C O N T E X T 1 4 1 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 5 3 rusting to iron cramps used in Victorian spires to hold masonry together; woodpecker damage to wooden spires; and high winds and heavy rain leading to weakened spires. Over the last three years, the National Churches Trust has helped fund repairs to 17 parish church spires in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Is the future of public services digital? Bob Kindred MBE writes: A wellattended seminar on ‘Digital Public Services: reshaping, rethinking and rewriting services’ was held in London in July. A series of speakers emphasised the government’s ambitious agenda for transforming service delivery in the digital era but said that this process still had a long way to go. The digital transformation is aimed at everybody in government with the aim of reducing costs and civil service numbers, but this will also affect local government providers, and the users of services including those in the heritage sector. All unprotected government departments will be cut by 15 per cent in the medium term, and NGOs and local government will face similar cuts of varying sizes. Running new (digital) services in a smaller public sector can not simply replace existing provision. These must run in parallel before the old ones are turned off and this will equate to greater costs in the short term. Seminar speakers attached great importance to the need for greater agility, the use of better project management skills and efforts to gain a better understanding of the services that customers need. Civil servants (and local government officers) may already be acting in an agile way but they are not necessarily interacting directly with customers. Consequently the delivery of services and project management is not fully effective. New digital projects for service delivery need prototypes before a full business case is submitted, making clear how complex the issues are and what the deadlines will be. The mantra for new ways of delivering services is if you are going to fail, fail fast. But those services also need to be related to and integrated with customers’ real-life experiences. There is a digital divide in the UK. Those who can not get online for services find life much more difficult. There are major problems for those who are not IT literate or have no access, such as the elderly and the four million people for whom English is their second language. Twenty per cent of the UK population has no digital access, and those who need it most may be least able to afford it. One speaker remarked that there was no point in saying that we wanted to be all digital by 2020: there needed to be a much better user experience now, understanding it and its faults, and working from there. Websites needed to be much more accessible, for example by screening to address problems of dyslexia. The world has plenty of good information services but they do not actually do anything specifically for individuals. New models of tailored services are emerging, such as Uber, which represents a safe and personalised service on both sides – with the supplier and the customer. In the NHS, for example, the same conversations take place over and over again with different groups, but only 25 per cent of advice is tailored to the needs of individuals. There may be some useful lessons for the needs of users of heritage services, where much of the present broad-brush approach could be replaced, for example by online interaction through Skype, with selfsupport by way of access to experts without direct face-to-face contact. In this way customer relationships should become personalised and related to individual transactions. Whatever the role of a smaller public sector in the provision of statutory services in the immediate future, it is clear that a better understanding of user needs, a better customer experience, and imaginative and agile provision of services through digital means will become essential. Annunciation at Bilborough Conservation work to two 20th-century wall paintings at the Church of St Martin of Tours at Bilborough, Nottinghamshire, has won the 2015 SPAB John Betjeman Award. The murals are the work of war artist Evelyn Gibbs (1905–1991). Completed in 1946, the paintings depict the Annunciation. They are positioned either side of the east window in the chancel, with Mary to the left and Gabriel to the right. The figures are pictured in the old village setting of Bilborough itself. The paintings, thought to be last surviving examples of monumental work carried out by Evelyn Gibbs, were lost during the construction of an extension in the 1970s. Although their possible survival beneath layers of emulsion was identified in 1990s, no work was undertaken until they were rediscovered in 2009 by workmen re-wiring the church. The project required the removal of a 1970s ceiling in the chancel. The annual award is made for outstanding repairs to the fabric of places of worship in England andWales, completed in the last 18 months. Repairs to the medieval choir stalls at St Mary, Nantwich, Cheshire have received a commendation. All things illegally modernised A property developer who illegally modernised a historic building in SouthWales has been ordered to pay a £60,000 fine and £240,000 costs, or serve a 20-month prison sentence. Grade II*-listed Llanwenarth House, built in the late 16th century, is where the Irish composer Cecil Alexander is said to have written the lyrics to the hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. The unlawful alterations included stripping out numerous historic features, and replacing Regency features with mock-Tudor ones. Davies said in his defence that he had saved the house from ruin. Evelyn Gibbs’ Gabriel restored Medieval choir stalls at St Mary, Nantwich
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=