CIO interview: Dylan Roberts, CDIO, Leeds City Council

Creating lasting benefits for citizens

Since becoming CDIO at Leeds, Roberts points to a number of key achievements, including creating the “city as a platform” approach, which aims to deal with the increase in demand for public services at the same time as budget cuts. The approach ensures service delivery is focused on outcomes that are enabled by the effective use of digital, data and technology in communities.

Under Roberts’ leadership, Leeds has become the UK’s fastest-growing digital ecosystem outside London. The ecosystem includes a range of technology partners, such as Canon, and public service providers, including third-sector parties, independent providers, community groups and charities. These groups draw on the city’s digital approach to deliver services that meet people’s individual needs.

Last year, Roberts also led a successful bid for the Yorkshire and Humberside region to become a Local Health and Care Record Exemplar (LHCRE). These exemplars will each receive up to £7.5m over two years to put in place an electronic shared record that makes information about people instantly available to everyone involved in care and support.

In the case of the Yorkshire and Humberside region, the successful bid involved the engagement, coordination and agreement of 86 organisations. Work on the LHCRE continues and Roberts recognises that this, and his work around the digital ecosystem, are significant achievements. Yet he believes his biggest triumph over the past two years is the focus on citizen outcomes.

“There are many achievements, but that’s the key,” he says. “And it’s something that should not be underestimated – the delivery of citizen-centred outcomes is something that you can’t do as individual organisations.”

Using digital to include everyone

Roberts gives an example of a project that is just beginning. Leeds City Council owns 57,000 council houses, including 116 blocks of flats. This council accommodation is located in the some of the poorest and most deprived areas of the UK. Roberts says the aim is to use digital to enable better outcomes.

“We’ve been able to convene partners connected to those flats,” he says. “Numerous community organisations engage with the people who live in the accommodation. When we run our digital literacy programme, 32% of the people in those flats are digitally excluded and aren’t online.”

The digital initiative pulls in professionals from a broad range of organisations, says Roberts. This includes funding from the Cabinet Office’s GovTech Catalyst challenge programme, which helps the public sector to identify and work with cutting-edge technology firms around developments in home-management technologies, such as damp and heat monitoring. Roberts says these automated smart-home technologies can help vulnerable citizens to reduce their bills.

“Digital inclusion is a hugely important area,” he says. “As a standard part of our offering as a council, we believe everyone in Leeds has to be digitally literate. We don’t train people directly on how to get online. We train lots of people in voluntary and third-sector organisations, who are engaging with people in housing on a day-to-day basis, on how to get online.”

Connecting the community ecosystem

Further work around digital inclusion continues. The council is looking to secure funding from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to help push fibre connectivity to homes. Other priorities include accessing funding to help schools and students become connected. Roberts says his job is to lead developments in this area.

“The CDIO role is almost a convening role – we need to create better outcomes,” he says. “What we’re able to do is to convene different stakeholders from across the city, and different national funding pots, in common outcomes. We’re connecting the community ecosystem – and technology has a massive role to play.”

Roberts gives the example of St George’s crypt in Leeds, which provides food for homeless people. The council has established one of the biggest tablet-lending schemes in the UK in the crypt.

People who work at the crypt receive tablet computers, are trained in how to get people online, and these specialists then help homeless individuals use the web for individualised requirements, such as bidding for council housing, applying for Universal Credit, and connecting with family members.

“Everyone can be engaged through a digital platform,” says Roberts. “We’re pulling together multiple strands.”

Roberts has a range of key priorities for the next few years. These include delivering full-fibre connectivity to 1,180 public sector endpoints across the Leeds metropolitan area. As an LHCRE exemplar, Roberts also had to deliver the Yorkshire and Humber digital care record programme – and that’s no straightforward task.

He says it’s important to be both practical and realistic in terms of expected outcomes for the initiative. The care record partnership involves 80-plus organisations with a range of healthcare systems, and the aim is to develop what Roberts calls “a system of systems” for the region.

Although something similar has already been established in the city of Leeds for the past five years, this integrated infrastructure for the region will give professionals in health and care organisations secure access to joined-up citizen records.

“This will enable us to create a longitudinal and combined care record for as many as seven million people,” says Roberts.

“We are in the process of doing that right now – and we’re doing it through open standards. We will have dealt with all the information governance and data ethics, and we’ll have a record that will enable new knowledge. We can point artificial intelligence at that anonymised data, so, from a research point of view, we can develop significant new insights.”

Roberts says this work is crucial because life expectancy varies significantly across the region, by as much as 12 years. “If, through better data analytics around our population, we can start to design personalised medicine plans, these targeted interventions could help people in the poorest areas enjoy at least five more healthy, independent years of life,” he says.

“By the end of March 2021, I’d like to be in a position to say that we have that longitudinal care record and that the platform will allow us and research organisations to develop new capabilities. As a result of that work, I’d hope by 2030 or 2035 that we’re getting to a point where we’re providing those five extra, healthy years to those who have a lower life expectancy right now.”