16 October (Part 1) - Insurance, Artificial Intelligence and psychiatry
A big part of Wednesday’s Finance Scrutiny meeting was taken up by the
Council’s upcoming (July 2027) Insurance renewal which I doubt will interest
many readers so here are just a few highlights, if that is not a misnomer.
Currently the main insurer is Zurich and its broker has been Marsh Ltd. Zurich
will have provided cover for nine years by next July but premiums have been reducing in recent times.
As is normal when looking for insurance, whether something should be insured at
all and if so the level of excess balanced against the higher costs involved
were debated.. Schools typically have a £250,000 excess, public liability
£125,000 and vehicles £25,000. Cyber attacks were considered, the risks having
grown considerably since 2018 and a specialist insurer may be engaged.
A similar debate concerned future technology issues. Microsoft licencing and
delivery of digital services etc. Councillor Jeremy Fosten (Labour, Belvedere) said he had been
using Windows 11 for five years; why was the Council only now beginning to roll
it out? Not unreasonably the answer was that Windows 11 imposed hardware
restrictions and you cannot just throw away otherwise good computers. (It is
easy to bypass those hardware restrictions. I run Windows 11 on a nine year old
computer. Maybe corporates are not so adventurous.)
Bexley Council adopted Artificial Intelligence webchats on 1st July and they
claimed that 86% of questions were answered with a target of 95%+. There is an increasing tendency for
residents to use AI to generate complaints which might in extreme cases be 100
pages long. (In my limited experience AI can improve short letters of complaint
but my advice would be do not, as a friend did, audio record an angry phone call and get ChatGPT to
do a psychiatrical analysis of the speaker!)
Complaints from residents are being run through AI so that they are fully
understood and hopefully get better answers. (A big and long term failure of
Bexley Council is that they reply but don’t answer questions or complaints at all.)
Closing FixMyStreet complaints when the problem is not resolved is a major
source of frustration by residents.
Cabinet Member David Leaf provided a brief report to the Committee. He is concerned
about rising interest rates and the forthcoming budget. The outlook is nothing
but “uncertainty”. Local Government generally, “including Labour Leaders across
the country” is totally confused about what the new Prime Minister has been saying and unsaying. He is a “TikTok PM”.
Labour Leader Stefano Borella said he did not recognise David Leaf's assessment
especially his comments about other Labour Leaders. Stefano was critical of
BexleyCo while David said it had “delivered homes in our borough and returns to the Council”.