The House Article | Councils are leading the way on using tech to reform public services

4 min read12 min

The Ministry of Justice has sent a clear signal to the legal world: the era of the dusty ledger is over. The government is, rhetorically at least, leaning into the potential of technology to tackle the Crown Court backlog, as it has in other departments. As a founder who has spent years building tools to navigate these very challenges, I back the intent.

It’s a vision the Prime Minister feels strongly about.

He has publicly shared his frustration with the culture of paper files during his time running the Crown Prosecution Service. I’ve spoken with him directly about the truly transformational potential home grown technology has for public sector reform.

However, as any founder who has tried to sell a transformative idea to a government department will tell you, the “what” is often inspiring, but the “how” remains the bottleneck.

While Whitehall stumbles forward, there is revolution brewing in town halls. Local authorities across the UK are increasing spending on UK-born innovative technology at a rate that puts central departments to shame.

AI is increasingly being used by social care teams to create accurate, compliant social care documentation, saving over-stretched frontline workers over a day per week. Faced with the tightest budgets in a generation, councils have become the ultimate friends of innovation. Their fiscal constraints and little press coverage for their work show they don’t harness new technology to make a point or because it gives them a headline. They buy it because it secures them much-needed efficiencies, enhances their thin resources, and improves their services for the people they represent. It allows them to do more with less.

They are proving that harnessing tested and secure technology isn’t about replacing the soul of public service. It is about stripping away the administrative sludge that prevents human beings from doing their jobs.

My own experience with government procurement has been a mixed bag, which is a sentiment shared by many in the tech ecosystem. On one hand, there is a genuine desire to engage with SMEs. On the other, state machinery still favours the safe, the slow, and the scale of legacy providers.

The centre of government talks a good game about harnessing technology in its quest to bring services closer to people. In some areas, there’s been decent progress. The use of Claude in the gov.uk app is one. But there is a massive opportunity being missed by treating tech as a procurement exercise rather than a partnership. To truly reform public services, we must move beyond the buyer-vendor dynamic. We need a system that values the speed of a startup and the sovereignty of British-built AI, rather than one that bogs us down in eighteen-month tender cycles that risk outliving the technology itself.

This byzantine system is not only holding back government ambition. It also risks undermining the ambition of UK tech founders. Many of my fellow founders are ramping up focus on selling technology in the US, Europe and Australia, where it is already driving public service reform. It is somewhat absurd that UK tech is driving efficiencies in over a dozen countries around the world before Whitehall wakes up. 

Political will is needed to demand change in the boiler room of Whitehall.

The whole of the UK tech ecosystem has ideas about how to jump this barrier, including changes to the procurement process so specialist startups can compete; increased risk tolerance, accepting that not every pilot will work, but the ones that do will save billions; and a call for buying in proven technologies to be considered on level pegging with building from scratch in-house.

Systemic change is needed, but the first step is in many ways far simpler. We need to ensure Whitehall allows a turbocharged AI-enabled reform of services, to be accompanied by a celebration of UK innovation. UK plc stands ready.

Alex Stephany is founder and CEO of Beam