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.

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Exploring and prototyping a common service pattern for online housing repairs

Council name: London Borough of Southwark

Stage: Funding application – Alpha

Partners: City of Lincoln Council, South Kesteven District and the Royal Borough of Greenwich

Status: Funded

Themes: Housing repairs, Website improvement

From our discovery, we identified council tenants’ and leaseholders’ user needs and barriers for going online to report and book a repair and that a common service pattern for online repairs is possible.  For the alpha phase, we want to explore and test:  Whether the ideal user journey and wireframes…

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…

Reducing invalid planning applications: a service pattern for digital planning submissions

Council name: London Borough of Lambeth

Stage: Funding application – Alpha

Status: Funded

This alpha does not follow-on from a single discovery project, but is the result of insights that have become clear during other projects by the partners and their collaborators. These include an automated digital planning guide, a digital planning submissions service and a back office planning case management system. We…

Learning how to make code-sharing between councils work in practice

Council name: London Borough of Croydon

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Status: Funded

There’s no pan-local government ‘playbook’ describing how to make code sharing work in practice. We believe this discourages collaboration, and leads to painful reinventions of the wheel in councils where it’s tried.   Our Discovery project will work through the issues that make shared development of code difficult, including:  issues of fairness in investment, workload, benefits and ownership of IP  resource implications initially and over time,…