Podcast
At Play In The Garden of Eden
Hosted by Joe Tibbetts · EN
Two men, one an American Ai engineer and game designer living in Seattle and an English documentary film maker living in Dover, England in conversation about AI, documentaries, chess, human stupidity and the future of the human race.
83episodes
Episodes
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The Circular Economy Show No3
Jun 8, 201900:47:52Tap to summarizeDr David Greenfield asks Adam Woodhall, spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion and Cat Fletcher, head of media at Freegle to explain how sharing will deliver a less resource-greedy world. Fresh from April's Extinction Rebellion protests in London, and with plenty of stories from the heart of the activity, Adam Woodhall told the CLGdotTV audience that sharing thinking about use of resources via protests sets the stage for sort of practical action that can be facilitated by organisations like Freegle. Freegle was founded in 2009 and aims to increase reuse and reduce landfill by offering a free online service where people can give away and ask for things that would otherwise be thrown away. Cat Fletcher said that the impact of Extinction Rebellion for the organisation and its 1000+ volunteers was immediate and positive. She stressed that the benefits of sharing are not just about the environment either. There is a human connection made whenever something is passed from one person to another, to become part of a different life. As Reuse Manager at Brighton and Hove City Council, Cat's day job is equally concerned with saving stuff the council doesn't need any more for further use - in unbelievable quantities – which, as she explains is a far better outcome than recycling, where products have to be taken apart (more use of resources) before anything can be done with them.
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A safe place for whistleblowers
Jun 8, 201900:27:53Tap to summarizeJoe Tibbetts talks to Richard Vize a journalist well known in the public sector/delivery of public services space, Kushi Gujral of Protect the whistleblowers charity and Georgina Charlton of Guys and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust. Whistleblowing has been around for a long time as people have felt compelled, often at significant personal cost, to report wrongdoing by colleagues at work whether fraud, professional misconduct, bullying or mistreatment of people in care. As our panel explains, the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 has been a game changer, since it provides legal protection to workers from detrimental treatment or victimisation from their employer if, in the public interest, they blow the whistle on wrongdoing. Protect runs a legally privileged confidential helpline for people in public and private sectors who want to raise concerns about something happening at work, with the majority of enquiries coming from education, health and social care. Advances in last few years in getting organisations to take it in board are encouraging - but there is more to be done.
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Digital maps get more people more involved in the local community
Apr 25, 201900:31:30Tap to summarizePaul Clarke of Esri UK, Graeme McDonald of Solace and Stuart Cole of Oxfordshire County Council explain how crowd-sourced, interactive maps help create active citizens. Stuart Cole, who is part of the Innovation team at Oxfordshire County Council says that digital maps are enabling a whole new degree of interaction between local authorities and the people who live 'in their patch'. Citizens can contribute their local knowledge (eg reporting potholes or problems with footpaths) and their views (eg about local development plans) and councils can share this crowd-sourced data with them in a time and cost-effective way. Map-based tools are also helping galvanise local volunteers to support local services like libraries and parks and an important consequence of this is that it tends to increase people's interest in their local area and its publicly available facilities. These developments have been facilitated by significant improvements in the usability and presentation of digital mapping tools, so that they are much easier for the non-specialist to use than they were even five years ago.
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Councils, households and businesses face major changes from Government Waste Strategy
Apr 25, 201900:28:49Tap to summarizeDr David Greenfield draws out key aspects of the current Strategy consultation with Robert Vaughan and Linda Crichton of Defra, and Stuart Hayward-Higham of SUEZ Recyling & Recovery. Our second edition of the New Circular Economy Show focused on the consultation - due to complete May 18 - on measures that will have a major impact on household waste collections. The consultations cover proposals including deposit return schemes (DRS) in which people will be paid for returning drinks containers; extended producer responsibilities (EPR) under which producers will need to produce packaging that is easier for households to recycle; and measures to encourage greater consistency in council waste collection arrangements. Issues discussed that are likely to be close to the hearts of local politicians, waste managers, local businesses and householders include: the Strategy's ambition to raise national recycling rates from 45% to 65% by 2035; the desire for a 'dramatic' rise in weekly food waste collection from its current base of 15%; possible introduction of free garden waste collections; and greater consistency in what and how councils collect for recycling including the suggestion that bin colours should standardize According to Stuart Hayward-Higham a big part of the challenge is behaviour change, since achievement of a 60% recycling rate requires '90% of people to do 90% of the right things 90% of the time.' Details of future New Circular Economy Shows, presented in collaboration with Dr David Greenfield can be found on CLGdotTV's eventbrite page ('follow' this page to receive alerts about future events).
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Fraud may not feature as a council corporate risk – but should do
Apr 24, 201900:26:26Tap to summarizeRachael Tiffen, Local Government Director at Cifas, and Essex CC Head of Assurance Paula Clowes, discuss why fraud isn't a higher priority for councils and why it should be In 2013, the National Fraud Authority estimated that local authority fraud cost the taxpayer £2.1bn. That's a lot of money, but when it comes to individual councils, fraud may not make in onto the corporate risk register because fraud losses known to individual departments are seldom aggregated at corporate level. Were councils to add up total losses from fraud across all areas, they would be better able to see the size of the problem and allocate resources to tackling it, focusing on areas like housing, schools, social care, and procurement where the biggest problems are likely to be found. And the cost is not just financial: as we hear in this discussion, the impact is also on members of the public, who may miss out on homes, school places and other services, and on council staff, who may be affected in all sorts of ways by the actions of a dishonest colleague. This programme takes a high level look at fraud prevention and discovery as a curtain-raiser to a series CLGdotTV and Cifas will be rolling out over coming weeks, looking at different aspects of fraud in more detail, and presenting some case studies. Rachael and Paula's conversation includes information about some recent frauds, including one in which a finance officer siphoned off £2m from Barnet Council to fund a gambling habit and another in which a headteacher was funding a lavish lifestyle while pupils shivered in their coats because there was no money to heat the classrooms.
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Innovation: every council should have a team like ours
Apr 17, 201900:31:22Tap to summarizeLlewelyn Morgan of Oxfordshire County Council tells CLGdotTV's Joe Tibbetts about iHub, the 24-strong innovation unit he leads that is 80% externally funded. Most of this funding comes from sources like InnovateUK, Horizon2020 and the European Investment Bank: only four posts are currently funded by OCC to do core council activities like transport modeling, research to support policies and business case development. Other-funded work is looking into things like solving the problems of rural transport provision (now that austerity has removed many bus subsidies), piloting use of council assets to provide 'mobility as a service', as well as projects around green energy, public health, drones, and more. The unit has developed provision of 'innovation' as a service to the rest of the council, helping service teams get to grips with the process of innovation so that they have the capabilities to carry forward projects once developed, by themselves. iHub also collaborates with Oxfordshire's universities and local industries to help identify and pilot innovations that can be taken up by the council or elsewhere, in an approach very much in line with the Government's Industrial Strategy. Working in collaboration with commercial brains and adopting a more commercial approach to innovation has been a new and instructive experience for the team. This podcast is sponsored by Rapier Systems Established in 2003, Rapier Systems designs, builds and manages Wireless Infrastructures for clients in the public, private and third sector. Customers range from hospitality to healthcare and aquaculture. An unwavering focus on wireless means we are trusted to manage Scotland's largest Metropolitan Area Network delivered entirely by Wireless and we are the most prolific provider of public realm Wi-Fi in the UK. Responsible for many industry firsts, including first use of true Gigabit Speed Microwave for the NHS in England and Wi-Fi at Sea for the renewable energy sector in Scotland – We Live Wireless!
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Using data to understand and change travel behaviours
Apr 14, 201900:36:11Tap to summarizeStuart Lester of Transport for the West Midlands and Toby Bennett, Local Government Lead at Commonplace discuss how data is being used to manage the travelling public. Transport for the West Midlands is part of the West Midlands Combined Authority which brings together Birmingham, Coventry, Wolverhampton, Sollihull, Dandwell, Dudley and Walsall to bring strategic transport planning to these footprints and to an even larger travel-to-work area that is home to 4.2 million. Commomnplace is an online engagement platform used by local government, developers and others to provide open community engagement to reduce risks arising from regeneration, housing, transport and infrastructure projects. This discussion reveals some of the work being done by TfWM to bring together huge quantities of data, some collected by traditional means as well as 'high velocity data becoming available from mobile networks, CCTV and satnav, and projects carried out by Commonplace to dig deep into community sentiment around controversial projects. Issues also discussed include the problems of sharing data from private and public sectors (trust, commercial sensitivity, GDPR); how to give the travelling public the right amount of information at the right time, and how to persuade people to change travel behaviours that work for them but harm others who may be affected by eg poor air quality.
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Apprentices urge councils to promote the opportunity more widely in local schools
Apr 13, 201900:27:36Tap to summarizeKhadiza heard about apprenticeships at school and, unable to go to university for financial reasons, started at Camden aged 17. Two years later she has achieved level 4 in project management, working within the Economic Development Department. Tahir became an apprentice more recently, after dropping out of university. He has achieved level 3 in business administration working within the council's community safety and emergency team. He'd not previously realised the wide scope of council activity or the careers on offer in the public sector. Both apprentices are enthusiastic about the work (although it is harder than being a student says Tahir…) and the fact they can earn while gaining qualifications. But above all they relish the opportunity to work for, and give back to, the community in which they grew up. Both now have firm ambitions to continue their careers in public service and improve the places where they live. The strong message emerging from the session was that councils should visit their local schools and work with social media to ensure that young people are exposed to information about opportunities on offer via apprenticeships.
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AI could solve capacity problems faced by local planning authorities
Apr 10, 201900:36:08Tap to summarizeBrett Leahy, chief planner at Redbridge and Richard Sankey of Arcus Global explain how smarter planning will deliver a better planning service as well as greater job satisfaction for planners. Planners don't enter the profession to spend their life checking applications for extensions, and chief planners shouldn't find themselves answering phone calls from the public chasing progress. This is still happening in too many councils and it doesn't need to. Application of AI to the planning process in Milton Keynes led to a reduction in planners' live caseloads from 80 per officer to 25 per officer. The planning applications process is very much rules-based and aspects of it like validation (checking drawings and documents and loading them into a document management system) and checking against permitted development rules can be automated. Planning professionals are then freed up to focus on place-shaping and engaging local populations with future development, including the provision of new, council-built housing. Place shaping activity under the local planning framework is also well served by new technologies that through, for example, visualisation can give the public a much better idea of proposed future development.
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Rough sleepers are just the tip of the homelessness iceberg
Apr 1, 201900:40:41Tap to summarizeAndrew Walker, managing the LGiU's Homelessness Commission, Cllr Stephanie Cryan of LB Southwark and Dawn Eckersley of the East London Housing Partnership explain the depth of the housing crisis and how councils are responding The Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 - part of the Government's aim to halve rough sleeping by 2022 and eliminate it by 2027 - has expanded councils' duties significantly and will fundamentally change their approach to the issue. But as our discussion reveals, rough sleeping is simply the most visible manifestation of homelessness, which also takes in the 80,000 plus households in temporary accommodation, and larger numbers in precarious housing, poor housing or reduced to 'sofa surfing' – all situations that could lead to homelessness at any time. This discussion explores how councils are responding to the Homelessness Reduction Act and its challenges, but as importantly, looks at the deep-seated causes of the current housing crisis, from a broken housing market, the impact of Universal Credit, the policy of selling off council homes, and the chronic failure to build new social housing. Further details of the LGiU Homelessness Commission, due to report later this year, and its interim recommendations can be found on the LGiU website. LGiU will be making a series of programmes with CLGdotTV on topics including democracy and elections, childrens' services, the future of the high street, and more. Follow our eventbrite page to receive updates.
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