“We get fixated with “can we share the data”, rather than why we should share the data.”
Last week, we interviewed Gary Leeming for the latest in our Capacity Conversations series. Gary is the director of The Civic Data Co-operative (CDC). He’s also a highly respected member of the UK’s civic data community. It was an intriguing window into the work of CDC, a team of 12 people that’s part of the Civic Health Innovation Labs at the University of Liverpool’s Faculty of Health and Life Sciences.
Ask around and CDC’s reputation is growing. Increasingly influential in public service innovation in the city region, their work crisscrosses research in public health and social care. We’re speaking just a few weeks after CDC published Greater Data – a blueprint for the use of public data in the Liverpool City Region. We asked Gary about the report and CDC’s work. He didn’t always stick to the script. But the conversation was all the better for it.
Emma Lord, Sara Chattun and Gary Leeming.
Hello Gary, thanks for taking part in Capacity Conversations. Tell us a bit about Greater Data and the work of CDC.
Every day we make decisions about our public services. Where do we want to build a new GP practice? What kind of care and early help do we need for young families? CDC’s work is about helping to make better decisions through data and involving more people in making those decisions.
How we make decisions and how they shape our lives and our communities is something we need to start doing better. That’s at the heart of our work. The role of the CDC was probably felt most sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic. Across the region, we saw the impact of COVID on care homes and the wider population. Liverpool had one of the highest infection rates in the country.
That’s why the region was chosen as the pilot for a community testing programme. CDC was working with the NHS, national government, local council, the army – pretty much everyone – to build a system in real-time to prove if testing would work. It did. Liverpool was able to open up in ways other parts of the country couldn’t and keep infection rates low.
The testing was focused, rightly, on elderly people but also left young people trapped in their homes. We worked on the Events Research Programme. It was a series of concerts, business and club events that allowed young people to enjoy the things we’d all taken for granted before the pandemic. I can still remember the fear of not knowing if it would work. But also, the hope and pride that we played a part in getting young people out, safely, to dance and party again before anywhere else.
We usually think about data as hard numbers. How are lived experiences integrated into civic data and the work CDC does?
Too often the human component is missing. We want people to feel things are being done with them, rather than to them. Projects like ‘Round Ere’, a community-led health project designed by CDC and Capacity in Widnes, is our response. We trained 15 local people to talk to friends, family and neighbours about what makes them feel well.
My point is, that it gave us a great grounding in understanding how we bring people into decisions that affect them. My colleague Emily led it, you can read about it here.
That’s where the opportunity for lived experience comes in. Instead of capturing data that is easy to collect, or because ‘these are the problems’, we want to shift our thinking and see how can we can measure the things that actually make positive changes.
Trust kept coming up as a recurring theme in Greater Data. How do you enable trust in data sharing at a system, organisational and individual level, so that people just expect it to happen?
Simon Burrell from Involve, who sadly passed away recently, helped us to set up our public participation programme. He would say ‘trust isn’t earned or given; trust is demonstrated’. So, we need processes that prove trust. I’ve been recommending a book called ‘Power to the People’. Its starting point is that government is a good thing. It helps us to deliver all of these different services to people.
It’s an interesting framing for how we use technology and data in the public sector. Because the systems and technology seem designed to break trust, not deliberately – just by virtue of the fact that technology often doesn’t seem work for us.
If we can make things more transparent and understandable and easier to use, we can establish that trust. Trust is essential to making progress in the public data space and better outcomes for people who use public services.
A lot of people expect data to be shared for better health outcomes and in a lot of instances, it isn’t. It seems reasonable to most people that if you have an accident, then A&E will have access to your medical records. But, the legal system is perceived as restricting data-sharing even though it’s a good thing to do. There’s a fear within the system.
We get fixated with ‘can we share the data?’, rather than why we should share the data. I’ve recently started saying (and I’m just waiting to get into trouble for it), information governance should never get in the way of us doing the right thing. If it does, it’s failed. Think about issues of sharing data around child protection or detecting when a victim of domestic abuse is taken between different A&E units and a pattern of violence is emerging. We could be making a difference, but we hide some of the data and we’re afraid to use it.
The data protection system has absolutely been designed for the right reasons. People’s medical data should be confidential and protected. But it should be used for the right purpose and we should find ways to make that happen.
How does the work of CDC integrate with the city region’s ambitions for the Office for Public Service Innovation?
Obviously the business case for OPSI is still being developed. But thinking about public service innovation, for me it’s really about how we transform our thinking from measurement and determining the scale of a problem, to how we’re going to fix it and fix it with the people we’re talking about.
One of the first pieces of research we commissioned through ‘What’s Your Problem?’ was with Koala to understand why people don’t engage with services or engage too late – past the point where help could really help. How do we use data to improve people’s lives by genuinely involving them? What data is collected, why it’s collected, that’s the opportunity for OPSI.
Some services are never going to be efficient, and we wouldn’t want them to be. Think about Meals on Wheels, it’s a service that’s never going to be efficient. We might use an algorithm to shave a few minutes off the route, but there are people who might want their meals at 1.30, not midday, and forcing them to fit into an algorithm could leave them with cold meals every day. Those simple, powerful human interactions are what’s really important.
And the other thing we must do is get away from short-term planning. Large companies deal in 20–30-year cycles, and that’s what we need to see real change in our public services. We don’t give ourselves enough permission to do that.
Final question. Thinking about the future of Greater Data. What would success look like in 12-18 months?
Let me give you three off the top of my head.
We’re keen to establish a community of practitioners who are interested in data. Everyone is so heads down it’s difficult to share information. So, we’re planning a series of meet-ups that bring together the public and private sector and VCSE community. And to do more about capturing the role of community in civic data, creating a sense that everyone can be involved. That includes another AI event, building on the success of the event we held in spring.
And, finally, something much more pragmatic. We want to deliver a programme focussed on a real, live issue. I’m not sure what it is yet, but let’s test some of these processes, accepting that some of it might not work. What we can do is create a positive experience about how it can work, ideally across the city region with multiple organisations.
Gary thanks for your time!
Funded by LCR Combined Authority, CDC’s work is radical and original. It recognises that a new world in open, civic data is coming, and coming fast.
Gary brings simplicity and a thoughtful enthusiasm to often complex subjects. He is, rightly, proud of his team and the work CDC do and very quick to credit his team for the reputation CDC has built in the civic data space. If you’d like to find out more about the work CDC is doing across Liverpool City Region, check out their website.
If you’d like to recommend someone doing brilliant things in public service innovation for a future Capacity Conversation, please get in touch comms@thisiscapacity.co.uk