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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.

Making Access to the Council Tax Support Scheme Easier

Council name: North East Lincolnshire Council

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: North Lincolnshire Council

Status: Not funded

Themes: Council tax

Council Tax Support (CTS) is a discount thats treat as a benefit for application purposes. Each LA scheme & household contribution levels is different. Discussions within the wider council tax community note LAs are nervous to be 1st to make changes to their local scheme, in part due to high…

Mapping Children’s Journeys Through Children and Family Services

Council name: Cheshire West & Chester Council

Stage: Funding application – Alpha

Partners: Wigan Metropolitan Council, Surrey County Council

Status: Not funded

Themes: Children services

Problem: All Councils struggle to understand and monitor how children move between statutory and non-statutory social services. This can make it much harder to make informed decisions on service delivery and often results in children bouncing between services without accessing the right support. Despite local authorities collecting data on children…

Maximising the potential of digital in improving healthy lifestyle behaviour at a population level

Council name: London Borough of Southwark

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Status: Not funded

Across the UK, our population is growing increasingly unhealthy, with more people developing chronic conditions. That in turn reduces their ability to work, live independently and participate in society. There are also significant inequalities, with those living in more deprived areas having significantly worse health outcomes. This places a financial…

Meeting FOI Demand through Assisted Self-Service

Council name: London Borough of Waltham Forest

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: Coventry City Council

Status: Not funded

Themes: Freedom of information

Problem Statement The Freedom of Information Act 2000 gives the UK public a ‘right of access’ to information held by public authorities including central government departments, Parliament, the armed forces, local authorities, the NHS, universities and police forces. These public authorities have a duty to respond to FOI requests within…

Move In Move Out - Tell us once

Council name: Leeds City Council

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: Kirklees MC, Cheshire East Council

Status: Not funded

Themes: Change of address

Citizens move home between different local authorities and as part of this process they are required to inform each local authority involved of changes required to the services they and their family need. Characteristics of the family members moving home and their prevailing situations are widely dispersed, families which access…

National Land and Property Gazetteer API development

Council name: Surrey County Council

Stage: Funding application – Alpha

Partners: Looking Local, Guildford Borough Council

Status: Not funded

Themes: Change of address, Data standards sharing and modelling, Local government as a platform

Problem: councils struggle to implement modern APIs for local address lookup which resolve unique property reference numbers (UPRNs), so where digital services are developed by or in collaboration with third parties, those solutions must rely on expensive, closed NLPG APIs that offer poor usability for end users and/or frustrating onboarding…

Norfolk and Waveney STP Hosiptal and Care Home Bed Flow tracker

Council name: Norfolk County Council

Stage: Funding application – Alpha

Partners: Norfolk and Waveney STP, N&N University Hospital

Status: Not funded

Themes: Adult social care, Health and social care record

The key objective of the project/programme is to help local people with health and care needs to get access to available beds without unnecessary delays and to save local public-sector money in the process. Norfolk County Council are leading the development of a full system wide Bed Management Tracker primarily…

Open collaboration pipeline

Council name: London Borough of Hackney

Stage: Funding application – Alpha

Partners: Hackney, GLA, Kingston and Sutton, Local gov digital

Status: Not funded

Themes: Local government as a platform

The structure of local and central government lends itself to public organisations working in silos to devise solutions to meet their own needs. This leads to huge inefficiencies through duplication of spending, lack of collaboration and sharing of knowledge. The vision for Pipeline is to develop an online tool that…

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,…

Optimising data usage to improve services to our communities

Council name: Leicester City Council

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: Milton Keynes Council, Canterbury City Council, Lambeth London Borough Council

Status: Not funded

Themes: Data standards sharing and modelling

Councils across the UK hold an incredible wealth of data but have been slow to mirror the private sector in optimising this data as a strategic and operational tool to anticipate customer demands, target scarce resources to not so obvious areas in critical need, predict and prevent future adverse events…

Organisational Digital Skills for Life

Council name: Ashfield District Council

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: Mansfield District Council, Southwark Borough Council

Status: Not funded

Themes: Digital skills and capability

We are seeking to adopt a whole organisation approach to embedding digital skills across the workforce. It is essential that we seek to equip our employees with the skills, knowledge and understanding to live, learn and work in a digital society. ‘Digital for Life’ is key to successful transformational change…

Participative research examining how technology can extend the reach of active ageing services

Council name: North Somerset Council

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Status: Not funded

A full PDF of application with diagrams will be sent to [email protected] Across Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire (BNSSG) we have a growing population with the number of over 75’s growing by 31% by 2025. This will put an estimated additional £30m of pressure on the local health system…

Pathfinder integration of health and social care systems

Council name: Gateshead Council

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: Northumberland County Council, Newcastle City Council, North Tyneside Council, South Tyneside Council, Hartlepool Borough Council, Durham County Council, Stockton Borough Council, Middlesbrough Council, Redcar & Cleveland Council, Sunderland Council, Darlington Borough Council, ADASS North East, Connected Health Cities/ Great North Care Record

Status: Not funded

Themes: Adult social care, Children services, Data standards sharing and modelling, Health and social care record

The 12 North East Councils wish to progress their digital ambitions by doing the necessary preparatory work to ensure our digital system architecture is ready to plumb into the regional HIE and social care clientele are fully informed about how we will share and use their data. Supported by ADASS,…

Pathway to City Scale Data Sharing

Council name: Sheffield City Council

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: North East Lincolnshire Council, David Ferguson, [email protected]

Status: Not funded

Themes: Data standards sharing and modelling, Local government as a platform

Problem Statement Evidence and agreement exists about the benefits and opportunities to be gained from sharing data between public sector organisations. NESTA, INVOLVE and others have completed work tackling the ‘why’ question; outlining many potential benefits and risks. The next stage for us is to understand how to take the…

Processing FOI, EIR and SARS requests for GDPR

Council name: Northumberland County Council

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: Newcastle City Council

Status: Not funded

Themes: Freedom of information

North of Tyne Councils have been struggling with the challenging process of FOI management. There is a considerable amount of manual work and paper processes involved which puts an added burden on information governance staff. We currently get over 3200 FOI requests a year, over 400 EIRS and over 100…

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…

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…

Proving the use case for Open Data

Council name: Birmingham City Council

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: Leicester City Council, Wolverhampton City Council, West Midlands Open Data Forum, ODI Birmingham, RnR Organisation

Status: Not funded

Themes: Data standards sharing and modelling

The purpose of this project is to develop a repeatable methodology to build use cases to support the release of open data. The current method of releasing data, to meet commitments under the Local Government Transparency Code, does not systematically take account of user needs in the use and reuse…

Re-Designing Planning Application Advice

Council name: Wokingham Borough Council

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: Publica Group (Cotswold DC, Forest of Dean DC, West Oxfordshire DC), Cheltenham Borough Council, Gravesham Borough Council, Maidstone Borough Council, South Kesteven District Council

Status: Not funded

Themes: Content management system, Digital skills and capability, Housing/Planning, Planning applications, Website improvement

All local planning authorities face a common problem in terms of significant numbers of the applications found to be invalid.  This is frustrating for service users and an unnecessary cost for all involved. We don’t fully understand why users struggle to submit valid applications; whether they have the necessary tools,…

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…