View from the Hill: When everything looks finished, who asks the difficult questions?

Nobody writes a bad covering letter anymore. Well, that's not quite true, but you will have noticed how much more polished everything has become recently. Role profiles, applications, board papers, presentations. Submissions are tighter, the rough edges that used to tell you something useful have been smoothed away. It points at something larger, though.

AI is good at producing answers that look finished. A business case, or a service plan, that arrives well argued, neatly structured and confident in its conclusions gets less challenge than one where you can see the working out. If an answer looks sure of itself, fewer people ask what has been left out.

Speed matters too. When the analysis takes minutes rather than a fortnight, there is more pressure to decide by the end of the day. Nobody says they want to sleep on it any more.

Local government has always depended on people being willing to push back. Section 151 officers, monitoring officers, scrutiny committees, members asking awkward questions at inconvenient moments. That is how councils avoid expensive mistakes when the evidence is incomplete and the trade-offs are uncomfortable.

Councils have more information available to them than at any point I can remember. The time and the confidence to interpret it properly is in shorter supply.

That changes what I would look for in senior leaders. Judgement has always been on the list. I would add a bit of stubbornness alongside it. The habit of asking where a conclusion came from, who has not been asked, and whether anyone has tested it. That is uncomfortable to do in front of colleagues who want to move on.

Leaders will use these tools, and they should. But reading an answer you did not write yourself with a sceptical eye is part of the job now.