Lessons from a scandal

17 January 2024 | The 4th edition of The Apolitical View by Apolitical CEO and Co-Founder Robyn Scott. Subcribe to the newsletter

In this week's edition:

• Lessons for leaders from the UK's Post Office scandal
• Code for America’s Jennifer Pahlka on AI in government
• You've got to try generative AI for yourself

Procurement and training may be two of the least glamorous words in government. But leaders ignore them at their peril. For readers outside the UK, the country has been gripped by a new television series, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, dramatising one of the broadest miscarriages of justice in UK history. Mysterious accounting errors led the Post Office (which is publicly owned) to sack and prosecute hundreds of village sub-postmasters. It took years to prove the financial losses were, in fact, caused by a glitching computer system procured from a large global corporation and not mass fraud by stalwarts of their local community. Lives have been ruined. The story may be UK-specific, but the lessons are more broadly applicable.

Follow the money. Procurement in government is fairly scandalous at the best of times. Large tenders often take so long to be awarded that by the time a decision is made, the scope is often out of date. And despite some notable attempts to speed things up and include more small companies in the supply chain, the vast majority of the circa $13 trillion spent each year by government on private contractors still goes to a handful of giant corporations. In the UK, for example, just one in five pounds of direct government procurement went to small or medium businesses in 2021. With little competition, there’s comparably little pressure on these vendors to deliver value for the taxpayer and citizens. As a result, around the world, even those large corporate vendors found to have made egregious errors like those in the Post Office scandal often soon see more contracts coming their way.

Put (trained) humans in the loop. One of the reasons the UK Post Office scandal took so long to resolve was that the individuals involved, from the accused to the investigators, were hesitant to believe the system was producing random errors. Had all those involved been given better training in digital technologies and its limitations, they might have had less default trust in the dodgy system. This lesson is especially critical when it comes to AI. While AI has huge potential to improve government operations and service delivery, if the people involved are not trained to understand and mitigate how it can go wrong, we’ll see even worse miscarriages of justice, such as the Dutch benefits algorithm scandal.

Another insight from the scandal is the power of community. The Post Office told each postmaster experiencing these errors that they were the only ones. When in fact hundreds of people, literally, were in the same boat — sometimes working just a few miles apart. If the postmasters had been able to connect with each other sooner, compare notes and problem-solve together, would the story have turned out differently? This is one of the reasons I co-founded Apolitical — to help solve problems by tapping into local and global government best practice.

Robyn Scott

Apolitical CEO & Co-Founder

My recommendations

Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America and former US Deputy Chief Technology Officer, is one of the standard bearers for the need to reform procurement and build capability. A friend of Apolitical, I recommend her book, Recoding America (which was reviewed on Apolitical) to everyone and follow her closely. Last week, she testified to the US Senate on harnessing AI to improve government services and customer experience. Key insights include that government’s primary need is not for a very specialised talent pool but for people who know how to use AI models. I recommend reading a write-up of the testimony.

In our diary this week

Wed 17 Jan | AI and Political Leadership: Pitfalls & Possibilities | Davos, Switzerland Hosted by co-founder Lisa Witter and our sister organisation, the Apolitical Foundation.

Sat 20 Jan | UK GovCamp | London, UK The Apolitical team will be at this ‘unconference’ of 500 UK public servants on how to make government work better.

Wed 24 Jan | Design & Delivery | Online Our monthly virtual event showcases brilliant policy design and delivery work from around the world and next up we have Danish designer and design-thinking legend Christian Bason. Register to join.

And finally...

Use AI or it will use you. At the Digital-Design-Life (DLD) conference in Munich on Friday, AI expert Azeem Azhaar interviewed me and my co-founder, Lisa, on AI’s impact on government and democracy. I was struck that in a casual poll of the (tech heavy) audience, less than 20% were net positive about the effect of AI on government and democracy. By contrast, in polling of our government community, a majority of often tech-cautious government officials are net positive. Azeem’s closing question was the one thing we wished for in 2024. My wish was that government leaders would roll up their sleeves and use generative AI themselves. I gave an example of a senior government leader who’d launched an AI team but had yet to put a single query into ChatGPT or equivalent, instead watching their kids. You have got to be experimenting with generative AI yourself to understand the technology and make it an ally rather than an adversary. I recommend Perplexity for a user-friendly entry into the world of generative AI.

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