2031 — A Digital Odyssey

🔁 TL;DR: This is an article I wrote in 2020 and this is why I’m republishing it

Back in 2020, before generative AI hit the mainstream, I wrote this piece exploring how local government could shift from reactive service delivery to proactive, event-driven design using shared ledgers, automated planning validation, and person/property-linked data models. With the direction now being set by forward-thinking strategies like Jens Gemmel (von Döllinger) ’s Reimagining Local Government in the AI Age, it felt like the right moment to resurface it.

The ideas in there while all technical feasible at the time may have once seemed like distant speculation because of the economic viability of them.

💡 What’s different now?

We finally have the enabling architecture to build this — from agentic AI for planning, prevention, and triage to Model Context Protocol (MCP) for secure interoperability between AI systems and public sector data. What was theory is fast becoming infrastructure.

2031 — A Digital Odyssey

Enveloping ourselves into a multidimensional vortex of time travel, let’s go on an odyssey to see how things change between now and 2031.

And change they most definitely will.

A renaissance in service delivery

Looking back from 2031, we’ll see that we were on the cusp of enlightenment. The cusp of an age of data, orchestration and automation. We’d see that in 2021, we rose to the precipice of a renaissance that had its genesis catalysed by a pandemic not seen in a century.

As with any renaissance driven by a traumatic event: "It's always darkest before the dawn".

To help us visualise this new age, we need to first consider the difference between how work is done today and how it will in future.

Isaac Newton’s 3rd Law of motion says that every action has a reaction. This is also true of how we work today. Virtually all work and activity in government is instigated by human driven input (action) and subsequent output (reaction).

E.g. A person lives alone, they apply for a discount and a new bill is issued. A person’s bin is not collected — they report the event for action to take place and the council sends a crew to collect it. A cyclist crashes into a pothole — they tell the council about the issue and its remediation is planned.

Almost all queries and transactions made to local government are driven by reaction. When this is scaled across the entire ecosystem of >1200 services that are delivered by government, it’s not difficult to realise there’s an inordinate cost to administering all of the service specific gubbins.

If we go back further than Newton, the earliest philosophers such as Marcus Aurelius, challenge us to think in first principles. Essentially saying you need to start with why.

Why do we issue new council tax bills? Why do waste crews need to return to collect a missed bin? Why does a tenant report the same repair multiple times? Why does a person become homeless?

Simplistically, the reasons of reaction comprise four high-level areas:

- Planned events (I am moving house, My partner became a student, I want to make a payment)

- Events of contention/issues (My bin was not collected, My neighbour is planning to build an extension that will block my view)

- Random/unplanned events (My council house roof was damaged in bad weather, I lost my job, I became unwell)

- Aggregated events of circumstance (Became financially troubled/started gambling/became homeless)

As we wrote earlier, with enough interlinked data, orchestrated pre-determination is possible, and this helps to shape our thought process on optimum service designs.

Humans will, largely, remain as the drivers of reactions, however, it’s the orchestrated and automated chain of subsequent reactions that will change in the next decade. One of the pillars of driving this is the ‘solid’ ledger.

‘Solid’ Ledgers

One of the first areas of change will be with the realisation that with technologies like blockchain and distributed ledgers, the challenges of centralisation, localisation and data sharing can crumble away; both technically and politically.

To help explain, let’s look at that most complex of government organisations in the UK — the council. Councils have departments that each deliver specific services (Gubbins) and which largely all hold people and properties:

It’s evident from the above that, clearly, it does not make sense for each of the service areas within a council to hold facsimiles of the same properties and people. There is only one property and there is only one person. Technological legacy, regulation and fear has caused the above.

But what if all properties were held in a distributed ledger, which was updatable in a consistent and secure manner; in the same way Georgia has already done so.

This ledger might have a data model like this for every property in the UK:

We can see that the data associated with a property in such a model is significantly more rich than a UPRN. In the UK, there is far too much focus on a local LLPG because of a lack of such a real-time synchronicity of a ledger. Every software tender/RFP for a digital platform today asks for integration to the council’s own LLPG. Entire ecosystems of cost and wasted effort multiple hundreds of times over.

A property ledger would still provide the benefits of being updated by planning/land registry/building control/street name and numbering, it would simply also be an updatable pod for other permitted organisations.

To provide a practical example, in a blockchain ledger world, planning will be enabled to become less about paper and drawings and start being about data and interactive 3D representations.

Advances in AI and, in particular machine learning, mean will ensure planning decisions are automated. Machine learning will ensure this decision engine iteratively enhances and optimises itself based upon successful/appealed outcomes. To bridge any delays in the shift to this model, organisations like Intelligent AI (headed by AI thought leader Anthony Peake ) are using the same tech to provide a ‘digital twins’ capability to insurance companies.

With a data driven approach, Augmented Reality and the advent of formats like USDZ councillors/neighbours will see the prospective development/changes before they happen in exquisite detail. Such technology is obviously not specific to the UK; adherence to code and preventing code violations in the US could also be materialised by such a change.

Such property blockchain ledgers would go far beyond the scope of a council. Solicitors will be able to record property sales /title deeds updates. Estate agents are able to record who the current tenant is and the fact they live alone directly against the ledger.

A blockchain of people

The moniker ‘Solid’ ledger from earlier was no accident. 30 years ago, a British chap Tim Berners-Lee invented what has become the internet. That same Tim has an open-source wonder called Solid. In the same way the ledgers are described above, Tim provides the concept of pods, which are enable citizens to give granular control of their data to external organisations.

This would include private sector organisations like Facebook/Instagram that might use your data in a more insidious manner. Importantly, whatever an organisation’s intent, you choose who gets your data, what they get and when they get it (you can remove access).

Taking this principle in a public sector context, we can see that against each of the service areas from before, there are duplicate/triplicate…n versions of the same person held. All with different versions of the same person and administrative/system processes to ensure effective information governance. A permission-based person ledger would only permit a line of business access to a person (and the bits relevant to them) for the time it was appropriate. Importantly, the person themselves could relinquish this access if appropriate.

It is this area where the greatest level of change can manifest and, below, we can see the line of business applications now only being responsible for the gubbins and not data management:

So much, rightly, is made of data protection but the practices and controls in place today are largely about protecting the organisations that hold the data; to the detriment of service provision for citizens.

Citizens need to tell multiple organisations the same information many times because the organisations are unwilling, unable (legislative/technical reasons), or are simply too scared of the risks to share data; even where this is what the citizen wants.

Such a ledger will require effective standards for the data models and organisations like iStandUK and work by NHS have made this all the simpler to realise.

Chain reactions

Let’s illustrate the power of what we’ve described by way of an example. The most fundamental of the life events is moving home. It also happens to be a great exemplar of a chain reaction. So in this move:

• Person 1 is selling home A in Council X to Person 2 and is buying/moving into home B with Person 3 in Council Y
• Person 2 is buying home A in Council X having moved out of their parents home C in Council X
• Person 3 is renting home D in Council Z and is also buying/moving into home B in Council Y
• Person 4 will be renting home D in Council Z having moved out of their parents home E in Council Z

This can be visualised like so with green lines showing where the person is moving to and red where they’re moving from:

It’s hard to comprehend the complexity of what this means in today’s ways of working; even in terms of only the council based updates. So let’s consider just Person 1.

In practice they’ll need to report their moves to the two separate councils’ council tax and electoral registry departments as well as the benefits, housing, social care, education and waste departments if it is relevant or necessary. They’d also need to do the same with central government, their bank, their GP and more:

What we can take away from the above is those that have the most touch points and interactions with government the worse this is. Remember, this was person 1 of 5. The number of these interactions in practice is five-fold.

In 2031, they chuckle at the folly of this. With Solid ledgers for people and properties the solicitor acting on behalf of Person 1 removes them property A and adds them to Property B. Person 1 has already set their permissions to notify all of the organisations involved that are connected to them to re-synchronise. Meaning all systems are synchronised to automatically, all closing bills and notifications generated in both councils including all of the external organisations.

These savings explode when you consider the other 4 people in the chain all getting the same benefits.

Boiling the ocean

Many large scale government projects have resulted in wild economic waste. Caused by focusing on technology rather than an outcome. The creation of distributed property/person ledgers is of course ambitious and could be seen as attempting to ‘boil the ocean’. But this does not need to be done overnight nor nationally at the outset and there’s a mighty big reason to do it.

Ageing demographics in the UK mean public sector costs for health care, social care, and pensions will increase disproportionately to those of working age.

These changes are fundamentally about massively reducing the administrative burden of reacting to actions taken by the public across over a thousand services. Transitioning to improved services driven by a proactive approach. The renaissance that leads to better services is in 2031 is not driven by technological aspiration.

No, it is driven by the rational and objective assertion that we cannot afford to continue with such legacy approaches to data and its use in effective and cost effective service provision.

2021 follows the most challenging year since World War 2. It will be the year we rise up, phoenix like, to challenge the norms of yesteryear and master difficulties to win the opportunities realised in 2031.

ps if you made it this far here's an all new visual: