Focus on Telescope: Kit Collingwood
Kit Collingwood is Chief Digital Officer at Royal Borough of Greenwich Council and is a member of Telescope’s board. She’s a keen advocate of diversity and inclusion, with a focus on gender equality and LGBT+ rights.
We spoke to Kit about her career, and the changes she would like to see in policymaking.
You have had a varied and fascinating career across the civil service and local authority level. Can you start by telling us about your current role at Greenwich Council, and your journey to get there?
I joined Greenwich Council three years ago, and before that I was a civil servant for about a decade. I started my civil service career in policymaking, but quickly became disillusioned because I didn’t feel it was getting to the heart of people’s lives. I moved to digital in 2012, it was a total accident actually! I got a job as a Delivery Manager in a digital team but didn’t know how on earth the internet worked, but I learned very quickly and became Head of Digital for a part of the Ministry of Justice. And then it went on, I joined the Department of Work and Pensions, where I spent three years, and then I took a break from the civil service. I thought I would really like to move into local government and I said to myself, if the job at Greenwich comes up, that’s the Chief Digital Officer role, I really want that job. And it came up within six months, which was a miracle, and I applied for it and got it.
My role at Greenwich is leading digital and customer services. I have a team of about 250 people, which is split between about 160 customer services folk and about 90 digital people. We work right across the organisation, looking after the contact centre and our website, and then we do a lot of partnership working, either on project work for innovation or complete service transformation.
Like all our board members, you have spent your time and energy driving social change in different ways, including setting up One Team Gov. Can you share two stories from your work as a changemaker - one that you're really proud of, and one that you learnt a lot from?
I’ve been privileged to work with so many amazing people and get some really good stuff done, but I think the work I’m doing now is the most rounded so I’m really proud of that. Doing change in local government is really difficult for a number of reasons: cost constraints combined with control cultures, it’s obviously a very political environment, as is central government. The part I’m really proud of is we’ve been able to make the case for change for the variety of roles that digital encompasses but in particular, things like user research. The ability to get really close to people and listen actively in a structured way to what they need and then have enough breadth of skills behind that that we can do things for them.
“Building that bridge between council business and real people and their real lives is something that I’m very grateful to have done.”
And I live in Greenwich, I’m raising my kids here, so I feel very strongly connected to the place and have a great sense of duty to try to make the borough better.
The one that I learned most from was probably a real failure in my career while I was at the Department for Work and Pensions, which has a happy ending, but at the beginning of my time there I was in a bad place mentally and that meant that I wasn’t really able to focus on my career. I felt very lost as a result of that, I was in despair in my personal life and at work I knew that I wasn’t showing up. What I learned from that was how much of my identity I’d put into my career and I had to take a really long, hard look at myself. I went and got some help, had some therapy, underwent some quite major life changes but I’d say it was probably a year before I was actually able to do my job. So, I learned a huge amount about myself during that time.
What were your biggest insights about the policy world from your time in the civil service?
It’s worth saying that my knowledge of policymaking in the civil service is somewhat out of date. But when I was there, and it won’t have changed radically, I found policymaking obviously overwhelmingly driven by ministerial desire. That is the nature of the role: you work to serve ministers, who serve the public, and that is the power dynamic. But the individual personalities and drives of ministers – as well as the party line – had such influence on policymaking and it was proven that the ideas there were not the right thing to do. We had a lot of evidence for that and yet were still duty bound to carry those things through. And every civil servant is signed up to do that to a certain extent, but I found it really difficult and disheartening, the degree to which some of those ministers just didn’t want to listen. That led to a certain amount of hopelessness and a desire for change.
It also wasn’t place based. The civil service is a national outfit and that meant I didn’t really understand the reality of the people that I was, via a Minister, looking to improve the lives of. And again, that was really disenfranchising, particularly working on things like prison policy where the reality of how somebody inhabits a prison is material to the success of any policy that you’re trying to make. I wasn’t required to go into prison and observe that and that’s something that for me now would be unthinkable, not to be in the place of the people that you’re serving. So that was a real eye opener and it wasn’t particularly equitable, it was very middle class. But the civil service has come on in leaps and bounds in terms of creating more diversity of thought in civil servants, that’s proven in the data. Policymaking in local government is very different, far more diverse, not least in the backgrounds of the people making the policy.
What do you see as the key trends in policymaking (central or local government) that will become important in the next few years?
I’m not sure about trends, I have hopes, which I hope will become trends! I would like to see a greater focus on individual communities. For central government, this would be bringing a degree of specificity in terms of who you’re trying to represent when you make a policy and having much better data about that group of people and their wants and needs. Listening to specific communities and carrying out research would be good and, linked to that, I would be hoping for more co-creation of initiatives, and levelling the playing field in terms of whose voices get heard in policymaking. In my experience in central government, even where there were listening activities, focus groups or workshops with affected people, they would often be with representative groups, which tended to be the most empowered or somebody who was a spokesperson for that group, as a pose to the least empowered. I would hope that dynamic changes.
And then partnership working. I think in both central and local government there’s this tendency to think, for very good reasons, that we should solve people’s problems. And that’s because most public servants want to offer good services and do things for people. Given the financial challenges, we’re going to have to think differently and use a far more mature blend of partners to help us offer those services. We are seeking control in some of those areas without seeing the evidence that we’re going to get the right outcome.
Which three people, ideas or organisations are filling you with hope right now?
Nicola Sturgeon is really inspiring me in terms of her support for the Gender Recognition Bill that, as it turns out, may or may not be her swansong. She is unequivocal in her support for trans rights, which is something in the wider media and across Westminster we don’t see. Nicola Sturgeon is somebody who has refused to bow to the rhetoric that’s been whipped up about trans people and I think she’s amazing for that reason.
And for a very different reason, Anab Jain who leads Superflux, who are effectively a futurologist consultancy. She’s amazing, she’s one of the cleverest people I’ve ever met but she is also somebody who gives me a great deal of hope because I see the work they’re doing in different parts of the world and think this is the kind of experimental, radical thinking we need. They’re the pioneers.
So that’s two, and then there are a lot of people who help me cling onto sanity. People like Greta Thunberg who started out as a climate activist and has ended up as an anti-ageist, neurodivergent, feminist hero of mine. I’ll stop at three, but there are millions of others who I could name!
How could local authorities change or improve the way they currently bring together local actors to deliver person-led services?
We’ve got quite a way to go. The big shift for local government is to develop the humility to listen to people without promising things to them. Every local authority is political, but there’s a fear among some that really listening to people who are disempowered and understanding what they need will lead to some kind of promise that can’t be fulfilled. Another aspect of that is local government understanding its power dynamics, so this comes back to what I was saying about bringing in partners. Local government is used to doing, so it favours delivery and I think there’s a different skillset to bring in that favours organisational design and service design that says: well hang on, what if we didn’t offer this service? What if we convened this service? What if we endorse partnership working for this service and brought in partners to do this? That would involve a real maturing of the operating model for local government.
Telescope’s mission is to connect frontline workers, policymakers and those with lived experience of issues, supporting them to build solutions that drive social change. What element of their work inspired you to join Telescope’s board?
A couple of things: Telescope’s always had this focus on inclusion, equity and changing the power dynamics between different groups, and that’s something that is a personal passion of mine.
“And the second thing was the focus on bringing operational wisdom into policymaking. I think a lot about communities and bringing their voice in, but Telescope’s got this extra element of what do operational folk who have to do this job and face these realities on a day-to-day basis, say to policymaking, how do they influence the pragmatism of policymaking? It was those two parts of the picture that I was really attracted to.”
What are you looking forward to in the future as Telescope develops?
It’s been nice to see Telescope expand their remit and to see the green shoots of pattern making, so case studies that get repeated. So, scaling up is really interesting. The other part is because Telescope is gaining legitimacy now, and has this rump of work to build on, there’s something about legitimacy to experiment. I’m really looking forward to how Telescope will take the experience you’ve built up and then use that to face into newer challenges.
