Rohan Silva
“Never let a good crisis go to waste.” That’s what I used to say to my team when we tried to get my company Second Home through the hellish global pandemic.
Hopefully Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng are saying the same thing as they grapple with the currency crisis enveloping the Government. Because there is an opportunity at hand, however hard it might be to see it right now.
The financial markets are spooked because the Government’s proposed tax cuts will add considerably to public-sector debt — and people want to know how all this will be paid for.
In other words, what bits of government spending are going to be cut? That’s where the opportunity comes in.
Of course if cutting costs just means closing hospitals or reducing the number of cops on the streets, then clearly that’s a terrible outcome.
But what if you harness the power of technology to transform public services — making them better and more efficient at the same time?
A former Labour cabinet minister once told me that he only started seeing innovation and new ideas in his department when his budget was cut — because until then there had been no impetus to change the way things had always worked. Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say.
This is a massive subject, and only a short column, but let me quickly illustrate the potential for technology to make things better without necessarily needing to spend more money.
A techie mate of mine has been spending time with the ambulance service, as there’s a lot of concern about how long people are having to wait for medical help.
My friend makes the point that ambulance call centre operators have to do a heroic — and almost impossible — job. When someone dials 999, these operators need to compute vast amounts of information within seconds.
They need to figure out how serious the emergency might be. They then need to work out whether to send an ambulance, a car or a motorbike - each has its pros and cons.
Having worked this out, they need to assign a specific vehicle — and that’s where where things get really tricky. Ambulance crews need regular breaks, and also have to finish their shifts at specific points - plus you also want to predict which hospital will have the shortest queue, and send the ambulance there.
Technology could help with all this - for example, rudimentary AI software could crunch the different variables, and then give recommendations to the call centre operator about exactly which ambulance to send, and which hospital to route them to.
And digital tools could help choose the optimal spots for ambulance depots to be based — as well as better forecast demand, which would enable ambulance trusts to allocate staff and other resources more efficiently.
If we did this, we could reduce ambulance waiting times without spending more money — and there are countless more opportunities like this across the public sector.
I totally get that it’s a hard - and sometimes counterintuitive - message that we don’t always have to spend more on our public services to get better results.
But if we use technology in an intelligent way, it truly is possible.
In other news...
Goodbye to Hilary Mantel — one of the greatest English writers of all time.
I was once lucky enough to give a speech straight after her — and she was absolutely amazing, even if I wasn’t.
We were both speaking at an LSE graduation ceremony — and Hilary told a story about how, when she was a law student, she’d walk past the library cloakroom, and could hear the bags whispering to her, as if their owners’ souls were trapped inside.
Hilary soon figured that if you’re hearing bags talking to you, you’re probably not cut out to be a lawyer — you’re best off becoming a writer.
I was so mesmerised by her monologue that when it was my turn to talk, I’d totally forgotten what I was going to say — and flunked my speech in a colossal way.
It was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life — but I’m so glad it happened, because it means I can say I once stood on stage with the magnificent, incandescent, Hilary Mantel.
