UK essential services: practical steps to enhance support for people in vulnerable circumstances

The UK is facing a major cost of living crisis. Many households are struggling with their rent or mortgage payments, forced to tighten discretionary spending and resort to desperate measures like unplugging fridges to cope with rising bills. 

Right now, effectively supporting the most vulnerable groups across the country must be a priority.

Enter Citizens Advice, a UK-based, independent, consumer charity that specialises in providing advice and assistance to people with legal, debt, housing, and similar problems. Their ground-breaking “Closing the Gap” report outlined their vision for improving consumer support in essential services.

The report shed light on the inadequacy of the current approach to data sharing among essential service providers like energy, water, telecoms, and financial companies. It stressed that the customer journey of accessing support is way too complex and disjointed, resulting in people missing out on the support they are entitled to. Additionally, the report outlined what a better system could look like, one that bridges the gap between the support people need and the support they receive.

Early last year, our team conducted Innovate UK-funded research, investigating the value and opportunities of effectively working with permissions data that describes individuals’ preferences for the use of their personal information.

To continue exploring the subject with industry peers, we held a co-creation session in collaboration with the Open Data Institute (ODI). At the workshop, the topic of supporting vulnerable groups emerged as a priority and sparked a passionate discussion about the ways in which open and therefore trustworthy data ecosystems could facilitate ethical data sharing and improve the current system.

In the interest of furthering progress, we’ve collated the learnings from Citizens Advice’s report, the co-creation session, and our Innovate UK research on personal data sharing. 

As Citizens Advice point out in their report, more needs to be done to ‘revolutionise the way people access support’ and to ‘achieve a solution that can be used by providers across all essential service sectors’. To do so, Citizens Advice suggests that government intervenes by assembling an ‘Essential Services Industry Taskforce’ that includes key stakeholders like the Information Commissioner’s Office, National Government, Ofgem, Ofcom, Ofwat, the FCA, and Citizens Advice itself. 

In support of this vision and to accelerate coordination, we’ve outlined a practical roadmap to help explain what activities such a taskforce should prioritise to make the Citizens Advice vision a reality and improve support for vulnerable groups through ethical and collaborative data sharing.

Roadmap to an ethical data ecosystem to support consumers in vulnerable circumstances

Our suggestion is a three-stage process – learn, design, prototype – however, we do not expect this to be a linear journey. For example, prototyping will stimulate new design work and designing will create a need for additional learning.

Fundamental to success will be the inclusive and continuous information sharing among the direct participants of the data ecosystem and with the wider range of stakeholders who have strong opinions over how essential services should operate. This is essential for earning trust in the ethical use of individuals’ personal data within these services and ensuring their willing consent.

Here’s what the three-stage process would look like:

1. Learn

This step has already begun as Citizens Advice outlined key essential services and government departments that’ll have to work together. Our co-creation session provided more details on the relevant types of organisations that need to be included:

• Central government and local authorities
• Emergency services
• Debt collection agencies
• Water and energy networks
• Energy retailers
• Social care services
• Mortgage providers and insurance companies
• Private rental sector
• Schools and colleges
• Retailers and pharmacies 
• Food banks and charities

These stakeholders will have to agree on the detailed scope of their shared mission, collectively understand their policies and the wider governance they follow, and characterise the technical systems and services they currently use to support those in vulnerable circumstances. This might mean sharing current organisational policies on vulnerable consumer support and use of instruments such as data sharing agreements and system-level data contracts.

To ensure inclusive progress for a broader range of stakeholders, it's important to make this information accessible both to the taskforce and to the public, benefiting a wider audience.

Listing of data sharing agreements and mechanisms

As a baseline of existing services and technical systems emerges, the taskforce will be positioned to digest current arrangements and agree on a sector-wide vision for how services across essential service providers should work. We recommend that this vision setting is conducted both at a policy level and on a technical level to ensure that ‘what’ policy agreements plan to achieve is realistic and pragmatic in terms of ‘how’ these plans can be realised.

Again, as is our view across the taskforce’s work, we recommend that work is carried out as openly as possible, with progress and plans continually published publicly to ensure inclusivity and trust by the very large ecosystem of stakeholders who will need to coordinate to improve essential services.

2. Design

During this stage the taskforce will need to review the assembled information to determine how to adapt essential services for better coordination. We expect this to require a strong focus on both cross-sector policy alignment (such as service requirements across utilities and banks) and data interoperation for technical integration of services. Specifically, the ability to coordinate consumer identification across essential service providers automatically, at a large scale (for millions of people), and in a way that is ethical and fully controllable from the perspective of the consumer is imperative. 

Focus on data over digital technology will ensure that taskforce solutions are adaptable to suit all stakeholders in the ecosystem (metadata, data spines, data models, API end-point contracts). Review of policy and regulation will help understand where governance is blocking progress or can accelerate investment into what we expect will be a newly emerging standard for ethical personal data permissions sharing.

3. Prototype

Achieving rapid progress requires prototyping early and often. In our roadmap, we’ve sketched what this might look like, but in reality, the design stage will strongly inform  how best to proceed. In general, highly engaged stakeholders should be encouraged to partner and lead on the testing and learning of optimal ways for exchanging data between their organisations. This will allow the taskforce to validate that emerging shared data architecture can scale across an extensible data ecosystem.

Implementation will require a shift from the data layer to the digital and technology layers. At this point, proofs of concept (PoC) will be taking centre stage as well as the selection of appropriate tools and solutions. For scalable success, architecture principles should be adhered to, guiding the use of technology. We expect tactical needs to deviate from this and so effective programme management will become key.

There will likely be a need to establish ‘run-ahead teams’, comprised of organisations that are developing compatible registers and adhere to the taskforce’s architecture principles. These groups will pioneer data integration approaches and validate that those in vulnerable conditions are better supported across the ecosystem as a result.

As PoCs evolve, we expect a growing emphasis on analytical topics, such as techniques for the matching and linking of data sets to identify vulnerable consumers across organisations. Additionally, we also expect the need for test exercises that address specific use cases, such as tracking consenting individuals through their changing circumstances to offer better support as their vulnerability needs evolve.

Improve support among UK essential services with our experts

The current cost of living crisis in the UK has highlighted the urgent need for a more cohesive and effective support system, especially for vulnerable groups. This is a data intensive challenge. The good news is – we can help make sense of the data and facilitate the creation of a reliable ecosystem by enabling relevant organisations to come together, collaborate, and focus on leveraging ethical data sharing to move forward effectively.

At Zühlke, we are experienced at addressing the challenges that public sector organisations face and we’re here to help. Our team has already delivered a range of successful public sector digital transformation initiatives, from building the NHS COVID-19 app to helping Innovate UK identify how data can drive decarbonisation. So, if you’d like to understand more about our recommendation, don’t hesitate to reach out, we’ll be happy to continue the discussion and glad to work with you on improving UK vulnerable consumer support in the public sector.