that meets a whole user need?” If you’ve been following GDS at all, which if you're listening to this podcast you probably have, then you will have seen stuff from Lou Downe, Kate Ivey-Williams, many other people, around end-to-end services and what we mean by services and service design. Around good services being verbs and bad services being nouns. Government has the habit of creating schemes, and initiatives, and forms, and giving them names, and then they stick around for a very long time. Users end up even having to learn those names in some cases. The classic example is, “I want to SORN my car.” What the hell does that even mean? Whereas actually what they want to do is take their car off the road. It’s an actual thing that an actual human wants to do. Nearly every interaction or task that you have with government requires more than one thing. You need to look at some content. You might need to transact. You might need to fill in a form. You might need to go and do some stuff that’s not with government. You might need to read something, understand what the rules are, and then go and do something offline. If you're a childminder you’ve got a step there, which is you’ve got to go and actually set up your space and get it inspected. Then you come back, and there’s more to do with government. Those things need setting out clearly for people. It’s still the case now. Despite all of the great work that we’ve done on GOV.UK to improve all of this stuff, it’s still far too much the case that people have to do all of that work themselves. They have to piece together the fragments of content, and transactions, and forms that they need to do. So what we are doing with our step-by-step navigation product is that’s a product output of a lot of thinking that’s been happening in GDS for many years, around, “How do you join services together, end-to-end, around the user?” We’ve got that product. It’s been tested. It works really, really well. To look at you might just look at it and go, “Well, there’s not much to that, is there? That’s just some numbered steps and some links.” Yes, it is, but getting something that looks that simple, and that really works, is actually a ton of work, and we’ve put in a huge amount of work into proving that, and testing that, and making sure that really works. Making it as simple as it is. The lion’s share of that work is actually in the service design, and in the content design, going, “Let’s map out what is… Well, first of all let’s understand what the users need. Then let’s map out what are the many things that come together, in what order, in order to meet that need.” Angus Montgomery: Before we wrap up I just wanted to ask you to give a couple of reflections on your time at GDS. What’s the thing you're most proud of, or what was your proudest moment? Neil Williams: That’s tricky. I've been here a long time. I've done a lot of… I say I've done a lot of good stuff. I've been around whilst some really good stuff has happened. (Laughter) Angus Montgomery: You’ve been in the room. (Laughter) Neil Williams: Right. I've had a little bit to do with it. It’s got to be the initial build, I think. Other than wearing a Robocop t-shirt to a very formal event, which I'm still proud of, it’s got to be the initial build of GOV.UK and that was the thing that I was directly involved with and it was just the most ridiculous fun I've ever had. I can’t imagine ever doing something as important, or fast paced, or ridiculous as that again. There were moments during that when… Actually, I don’t think I can even tell that story probably. (Laughter) There were some things that happened just as a consequence of the speed that we were going. There are funny memories. That’s all I'm going to say about that. If you want to- Angus Montgomery: Corner Neil in a pub or café in South London if you want to hear that story in the future. What was the scariest moment? Or what was the moment when you thought, “Oh, my God, this might not actually work. This thing might fall apart”? Or were there moments like that? Neil Williams: I don't know. No, I think we’ve always had the confidence, because of the talent that we’ve brought in, the capability and the motivation that everyone has. When bad things have happened, when we’ve had security threats or any kind of technical failures, just the way that this team scrambles, and the expertise that we’ve got, just means that I'm always confident that it’s going to be okay. People are here in GDS because they really care,and they’re also incredibly capable. The best of the best. I'm not saying that’s an organisation design or a process that I would advocate, that people have to scramble when things fail, but in those early days, when GOV.UK was relatively newly launched, and we were going through that transition of from being built to run, those were the days where maybe the operations weren’t in place yet for dealing with everything that might come at us. There was a lot of all hands to the pump scrambling in those days, but it always came right and was poetry to watch. (Laughter) Those moments would actually be the moments where you would be most proud of the team and to be part of it. When it comes down to it these people are really amazing. Angus Montgomery: Finally, what’s the thing you are going to miss the most? Neil Williams: Well, it’s the people, isn’t it? That’s a cheesy thing to say, but it’s genuinely true. I've made some amazing friends here. Some people who I hope I can call lifelong friends. Many people who have already left GDS, who I'm still in touch with and see all the time. It’s incredible coming into work and working with people who are so likeminded, and so capable, and so trusting of each other, and so funny. I laugh all the time. I come into work and it’s fun. It’s so much fun. And we’re doing something so important, and we’re supporting each other. The culture is just so good, and the people are what makes that. Cheesy as it may be, it’s you Angus. I'm going to miss you. Angus Montgomery: It’s all about the people. Oh, thank you. That was a leading question. (Laughter) Neil Williams, thank you so much for doing that and best of luck in the future. We will miss you lots. Neil Williams:  Thanks very much. Thank you. Angus Montgomery: So that wraps up the very first Government Digital Service podcast. I hope you enjoyed it - we’re aiming to do lots more episodes of this, we’re aiming to do around 1 episode a month and we’re going to be talking to lots of exciting and interesting people both inside GDS and outside GDS and we’re going to be talking about things like innovation and digital transformation and user-centred design and all sorts of interesting things like that, so if you’d like to listen to future episodes please go to wherever it is you get your podcasts and subscribe to listen to us in the future. And I hope you enjoyed that episode and I hope you listen to more. Thankyou very much.