Government crest Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities

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Projects submitted

Browse project applications from Rounds 1 to 3 of the Local Digital Fund. Since Round 4, we no longer publish all applications on our website. However, you can find applications for successful projects on their individual project pages.

Housing repairs online - improvement

Council name: London Borough of Southwark

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: City of Lincoln, Gravesham Borough Council, Lewisham Homes

Status: Funded

Themes: Housing repairs

This discovery aims to define a common service pattern for housing repairs and understand: barriers to adoption of digital repairs services The elements best suited to self service Optimal uses of technology to improve user satisfaction, reduce costs, which may not be the initial logging of the repairs Work on…

Registration Services Data - unlocking Local Government opportunities

Council name: Worcestershire County Council (Worcestershire Office of Data Analytics will lead on behalf of all Worcestershire Public Sector Agencies)

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: Worcestershire Registration Services, Wychavon District Council, Worcester City Council, Redditch Borough Council, Bromsgrove District Council, Malvern Hills District Council, Wyre Forest District Council, Hereford & Worcester Fire & Rescue Service, West Mercia Police, Worcestershire NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups, Worcestershire Acute Hospital NHS Trust, Worcestershire Health & Care NHS Trust, Hull City Council, Suffolk County Council.

Status: Funded

Themes: Adult social care, Care assessment, Change of address, Children services, Council tax, Data standards sharing and modelling, Health and social care record, Housing/Planning, Local government as a platform, Planning applications

Problem Statement The Digital Economy Act 2017 enables greater powers to share Registration Services data for birth, deaths and marriages with other local public sector partners – the common 'problem' is identifying for what purpose, how to share, and what are the business benefits of doing so. Objectives The existing…

User-centred back office planning system to unlock transformation

Council name: London Borough of Southwark

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: London Borough of Hackney, GLA, Future Cities Catapult

Status: Funded

Themes: Housing/Planning, Planning applications

Planning services are dependent on proprietary solutions that are developing slowly and resistant to interoperability. The market is dominated by just two providers. This software does not meet the aspirations set out in the Local Digital Declaration. The commercial incentives to support innovation are low. The practical problems associated with…

Tell us once ‘move-in’ process

Council name: Sunderland City Council

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: North East Lincolnshire Council, Kirklees Borough Council, Watford Borough Council, Newcastle City Council

Status: Funded

Themes: Adult social care, Change of address, Children services, Communities, Council tax, Data standards sharing and modelling, Directory of services, Libraries, Local government as a platform, Parking, Waste, Website improvement

Moving house is stressful and this is not helped by the complexity of the public sector front-end, as a new resident has to navigate individually a disjointed mass of bureaucratic processes in order to get everything they need when moving house. The current approach means a resident has to make multiple contacts and…

Can chatbots and AI help solve service design problems?

Council name: Oxford City Council

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: Hertsmere Borough Council, Cheltenham Borough Council, Doncaster Council, Preston City Council, North East Derbyshire District Council, Bolsover District Council, Calderdale Council, Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council, Bromsgrove District Council, Redditch Borough Council, Surrey County Council, Adur and Worthing Councils

Status: Funded

Themes: Artificial intelligence and robotic process automation, Chatbots

There are problems for local authorities looking to adopt chatbot and AI solutions; There is no shared understanding of the technology and its advantages/disadvantages as a solution to key issues.  There are a variety of products and platforms that already exist on the market, but no objective evaluation of each…

OpenCommunity: data standards for local community-based services

Council name: Adur & Worthing Councils

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: Adur & Worthing Councils, Devon County Council, Buckinghamshire County Council

Status: Funded

Themes: Adult social care, Care assessment, Children services, Communities, Data standards sharing and modelling, Directory of services, Homelessness, Housing application, Housing/Planning, Independent and assistive living, Libraries, Website improvement

Our project wishes to bring joined-up, best-practice digital thinking to the challenging problem of local service directories. Every local authority, health organisation, police force, together with other voluntary sector partners are attempting to maintain some form of local directory-based information with massive duplication of effort.  Typically there is little join-up,…

GOV.UK Pay as a viable alternative e-payment provider

Council name: North East Lincolnshire Council

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: GDS GOV.UK Pay team, Publica Group (Cotswold DC, West Oxfordshire DC and Forest of Dean DC), Allerdale Council, Oxford CC

Status: Funded

Themes: Local government as a platform

LAs should use GDS GaaP products; GOV.UK Pay has processed >£93m, yet LA adoption is slow to adopt with concerns about if GOV.UK Pay can be their sole e-payment system. The GOV.UK Pay contract model is financially beneficial for LAs but their feeling is that challenges & integration costs with…

Reducing care calls to improve customer satisfaction

Council name: Birmingham City Council

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: Worcestershire County Council (Steven Medley), Solihull MBC (John Loughead)

Status: Funded

Themes: Adult social care, Artificial intelligence and robotic process automation, Care assessment, Digital skills and capability, Independent and assistive living

Adult Social Care provides home care support to over 7000 citizens who are vulnerable, frail and may suffer early signs of cognitive impairment.  Following guidance from the NICE, and Birmingham City Council’s (BCC) commitment to provide excellent services, BCC increased the duration of its care visits from 15 to 30…

Common Data Model for Children's Services Statutory Returns

Council name: Greater Manchester Combined Authority

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: Greater Manchester Combined Authorities, Manchester City Council, Wigan Borough Council, Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council

Status: Funded

Themes: Children services

The problem: Every day, our Children’s Services Departments (CSDs) make key decisions deciding the future of vulnerable children without timely and relevant comparable data. Without this, they cannot accurately assess what works and what doesn’t or make well-informed commissioning decisions. Statutory returns processes specifically are very inefficient and cost-intensive. Although…

Taxi licensing applications – fixing complexity, inefficiency and risk

Council name: Gateshead Council

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: Northumberland County Council, Sunderland City Council

Status: Funded

Themes: Taxi Licencing

Problem Statement Licensing in the taxi trade is a key statutory responsibility of local government. Gateshead Council and partners (Northumberland County Council and Sunderland City Council) find that delivering license service is time consuming for users and staff; often involving paper applications and repeated visits to council premises. Underpinning the taxi licensing…

Development Data Automation – Addressing the shortage of Delivery Data

Council name: Greater London Authority

Stage: Funding application – Alpha

Partners: Plymouth City Council, London Borough of Waltham Forest, London Borough of Hackney, London Borough of Southwark

Status: Funded

Themes: Building control, Data standards sharing and modelling, Digital inclusion, Housing application, Housing/Planning, Planning applications

There is an increasing need for reliable data on proposed and approved development in order to measure progress toward housing delivery and other Government priorities. Obtaining even limited data on consented development is costly and labour intensive. Data is often out of date before it can be used for policy development…

Digital data protection impact assessment (DPIA) tool

Council name: Greater Manchester Combined Authority

Stage: Funding application – Alpha

Partners: Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council is our named lead partner, Due to the nature of our work we will be working with the 10 Local Authorities in GM. Three areas have signed the Local Digital Decleration (Wigan, Manchester and Stockport) and we will be actively encouraging the remaining authorities to sign as soon as possible

Status: Funded

Themes: Data standards sharing and modelling, Digital skills and capability

Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) are a requirement of data protection legislation but are seen as an intensive and onerous process. We know a range of templates are currently used resulting in a complicated and fragmented approach particularly across partnerships. Challenges include that process are reliant on a small number of specialist staff…

Better case management of FOI and SAR requests

Council name: London Borough of Hackney

Stage: Funding application – Alpha

Partners: Suffolk Council, Stevenage Borough Council (Digital Declaration signoff in progress), Cornwall Council (Digital Declaration signoff in progress)

Status: Funded

Themes: Freedom of information

In response to an earlier discovery process around Freedom of Information (FOI) requests and Subject Access Requests (SARs), Hackney made a set of process improvements, commissioned an open source service that provides a simple user journey for members of the public for making FOI requests, and procured a closed source…

Using Analytics and AI to Aid the Production of EHCPs

Council name: Ealing Council

Stage: Funding application – Alpha

Partners: Staffordshire county Council, and Suffolk Council

Status: Funded

Themes: Children services

Having ‘blueprinted’ the SEN Assessment process it is apparent that applying digital processes, analytics and AI that the production of Education Health and Care Plans (EHCP) can be greatly enhanced. A new system would: Allow schools direct input and assessment of need. Allow and monitor assessments and be a single…

Visualising Failure in Waste Services

Council name: North East Lincolnshire Council

Stage: Funding application – Alpha

Partners: Leeds City Council

Status: Funded

Themes: Waste

Missed bin reports are a problem to all LAs that have responsibility for them. The impact is customer contact through whatever channel, some of which is real and some through residents not observing the terms and conditions of the service. Understanding the true picture is difficult and makes informative action…

Family Context in Children's Services

Council name: Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council

Stage: Funding application – Alpha

Partners: Leeds City Council (Clare Walker), Surrey County Council (William Balakrishnan), Worcestershire Office of Data Analytics (Neill Crump)

Status: Funded

Themes: Children services

Problem and objectives With 12 other councils, we identified that we all face a common problem with getting information about a child’s family (from basic details to understanding relationships and risk factors) for Children’s Services decision making. Not having this information readily accessible makes it harder to judge risk and…

Exploring Income Management and ePayments so that all councils can benefit from a viable alternative to legacy systems and suppliers.

Council name: Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: Allerdale Borough Council, Cherwell District Council, Huntingdon District Council, North East Lincolnshire District Council, Sheffield City Council, South Northamptonshire Council and the Government Digital Service

Status: Funded

Themes: Website improvement

All local authorities need to manage their finances through income management (IM) and reconciliation processes: matching expected income against actual income allocating actual income to paying users’ accounts (for example, to show that someone has paid their council tax) matching actual income to ledger codes so books can be balanced…

Providing Local Authority Housing services with Registrations data in order to reduce the time that families on the social housing list wait for a Council property

Council name: Worcestershire County Council

Stage: Funding application – Alpha

Partners: Redditch and Bromsgrove Council and Suffolk County Council

Status: Funded

[note: outputs discovery available here. This includes a ‘Discovery report’, which is the final output of the project, and an Appendix, which includes other outputs like detailed journey maps. We refer to the Discovery report throughout this application by the relevant page number unless otherwise stated]. Principal hypotheses to test…

Exploring new user-centred digital systems to make the planning process more efficient and transparent.

Council name: The London Borough of Southwark

Stage: Funding application – Alpha

Partners: London Borough of Hackney, Greater London Authority and Surrey Heath Borough Council

Status: Funded

Our work during discovery was largely focussed on exploring the user needs of planning officers to understand the challenges they face and the potential benefits of improving the back-end management systems they use. We found that new systems, designed with a user-centred approach, would result in a more efficient and…

Prototyping an OpenCommunity Data Service model

Council name: Buckinghamshire County Council

Stage: Funding application – Alpha

Partners: Adur and Worthing Council, Leeds City Council and the London Borough of Croydon

Status: Funded

Our OpenCommunity Discovery found significant duplication of effort and cost in the provision of community based service information in local areas, as well as significant challenges around interoperability and usability.  Our report estimates that substantial savings across 160 upper tier councils could be made if these issues were addressed, totalling…