Lancashire County Council: How AI is enabling social workers to offer more human care
Lancashire County Council is using Microsoft AI tools to reduce administrative burden and give social care teams more time with the people they support. The result is less duplication, more consistent documentation, and more face‑to‑face, relationship‑based care.
Brett Aspden, a Mental Health Social Care Lead at Lancashire County Council, doesn’t want a keyboard between himself and the people he helps.
“Being able to engage with the people we support is a key facet of social care,” he says. “Paperwork and admin have always created barriers to how much time we can spend doing that.
“AI has supported me and our teams to have more time to focus on people.”
For people in crisis, or families with complex needs, that shift matters. Conversations that flow naturally help social workers listen attentively, build trust, and make better decisions.
“I can now spend a bit more time with the person, get that in‑depth discussion going, and feel out what their options might be,” Aspden says. “It means we can come up with the best possible, strengths‑based, person‑led support plan.”
Across Lancashire, that is starting to reshape how social work is delivered.
Admin burden
Lancashire County Council serves more than 1.3 million residents across one of England’s largest local authorities. Some of its most demanding work sits in adult services, children’s services, and special educational needs, where practitioners support people through some of the most difficult moments in their lives.
“Spending time on admin was not what our practitioners signed up to do when they decided to become social workers“
In children’s services, that can mean support ranging from early help to statutory intervention, often involving schools, health services, charities, and other partners working around a family.
The work of social workers and family support staff is deeply human, but it has also become heavily administrative: recording visits, updating multiple systems, and translating detailed case material into formal reports.
“We were constantly getting feedback that people felt very burdened with admin,” says Chris Hayes, Performance Quality Review Officer at Lancashire County Council. “There was duplication of recording, and it was taking too long.”
Hayes describes workers taking notes during a visit, then returning to the office to write the same information up again in the required format.
“If you had an hour allocated to a family, the quality contact time might only have been a fraction of that,” he explains. “The rest could be spent reviewing and recording what was discussed.”
He stresses that this is an illustrative example rather than a fixed measure, but one that reflects consistent feedback from teams. For a profession built on relationships, that imbalance was a serious problem.
“Spending time on admin was not what our practitioners signed up to do when they decided to become social workers,” says Amisha Chauhan, Digital Innovation Manager at the Council. “By reducing that burden, we can give them more time to focus on helping families.”
Saving time, improving quality
Lancashire began exploring generative AI to tackle the admin burden, not by replacing professional judgement, but by removing repetitive work around it.
Instead of writing up every visit from scratch, social workers can capture a spoken account of the visit using tools such as Teams or Facilitator on their phone. Microsoft 365 Copilot then helps turn that material into structured case notes and draft documentation in the right format.
The result is more consistent documentation produced more efficiently. Staff no longer have to reconstruct the same case from scratch, but can start from a structured draft and refine it to meet Lancashire’s standards and language.
“People we support don’t have to retell the same story each time,” Hayes says.
In Children’s Services, AI is used strictly to support professional judgement, with practitioners retaining full responsibility for safeguarding decisions.
“What we’ve really tried to do is give our people more time to engage, build relationships, and deliver care“
In adult services, the same approach is helping teams complete complex documents more efficiently. Draft reports that once took hours can now be produced much faster and used as a starting point for practitioner review.
Social workers always review the output, apply professional judgement, and make final decisions. But across services, Lancashire estimates its AI use cases could save at least 225,000 hours a year.
That time saving is already improving the quality of care, Aspden believes.
“It gives people more time to do the really important face‑to‑face work,” he says. “Those conversations help us tailor support properly to each person.”
Designing together
Rather than introducing technology in isolation, Lancashire worked closely with frontline teams to identify where administrative pressure was highest and where AI could help most.
“With the emergence of generative AI, there was a real opportunity to change how we work,” says Peter Lloyd, Director of Digital at Lancashire County Council. “But success depended on building solutions with the people using them every day.”
That collaborative approach helped the Council design tools and prompts around real working practices, including existing templates and reporting requirements. In some cases, frontline staff quickly became expert users themselves.
“We had people in services who were better at writing prompts than digital teams – or even Microsoft!” Lloyd says.
The Council has now rolled out Copilot to thousands of staff, with around two‑thirds of the workforce actively using AI tools through a mix of free and paid licences. Plans are in place to expand further.
For Lloyd, the goal is straightforward: give people more time to do the part of the job that only people can do.
“What we’ve really tried to do is give our people more time to engage, build relationships, and deliver care,” he says.
And that means less time writing about families. More time working with them.
How AI is putting the humanity back into UK public services
Amanda Sleight: How AI is transforming the UK’s public sector
‘Less admin, more care’: Three Welsh Councils are using AI to improve services for residents
How AI is helping Westminster City Council offer a better service to residents