Opinion: The UK invented the Welfare State, now AI can help protect it
Seb Barker is a former support worker and the Co-Founder of Beam, a company on a mission to use technology to transform how social services support the most vulnerable members of society.
Before setting up Beam, I spent almost a decade working as a support worker in drug rehabilitation and homelessness services. I saw first-hand how the passion of those dedicating their lives to supporting others felt increasingly constrained by demand and time pressures.
Photo by Igor Omilaev
In a few weeks’ time, when the Chancellor stands up to give her first Budget, she is expected to place a significant focus on public sector adoption of AI. Amid the financial pressures facing our government, from local councils to Whitehall departments, harnessing the power of new technologies to transform how social services support the most vulnerable members of our society, has never been more necessary.
I’ve seen many times over my career how the need to fit more meetings into the week and take on more cases, led to mounting administrative burdens. More often than not, this removed frontline workers from their ability to help those in need and robbed them of vital face-to-face conversations.
Witnessing this spurred me to find new systems and tools that would better empower social workers to be present, and find a way to make their day-to-day lives easier. Together with my co-founder Alex Stephany, we founded Beam, a social enterprise on a mission to use technology and AI to help supercharge the efforts of resource-constrained local authorities, who are struggling with record waiting times.
Our Magic Notes tool – which we recently launched more widely following successful pilots across the UK – is the only AI assessment solution designed by care experts and used by frontline professionals in social care to enhance productivity and improve outcomes. Its core capability is creating structured and compliant reports from recordings of conversations between social workers and residents. Piloted in 28 local authorities to date, Magic Notes has cut the time social workers are spending on admin by 12 hours per week on average and is estimated to have the potential to save UK social workers collectively 7,500 years of time a year – savings which with scale could amount to over £2bn annually to taxpayers.
Empowering social workers is just the start, however: with my background on the frontline I see vast potential for AI tools to transform public services in the coming years. For Beam’s part, we are looking to expand our support for frontline workers across housing, employability, probation and other services, which will lead to billions of pounds of savings. We know from our work in homelessness that tens of thousands of hours are wasted each year on paperwork and admin, which could be spent on a better quality of service for people seeking a safe and stable home.
But we can’t do it alone. The government’s proposed AI Opportunities Action Plan consultation rightly identifies using AI in government to transform citizens’ experiences of interacting with the state and increasing public sector take-up as two key priorities.
For this to succeed, AI tools in the public sector need a supportive environment to reach scale. We need to address the blockers to the wider deployment of AI in the public sector by building a specialised procurement regime which enables both local and central government departments to carry out procurement in a nimbler, smarter way if they are piloting the safe and responsible use of AI tools.
As the range and capabilities of AI tools and services continue to develop at pace, local authorities need to be enabled to make the most of this – without compromising personal data – so that services can be designed and built around local needs.
In evidence Beam has submitted to the Government as part of the AI Opportunities Plan, we’ve also suggested that local authorities could be required to appoint a senior responsible officer (SRO) for AI deployment, making it a distinct function and strategic priority at the local level. This would put it on a par with other significant strategic projects being led within local authorities and reflect both the urgency and potential of AI adoption.
AI is transforming our lives and the way all of us work. By harnessing its power, policymakers and officials in central and local government have the ability to truly modernise the welfare state. These changes have the capacity to not only benefit frontline workers but the people relying on social care, as well as the taxpayers who fund them.
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