TL;DR: Lancashire County Council, serving over 1.3 million people, has rolled Microsoft 365 Copilot out to help social workers with routine paperwork. Thousands of staff now have access, and around two thirds of the workforce use AI tools of some kind through a combination of paid and free licensing.
The workflow is deliberately narrow. Instead of writing each visit up from nothing, practitioners dictate an account using Teams or a handset, and Copilot turns that into case notes and draft paperwork in whichever format is required. Everything then goes back to the practitioner, who reviews it and takes every decision.
Amisha Chauhan, digital innovation manager at the council, framed the motive in terms of what the job is supposed to be. “Spending time on admin was not what our practitioners signed up to do when they decided to become social workers,” she said. “By reducing that burden, we can give them more time to focus on helping families.”
Where the boundaries sit
The council has drawn explicit limits in the most sensitive area. Where children’s services are concerned, the technology only ever supports a practitioner’s judgement, and accountability for safeguarding calls stays wholly with the person making them. On the adult side, reports that used to consume hours can be drafted quickly and then worked over by hand.
Digital director Peter Lloyd put the uptake down to how it was introduced. Teams on the front line were asked where paperwork actually weighed heaviest, and the prompts and tooling were shaped to fit the templates and reporting formats already in use, rather than asking practice to bend around a product.
Reading the evidence
The claimed benefits — less repeated recording, steadier documentation, quicker drafting — come from the council and are described in qualitative terms. This is a case study rather than an evaluation. There is no independent assessment, no baseline for how long a record took before, and no published error rate for the drafts staff are checking.
That final gap is the significant one. The whole proposition rests on reviewing a generated draft being genuinely quicker than composing one, and on reviewers reliably catching what the system gets wrong while under pressure. Neither number is available.
Looking forward
For other UK authorities considering something similar, the transferable element is the sequencing rather than the software: find out from practitioners where the administrative load really falls, then fit tooling to existing formats. Lancashire intends to expand further. What the sector still lacks — and what would make any of this genuinely evaluable — is a council willing to publish accuracy and time-saved figures.