My unhinged pitch for a New Town (Odds and Ends #80)

Plus the government's new LLM-powered app for the public, and more!

Photo by Ruben Hanssen on Unsplash

POD! On The Abundance Agenda this week, Martin tells the extraordinary story of how Natural England has prevented 20,000 homes from being built in Sussex, and I wonder if the Tories have been abundance-pilled. Plus we speak to Praful Nargund from the Good Growth Foundation about four tricks to speed up housing development, and how to bring cross-channel trains back to Kent. Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or Substack!

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Hello! It’s time for Odds and Ends, your semi-regular round-up of the most interesting links I’ve seen lately – plus some shorter takes. This week, I’m featuring:

• How the government is testing an LLM-powered app for public use

• What happened at the Riyadh Comedy Festival

• A short lesson in fact-checking

• My crazy idea for the New Town Britain needs to build

• What sort of bubble the current wave of AI investment will be

• A big fight between two major American writers

• And the story of Manchester’s development miracle

But first…

Can you apply service design principles to fix a fragmented NHS? (Liz Lutgendorff)

I recently read This Might Surprise You by my friend Hayley Gullen. It’s a graphic novel memoir of her experience of breast cancer treatment. For such a heavy topic, it is incredibly funny and observant of the weirdness of undergoing complex medical treatment within the UK’s National Health Service (NHS).

What I found most surprising was how it made me think a lot about the work we’re doing to build a new national breast screening digital service. It was fascinating to see the descriptions of issues that I encounter in day to day work reflected in a patient’s experience. It also demonstrated the confidence you need in order to advocate for yourself when navigating the organisational complexity of the NHS.

Hayley’s experience also demonstrates the similarities between poor digital user experiences and poor experiences interacting with the healthcare bureaucracy. Some of the issues are a consequence of poorly implemented integrations, but not all of them.

It made me wonder if there should be an analogous service standard for patient care that could be deployed in the NHS. This might help with that fragmentation and the feeling of overwhelm for patients when they are forced to interact with a system, that while ostensibly about healthcare, often emphasises efficiency or cost effectiveness for the organisation over what patients expect from a national health service.

Before we hit the paywall, the latest post from my partner, Liz Lutgendorff. She currently works for the NHS, and is doing her best to drag the breast cancer screening service into the 21st Century. In her latest reflection, she digs into service design, fragmented institutions and user experience. A must read! Go and subscribe to her!

Now let’s get on with the rest of the links! I think you’re going to like my New Town idea…