The Wexford Hook is collectingthe work this county needs done
Some of it happens every week and nobody notices any more. Some of it has never happened at all, because there was never time. We want to hear about both.
We are looking for digital work that repeats — either week after week in your own organisation, or the same underlying job arising separately in several organisations around the county.
It should have a clear starting point, information going in, a useful result coming out, and somebody who can tell whether the result is right.
It might be work you do by hand now. It might be work nobody does at all — because there has never been time for it, or because somebody got a price for it once and it was more than it was worth.
You do not need to know whether AI can do it. That is our job. Tell us about the whole piece of work and we will work out which parts can be helped and which parts need a person.
Examples of the work we mean
Work that happens now, slowly
- The quarterly report is assembled by hand out of files kept by four different people. Two days every quarter.
- The same forty questions come in from the public, and the answers are spread across nine different documents. Twenty minutes to find each one, four hundred times a year.
- Somebody is supposed to check the funding portals and the regulators every month for anything new, and it slips. Half a day when it happens.
- Every month somebody reads back through the last four sets of minutes to work out what was actually agreed about one thing. Half a day each time, six days a year.
- Every application has to be judged for whether it is complete, what is missing, and who it should go to. An afternoon each, and there were sixty of them last year.
- Nothing goes out until one senior person has read it all against the source material. That is a day of their week, every week.
Work that never happens at all
Because there was never a week to spare — and this is the kind we hear about least:
- A funding application takes a week to write, so the organisation applies for one thing a year instead of four.
- One person has run it for thirty years and most of what the place knows is in her head. None of it is written down, and she retires next year.
- Sixty pages of new regulations arrive, and nobody has time to work out which three paragraphs actually apply here.
- Money arrives from three funders and leaves through four bank accounts, and seeing the whole picture would take a week nobody has.
- Nobody has ever gone back through five years of the organisation's own records to see what actually changed.
- An organisation needs a one-off job done — a website, an archive converted, records moved, a compliance system set up — and plenty of others around the county need the same thing.
If any of those made you think that’s us, that is exactly what we want to hear about.
Why collect them in one place
If twelve organisations are each doing the same job on their own, that is one thing worth building rather than twelve — and it becomes far cheaper for every one of them.
Nobody writes this down at the moment, so nobody can see it. That is the whole reason for keeping one record for the county rather than twelve separate conversations.
The kind we hear about least
We especially want to hear about work that never happens
If something useful is missing because it would take too much time, cost too much, or need skills nobody there has — tell us about that too.
People stop mentioning things they have decided they cannot have, so it never comes up unless somebody asks directly. We are asking directly.
What remains a human responsibility
Under this programme, some responsibilities stay with people.
- Anything that needs somebody physically there
- Consequential decisions about individuals — who is hired, who is eligible for a service, or formal assessment of somebody's performance
- Anything where a professional's signature is the product
- Managing, supervising, disciplining, counselling, caring for, or providing relationship-based support to people
- Work where the relationship is the work
- Anything where a wrong answer would not be caught
Tell us about the whole job anyway. Usually only one piece of a job is off limits and the rest is fair game — the visit has to happen, but the preparation, the paperwork and the report afterwards may not need to take you a whole evening.
What happens next
We write it down properly, in a shared record for the whole county. Then we look for the same piece of work turning up somewhere else.
On confidentiality. We look for shared patterns across organisations. We will not publish confidential business information or identifiable operational details without your permission.
Some of it can be done now. Some of it cannot be done yet — and when that happens we record exactly what would need to change, so it gets looked at again when its blocker changes.
Tell us about your work
It takes a few minutes and you do not need to prepare anything. Sending it in commits your organisation to nothing.