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Thoughts from the mind of Ben Welby

Author: Benjamin Welby (Page 5 of 18)

I’m Benjamin Welby.

I live in Croydon with my wife and two children. I church at Croydon Vineyard. We’ve had season tickets for Bradford City since 2007. I’ve got degrees in History, Post-War Recovery and Public Administration and have spent the last 15+ years working at the intersection of digital transformation and good governance.

I began my career in local government, went on to help launch GOV.UK and most recently worked on defining global standards for digital government at the OECD. I'm currently currently co-authoring a book integrating biblical values with civic life, encouraging Christians to adopt a hope-filled, faith-inspired perspective on democracy and how we are governed.

I’m interested in too many things: being a good husband and father, following Jesus, the theology of governing well, a warm welcome for refugees and asylum seekers, that ‘digital’ leads to fair, inclusive and equitable transformation, exploring the world, League Two football, Pantomime, various England sports teams and Team GB…

Building a data-driven public sector Part 2: How to do it

July 19, 2024 / / 3 Comments
This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Building a data driven public sector (DDPS)

On 16th May 2024 I led a 90 minute session as part of the Digital Academy Masterclass, hosted by the Government of Azerbaijan’s Innovation and Digital Development Agency, and delivered by Digital Nation.

I’ve broken the presentation into 4 parts. After the introduction, Part 1 considered the potential of data to deliver public value; this is Part 2 and looked at the elements needed to actually build a data-driven public sector; and Part 3 explored how to unlock the value of data without losing public trust.

Unless otherwise indicated or an obvious screenshot, the images were generated by ChatGPT.

David McCandless, of Information is Beautiful, suggested that instead of thinking about data like oil, we should rather think of it like soil. Data is a fertile environment from which good things might happen. 

But just like soil, it is something you have to nurture and care for if you want it to give you a good return.

And this is where we start our second section – if we’re in roles with responsibility for building a data-driven public sector then we need to think about our job in terms of farming. We need to be mindful that when it comes to data our job is to make good soil and nurture data-driven ways of working.

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Building a data-driven public sector Introduction

July 19, 2024 / / 2 Comments
This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Building a data driven public sector (DDPS)

On 16th May 2024 I led a 90 minute session as part of the Digital Academy Masterclass, hosted by the Government of Azerbaijan’s Innovation and Digital Development Agency, and delivered by Digital Nation.

I’ve broken the presentation into 4 parts. This is the introduction, Part 1 considered the potential of data to deliver public value; Part 2 looked at the elements needed to actually build a data-driven public sector; and Part 3 explored how to unlock the value of data without losing public trust.

Unless otherwise indicated or an obvious screenshot, the images were generated by ChatGPT.

My name’s Ben Welby and I’ve spent 15 years working in and around digital transformation starting off in local government, then helping to build and launch GOV.UK, and most recently at the OECD.

Today we’re going to be looking at the three aspects of building a data-driven public sector:

Can Labour unlock the value of the OECD?

July 11, 2024 / / 4 Comments

Rachel Reeves has been quick to tell us that UK public finances are in their worst state since World War Two. As she pores over the bank statements to identify a subscription or two to cancel she might pause at the £900,0001 we send each month to the OECD and ask what are we getting for that money.2

I hope she and the Cabinet get a handle on that a bit more quickly than their predecessors. In the summer of 2023 the UK Foreign Secretary was in Paris, chairing the OECD’s annual meeting of ministers. He gave a speech that basically said “Before this week I didn’t appreciate the breadth and value of the OECD”. Arguably, he was just praising the organisation with niceties but then again, the ministerial musical chairs of the last decade means it’s not wholly surprising if the value and scope of the OECD got a bit lost.

It’s easily done.

OECD data does crop up from time to time but neither UK politicians or UK media seem to pay too much attention to its work. Just this week the OECD published the latest edition of its Trust Survey. In Ireland there was a ministerial press release and some press coverage but in the UK, nothing. And yet there’s a huge amount to unpack from what it says (and what it doesn’t) including the headline that only 2 of the surveyed countries have lower levels of trust in national government than the UK3.

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Five things I think about GDS, CDDO and i.AI moving into DSIT

July 10, 2024 / / 8 Comments

If those acronyms mean nothing to you then this blog post is not for you. It’s written in response to the news that the Government Digital Service (GDS) and the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO), and the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (i.AI) are moving from the Cabinet Office to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) under the responsibility of Peter Kyle as the responsible minister.

At the OECD one of the things we would emphasise was the importance of a mandate and authority for providing leadership of digital government across the entire public sector. GDS was the poster child for this idea. Many countries have established their own Digital Government Units similarly located at the centre of government and operating in proximity to the country’s political leadership. In more than one country the digital function has been given even more prominence and made an extension of the President or the Prime Minister. This has been critical in ensuring that the agenda receives support at the highest levels and made a priority.

In the UK, GDS benefitted from Francis Maude as the Minister for Cabinet Office (MCO) with his leadership backing the wave of transformation through to 2015. Under his watch many of the things that established the culture for digital transformation bedded in. And then in 2015 there started a sequence of 12 MCOs in 9 years. Not many of them showed the same aptitude for leading digital transformation as Maude.

Along the way the clarity of responsibility for digital started to fray. Digital inclusion, some aspects of data, some parts of Artificial Intelligence, and some parts of digital identity moving over to what is now DSIT.

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Re: The oddness of the political moment

July 9, 2024 / / 4 Comments

At the start of June, James Plunkett wrote a piece called The oddness of the political moment. It is amazing just quite how quickly the atmosphere has changed since the election (I’d attribute a lot of how I feel myself to having prayed through Croydon and then for all 650 MPs in the last week) but the post remains very timely and insightful.

I left a couple of comments around accountability. One on the accountability of those elected to serve, and the other about GOV.UK and the policymaking process. David Durant said one needed to be a blog post, but I’ve done both.

1. Accountability of politicians

“…it seems increasingly clear we need people whose day job it is to care about the infrastructure that underpins accountability and the associated discourse…”

The oddness of the political moment, James Plunkett (07/06/2024)

When I decided to leave the OECD, a major factor was the stark disconnect between its stated mission of ‘better policies for better lives’ and the practical reality that means the organisation has to prioritise diplomatic niceties over accountability. I accept that my expectations are perhaps unreasonable. After all, the OECD isn’t an organisation designed, set up or mandated to provide accountability when a member mis-steps. However, you can’t have a ‘rules based international order’ if there’s no accountability against those rules.

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I prayed for every single newly elected MP

July 7, 2024 / / 7 Comments
A screenshot from a web application showing a hexagonal grid map of the United Kingdom completely filled with red heart icons, representing each constituency. At the top, it says 'Constituencies left to pray for: 0' on the left and 'Constituencies waiting for prayer: 0' on the right. In the centre, there is a message that reads 'You have finished praying for the 2024 intake of UK MPs.' Below this message is a green button with 'Amen' and a prayer hands emoji.

A different kind of party

Recently God changed my plans for election night and inspired me to spend my night praying for each constituency and every MP. So we opened up Boon Café and Zoom for a watch party focused on prayer over punditry.

After the polls closed and before the results started to come in we prayed and worshipped. I had planned to bring Post Its and give space to lament over policies and poor governance. But I forgot them. And that was a blessing. There was still space to mentally and emotionally clear our prayer decks without spending too long on the shortcomings of the past. Fixing our eyes on Jesus was a much better way to spend our time before the first result popped up.

When it did I was grateful to Philip Brown and Alasdair Rae at Automatic Knowledge for sharing the hex map in a number of formats. Every time we prayed for an MP we could add a heart to our A0 poster, as well as automatically to the web app I’d built with the help of ChatGPT and data from Democracy Club1.

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My Pre-election Prayer Walk through Croydon

July 1, 2024 / / 4 Comments

On Sunday evening when I would normally have been watching England pull a rabbit out of a hat against Slovakia I was walking and praying the streets of Croydon.

I set off on this 15km/10m walk after Croydon Vineyard’s 4pm service. My route followed the boundary between the 4 Parliamentary constituencies of West Croydon, South Croydon, East Croydon and North Croydon and Streatham. When I first thought this would be a good thing to do I thought I’d do the perimeter of the 4…that would have been 60km. Something to do but over a period of time I think.

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Migration in Christian Perspective: Notes

July 1, 2024 / / 3 Comments

This post is one of several I’ve written discussing immigration in light of rooting my life and politics in following Jesus. Please add your thoughts on What would help you to feel ‘at home’ in a new environment or consider this longer piece about ‘thinking Christianly about asylum policy’ that I wrote with my friend Andy who heads up the Vineyard English School. If you enjoyed this and want to know about any new post please subscribe to my RSS feed or emails.

On Wednesday 19th June 2024, the Sanctuary Foundation hosted a half day conference at St. Mellitus College called “Migration in Christian Perspective”. With some of us gathered in person and many more tuning in from all over the world it was a fabulous afternoon of insight and wisdom drawn from the experience of some stellar thinkers and practitioners.

I hope these notes are an encouragement or of value for others. All these shared with the caveat that any of the mistakes and errors are down to my transcription and not the people speaking! I also didn’t take notes for every session so this is a partial record.

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I’m excited for #GE2024, but not for the reasons you might think

June 26, 2024 / / 6 Comments

I don’t know what you’re thinking about #GE2024, or elections in general.

A lot of us are cynical and disdainful, perhaps to the point where politics is an active sore in our lives, and the lives of those around us. There’s plenty of reason why our feelings about government and governing should provoke our grief, rage and distrust.

A lot of us are apathetic. We’ve been disappointed too many times to keep seeing any merit or relevance to the whole exercise. Maybe it was a struggle to even read beyond the word “election” . If that’s us then we probably won’t vote. And nobody could lay any of the blame for that decision on us.

A lot of us still have some optimism about politics and policy, or at the very least recognise its potential for achieving particular goals. Some of us have active roles in a party. For others we might stick a poster in the window or an emoji on our socials. It could be that our commitment to our party or policies means overlooking the means so long as we achieve ‘our’ ends in battling an injustice and delivering an important cause.

I’ve worked in and around government for 15 years. That limits what’s possible in party political terms1. But if you spend enough time with me then I will more than likely have tried to persuade you that it’s important for Christians to care about the quality of how government goes about its business.

It’s a core part of who I am. I have a recurring prayer that “those who govern the world would fall in love with the values of the King and His Kingdom”. I’m even writing a book with my friend Dave that’s intended to be an encouragement to Christians by offering a hope-filled, faith-inspired perspective on democracy and how we’re governed.

So that means I’ve been anticipating this election for a long time, and frankly growing ever more restless at the need for change. I can’t say I’m impressed with these last 5 years (or with much of several previous electoral cycles to be honest). Once the election was announced I was looking forward to the night of July 4th into July 5th as being one of enjoyable schadenfreude2.

But then a couple of Sundays ago God challenged me in a moment when I was supposed to be listening to a sermon but was in fact being distracted by an email.

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