London Borough of Southwark

Every local authority is tasked with hundreds of functions, and through individual transformation programmes many are redesigning them to provide better, cheaper services. There are hundreds of councils across England all delivering similar services, often to meet the same statutory requirement.

Whilst it’s impossible to quantify the cost of duplication, if you multiply hundreds of services by hundreds of councils it is obvious there is huge a potential for reducing waste, through collaboration.

We would like to develop a solution to share patterns (how a service manifests itself to the user) which incorporate the GDS design system, and processes (how a service is delivered) that is managed by local government, for local government. This would not only help prevent duplication, it would give councils a blueprint with which to start their service redesign, speeding up the process and reducing cost in every council.

The councils listed as lead authorities will work in partnership on the creation of the library.

Discovery evidence

As part of discovery we spoke individually with numerous councils and ran three research sessions, two in London, one in Birmingham.

One research session was also attended by:

• platform suppliers who combined are used by 50% of the local government market
• the Government Digital Service
• techUK
• iStandUK.

We used these sessions to gather individual user needs and asses whether there was  consensus for a platform to allow the sharing of patterns and processes. The sessions found that

• An overwhelming percentage of participants working in local government felt they would make use of, and contribute to the library, because this would assist them with re-designing their organisation’s services.
• The library, if used in conjunction with service assessments, would provide a quality control for the re-design of local government services.
• Most suppliers thought the library would help users of their platform create better services.

We would also like to expand on the work already started by individual suppliers, such as Jadu’s Library

https://www.jadu.net/library/directory/1/library

by taking their discovery work, building on it to meet the identified user needs, and making the library platform and technology agnostic.