Tuesday February 10th 2026
West Lothian Councillors backed adoption of a policy to govern use of the rapidly developing technology.
Written by Local Democracy Reporter, Stuart Sommerville
West Lothian has approved the wider use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications in its service delivery.
Councillors backed adoption of a policy to govern use of the rapidly developing technology after the success of early trials.
Social workers trialled an AI application last year, reporting saving a day’s administrative work, and more time freed up to support clients.
The council’s Executive agreed to the policy tabled this month by IT manager Ian Forrest.
He told councillors: “Adopting the AI policy will enable the council to leverage AI responsibly, ensuring compliance with legal and ethical standards while supporting innovation and efficiency.”
A report to the Executive gave assurances. “All information generated by AI must be reviewed, checked and edited to ensure accuracy prior to use. Users of AI are responsible for reviewing output and are accountable for ensuring the accuracy of AI generated output before use/release.
“Users remain professionally responsible and accountable for the quality and content of any output generated by AI, however generated or used.”
It added: “AI systems must comply with data protection regulations, including GDPR and other applicable laws and statutory guidance Confidential and personal information must not be entered into public GenAI tools, applications or web sites (like ChatGPT), as information will become available to the public domain.
“Users must follow all applicable data privacy laws and organisational policies when using AI. If a user has any doubt about the confidentiality of information, they must not use that AI tool.”
West Lothian and other councils, including Edinburgh, trialled the use of AI with Social Work last year using Magic Notes, an AI-powered application developed by Beam, a social impact charity with extensive experience supporting individuals facing homelessness.
The website records and transcribes social work sessions, then uses advanced AI to generate tailored assessments or case-note-ready summaries.
Additionally, Magic Notes offers real-time translation of letters and other documents, enhancing communication and accessibility across language barriers.
It was built with the aim of saving social workers time and improving retention by enabling social workers to prioritise time spent with the families they are supporting.
A report to council at the end of the trial period in July last year noted: “Over the course of the pilot there were 640 recordings in total undertaken with 203 hours used over the 12 weeks. There were 29 testers and the website received a 4.4/5 average rating.
The key impacts noted include: –
– Less time being spent on administration tasks with staff saving on average 1 day a week
– Feedback included improved quality of conversations with service users due to staff feeling present in the visit and feedback from the team included that workers noted improvement in the quality of their written notes
– An 82% improvement in the speed in relation to completion of assessments, write up of home visits and supervisions was noted leading to 40% increase in the ability to take on additional allocations
– Morale and staff satisfaction were noted to have significantly improved with 90% of staff feeling their job was more enjoyable and satisfying and 50% of staff advising that the use of magic notes would influence them in terms of retention within the council if it continued to be used.
Pauline Cochrane, a senior manager, reported:
“Looking ahead, a thoughtful, phased approach to scaling AI across social policy, would allow for a more informed and sustainable rollout. Establishing a board and learning from each implementation phase would support the development of a robust local AI framework and operating procedure.
“This approach will not only ensure responsible and effective AI integration, but also enable continuous risk assessment and provide practitioners with the confidence and guidance needed to use AI tools appropriately and ethically.”
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