Suspended Tory - Politically Homeless, Transatlantic,Podcaster, Business USA/UK, IoT, Electric Bike/Tesla. Councillor/Deputy Leader @worcscc, Charity Runner.
Worc’s, Brum UK, Florida USA
Joined June 2009
- Tweets7.3K
- Following2.3K
- Followers1.1K
- Likes4.5K
Pinned Tweet
Statement by Adam Kent, County Councillor for the Wythall Division of Worcestershire.
As a councillor on Worcestershire County Council for the Wythall division, my focus is on the residents I represent in my division and Worcestershire and the local issues that concern them, which I continue to work hard to resolve.
I have been suspended by the Conservative Party pending an investigation that I’ve been asked by the party not to comment upon. The party have been keen to stress that my suspension does not imply any assumption of wrongdoing and is merely a neutral and precautionary step.
Unfortunately, contrary to the parties procedures, a letter has been sent by the Chairman of the Conservative Party to the entire Conservative membership, as well as posted by him on social media, which has been disseminated widely. What he has said about me in that letter is false, defamatory and wholly inaccurate, and the matter is with my lawyers.
Despite all that has happened in the past week, I look forward to working with the other members of the council to continue to carry out the job for which I have been elected.
Media enquiries only to [email protected]
🎙️ Spoke to BBC Hereford & Worcester this afternoon, minutes after the Government's announcement on the future of Worcestershire's councils. Clip below 👇
After months of pausing, reviewing and unpausing, the Government has gone back to splitting Worcestershire in two: a North council (Wyre Forest, Bromsgrove, Redditch) and a South council (Worcester, Malvern Hills, Wychavon). And they've pushed the whole thing back a year, to April 2029.
I'll be blunt. This government couldn't run a bath.
Here's why this matters to every resident in Worcestershire:
💷 Splitting the county is a financial car crash. Adult social care, children's services and highways would all be carved in two. That means two sets of management, two systems and two services rebuilt from scratch, all paid for by you.
🗳️ District council elections will now go ahead next year in every district except Worcester, for councils that everyone agrees are being abolished. Residents will pay for elections to put people into seats for less than two years. That is frankly barking.
📉 An extra year of uncertainty with no plan to pay for it. Our adults' and children's costs are going through the roof, the Government has kicked reform of that funding to 2030, and it still hasn't told us how we're meant to bridge the gap in the meantime. That's another two years of budgets to set for a council that's being wound up.
I've always said one Worcestershire council is the right answer: one balance sheet, no splitting of debt, no duplicating services. That case hasn't gone away.
⏳ There is now a three-week window to feed back to ministers before this is finalised. This is the last real chance to get the decision changed. If you care about what you pay and the services you rely on, please make your voice heard, and share this post so others know too.
#Worcestershire #LocalGovernment #OneWorcestershire
A CAR. DID. A KICKFLIP. 🛹🚗🤯
I've watched this about ten times and I still can't believe it's real. The new Tesla Roadster fires SpaceX cold-gas thrusters, pulls a full barrel roll through the air, lands in a cloud of smoke — and oh, it does 0–60 in 0.8 SECONDS. ⚡🚀
This isn't a concept. It's real. This is what human ambition and brilliant engineering look like when nobody says "it can't be done."
And it's exactly the mindset we need in public life: stop fearing new technology, start harnessing it. The future isn't coming — it's HERE, and it's moving fast. 🌍🔥
Buckle up. 👇
---
"Three meetings, two committees and a review board for one change. That's not just NASA, it's much of UK government.
Cut the layers, trust capable people and use AI properly, and the public sector could massively boost productivity and protect frontline services. That's what I’m pushing to implement in Worcestershire."
A retired NASA engineer who had worked on the Space Shuttle program for 25 years was hired by SpaceX at age 62. He described the first week as the most disorienting experience of his professional life.
At NASA, a design change required 3 meetings, 2 committees, a review board, and 6 to 18 months of documentation. At SpaceX, his new supervisor said "if it works, build it. If it doesn't, change it by Friday."
He sat at his desk after the first day and called his wife. He told her he felt like a man who had been swimming with ankle weights for 25 years and someone just cut them off. He could move. He could decide. He could build something in the morning and test it in the afternoon. The constraint that he had accepted as the nature of aerospace engineering turned out to be the nature of bureaucracy.
Within 6 months he had contributed to more design iterations than he had completed in his last 5 years at NASA. Not because he was working harder. Because the time between having an idea and testing the idea collapsed from months to hours. The same brain. The same knowledge. A different operating system.
He described a specific moment where he proposed a modification to a Raptor engine component. At NASA, the proposal would have entered a queue. At SpaceX, the modification was machined by the end of the day and tested by the following morning. He watched his idea become a physical object in 18 hours. At NASA, 18 hours would not have been enough to schedule the first meeting to discuss whether to schedule a meeting.
He told an interviewer: "I didn't get smarter when I went to SpaceX. I got faster. The intelligence was always there. The system was in the way."
The difference between SpaceX and NASA is not talent. NASA has extraordinary talent. The difference is the time between a thought and a test. SpaceX compresses it. NASA elongates it. The same engineer produces 10x more at SpaceX than at NASA because the bottleneck was never the engineer. It was the meetings about the meetings about the work.
A superb piece by Josh Glancy in today's Times, and one every politician in the country should read:
"Politicians are talking like it's the 1970s while AI changes their world."
It's hard to argue with.
Glancy asks why our political class is so far behind the curve, and gives two answers. First, many politicians simply lack the technical background or the agility to deal with questions that move this fast. Second, as one MP told him, "there are no votes in AI". Getting to grips with a technological revolution wins fewer votes than an easy pledge on water companies or stamp duty.
His conclusion is that reality will catch up with politics soon enough, and that what we need in the meantime is leadership willing to tackle the issues that matter whether or not they are popular. He fears we don't have it. On current showing, I agree.
I've been involved in technology for over 40 years and I have never seen change arrive this fast. In my own business, AI is changing everything.
The same is possible across the public sector. In health, it means scans read faster, waiting lists managed properly and clinicians freed from hours of paperwork. Diagnosis will soon take seconds, not months.
In councils, it means social workers spending their time with families rather than typing up notes, and residents getting answers in minutes rather than weeks.
Wythall
It matters in planning too. Here in Wythall, residents are being failed by a government policy that puts housing numbers ahead of everything else.
Application after application arrives on our Green Belt: each largely judged on its own, as though the others did not exist.
But residents don't live on one site. They share the same roads, the same schools, the same GP surgeries and the same drains. Add the sites together and infrastructure that is already stretched is pushed past breaking point.
This is exactly where AI can help. It can take every application across multiple sites and model the combined effect on traffic, school places, health services and flood risk in hours, not months. I intend to use it to show, with evidence, what the cumulative impact really is, and to challenge decisions that fail to account for it.
The council
At Worcestershire County Council, many of you know the financial pressure we face. Adult and children's services now dominate every part of the council's finances, and the pressure grows every year. That is why I'm driving the use of AI across the council: to raise productivity, improve accuracy and protect the services people rely on.
But councils cannot fix a broken system on their own.
We seem to have reached a stage in national politics where the size of a majority makes no difference to what gets done. An 80-seat majority in 2019. A majority of more than 170 in 2024. Either was enough to reform social care, fix SEND funding and get a grip on public spending.
Instead we have had profligate spending, intransigence, and governments more absorbed in their own internal wars than in the job they were elected to do. National politicians shout and stamp their feet, yet seem to achieve nothing.
Businesses are being taxed to destruction, and the public see inflation and costs out of control. Why doesn't Westminster just deal with the issues instead of the rhetoric?
Meanwhile the rising costs land on local councils, and on all of us.
The technology to do things better is here now.
What's missing is the political will in Westminster to use it. We'll keep getting on with it in Worcestershire. It's time government did the same.
The article is below on a gifted token. It's well worth a read.
thetimes.com/article/9273ee3…
@joshglancy @thetimes
Adam Kent retweeted
🏣 NEW: Worcestershire County Council to offer up its assets to the advertising industry
🚌 Bus shelters, libraries, offices and other amenities could take adverts
💷 Third party salespeople could be brought in to make it work
A fascinating move👇bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm93…
Adam Kent retweeted
My favourite Parliamentarian question - The "President of Europe" Speech (sometime during the Brown years)
Today’s @Telegraph
Britain’s most persecuted minority: multi-millionaires
Here’s what worries me most, and it isn’t the tax receipts. When a serial entrepreneur leaves, the country doesn’t just lose their tax bill — it loses the money they would have put into the next three businesses, and the network that would have backed them. Those companies still get built. They just get built in Milan, Zurich, Dubai or Texas instead. The job that would have gone to someone in Wythall goes to someone else, somewhere else.
You cannot build an economy on contempt for the people who take the risks. Every time we treat wealth creation as something faintly shameful — something to be squeezed rather than encouraged — we push another person who could have employed twenty into the arms of a country that’s glad to have them.
Britain doesn’t need to out-subsidise anyone. It needs to stop being actively unpleasant to the people it depends on: energy costs that make manufacturing here a mug’s game, regulation that treats every start-up as a suspect, and a political culture that can’t say the word “profit” without flinching.
Growth isn’t a slogan. It’s a decision about whether people want to build here. Right now, too many are deciding they don’t.
telegraph.co.uk/gift/58520cc…
Adam Kent retweeted
🚨NEW: Worcestershire County Council to launch fresh attempt to find a Shrub Hill investor - in what bosses call a "massive opportunity".
A long read on what's happened, why the hunt for a development partner stalled last year, and what's happening now 👇bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy8m…
🏡 Could you change a child’s life? Because right now, Worcestershire needs you.
This article in The Times today (below) confirms what I’ve been saying for months — and what we in Worcestershire already know from our own experience.
The Children and Families Minister now says it plainly: around a third of children in residential care homes today should be growing up in a foster family instead.
Not in a building with a buzzer on the door. In a home. With a family. With someone who turns up to sports day and remembers how they take their tea.
It also confirms something else I’ve been raising: some private providers are charging councils up to £1 million a year per child — for care that too often isn’t care at all. That’s money that should be supporting loving foster families, not profiteering.
And here’s the part that should frustrate us all: last year, 100,000 people came forward wanting to foster — and only 7,000 were approved. That’s not a shortage of love. That’s a system failing willing families, while children wait.
#Fostering #Worcestershire #EveryChildDeservesAHome
@thetimes @worcscc
Worcestershire Local Government Reorganisation Letter
This letter refers to the North of Worcestershire as the "Industrial North"
It claims that the selected option will enable a more tailored response to housing supply and local needs; responding to the challenges of land constraints and uneven supply in the North.
It also states that he believes that the selected option will provide greater flexibility by enabling a wider range of devolution options to be explored that could address the different characteristics and needs of the different parts of the area. Given that a range of potential devolution options are still being considered for this area, this flexibility is important.
Read in this what you will but clearly they are considering different devolution options for the North than the South and that can only mean one or two things. Birmingham (North) or Solihull (East) where would the Industrial North best fit in their minds ?
Letter from Minister - Rt Hon Steve Reed OBE MP
@worcscc #lgr #worcestershire
#wythall
Interview with BBC and myself on Local Government Reform and the decision from Labour Government to split Worcestershire into two !
The Industrial North and the Rural South!
@worcscc #lgr
#industrialnorth
Just attended meeting and received the terrible news that Worcestershire will be split into two Unitary Councils North and South.
This is a horrendous decision in my mind from the Labour Government and is a kick in the teeth for our County.
Inevitably it will mean higher Council Tax for Residents in both the North and South of Worcestershire !
Divide and rule seems to be the focus of this government.
@worcscc
Maybe get the panel to comment tonight. @itvfootball #noreng
Leading in the Age of AI – LGA Conference 2026
Just attended a workshop session at #LGAConf26 on AI in local government, with Jason Kitcat (Department for Business and Trade) and Theo Blackwell MBE (Chief Digital Officer for London).
The opportunity here is enormous. AI can transform how councils deliver services – from adult social care and children’s services to planning, highways and customer contact. Done properly, it means faster decisions, better outcomes for residents, and millions saved.
But here’s the problem nobody wants to talk about: we have 326 councils in England, each procuring their own systems – finance, social care, planning, revenues and benefits – that all effectively do the same thing. Hundreds of separate contracts, hundreds of separate implementations, hundreds of licences for near-identical software. It’s duplication on an industrial scale, and the taxpayer picks up the bill every single time.
As someone who has spent a career in the technology sector, this is the kind of inefficiency the private sector eliminated years ago.
Local Government Reorganisation gives us a once-in-a-generation chance to fix it. As councils merge and reorganise, we shouldn’t just replicate the old patchwork on a bigger scale – we should integrate systems properly, with shared platforms, common data standards, and real-time information available UK-wide. Imagine a system where safeguarding data, placement availability, or financial pressures could be seen across boundaries in real time. That’s not science fiction – it’s just good procurement and political will.
AI is only as good as the data underneath it. Get the foundations right through LGR, and local government could lead the way rather than play catch-up.
#LocalGovernment #AI #LGR #Worcestershire #DigitalTransformation
