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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.

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…

Registration of births

Council name: Northumberland County Council

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: Newcastle City Council

Status: Not funded

North of Tyne would like to look at  the process of registering of births. There is a considerable amount of manual work and paper processes involved which puts an added burden on registrar staff. In Northumberland and Newcastle there were over 11,000 births.   Each one requiring a face to face…

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…

Research template for a digital library

Council name: London Borough of Croydon

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: London Borough of Southwark, Gloucestershire County Council, Cambridge City Council, South Cambridgeshire District Council, East Cambridgeshire District Council, Huntingdonshire District Council, Fenland District Council

Status: Not funded

Themes: Libraries

The digital revolution has changed library user behaviour and nationally footfall loans are decreasing. The experience for users is inconsistent and councils aren’t keeping up with digital trends. We propose to conduct research into digital library services and produce a template for user research that all local authorities can benefit…

Scaling ADASS East Region’s adult social care provider assessment & market management solution

Council name: North West ADASS

Stage: Funding application – Alpha

Partners: North West ADASS, Gateshead Council, Kent County Council, HAS Technology Group, ADASS East

Status: Not funded

Themes: Adult social care, Data standards sharing and modelling

All 152 Local Authorities with Adult Social Care responsibilities are required to ensure they operate a sustainable, high-quality market for their local population, with efficient operation of all adult social care. The Care Act 2014 sets out the law around market development in adult social care. It enshrines in legislation…

Scaling service design and agile methods to transform services

Council name: London Borough of Southwark

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: Hackney Council, Croydon Council, Adur & Worthing Councils

Status: Not funded

Themes: Digital skills and capability

Councils increasingly have transformation teams with digital skills but they tend to be small teams struggling to manage the demand from services wanting digital change. There have been small scale successes with design sprint and agile discovery projects utilising GDS’ methodology, however traditional council governance, culture and structure make it…

Self-service Digital Care Needs Assessment

Council name: Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council

Stage: Funding application – Alpha

Partners: Nottinghamshire, Harrow, Stockton

Status: Not funded

Themes: Adult social care, Care assessment, Directory of services

Adult social care (ASC) is currently one of the most analogue and expensive services that councils deliver. The Care Act increased the pressure particularly around assessments and with an ageing population this vital service will continue to feel the strain, and struggle if left unchanged. Responsible officers across the country…

Shared pattern and process library for local government

Council name: London Borough of Southwark

Stage: Funding application – Alpha

Partners: Adur & Worthing Councils, Devon County Council, Birmingham City Council, LocalGov Digital, iStandUK, Croyden Council, Brent Council

Status: Not funded

Themes: Local government as a platform

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,…

Simple Sign On

Council name: Durham County Council

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: Wirral Council, Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council, Hillingdon Council, Brighton and Hove City Council, Waltham Forrest Council, Rugby Council, Calderdale Council, Kirklees Council, Derby Council, Hambleton Council, North Devon Council, Cheshire East Council

Status: Not funded

Themes: Single sign on

Local Authorities have made significant progress in providing digital services to the public. As this journey continues it is becoming increasingly apparent, both from customer feedback and professional teams, that the ability to provide a simple and seamless authentication process across multiple case management systems is needed to make the…

Single unified communications technology implementation for multiple partners

Council name: Hinckley and Bosworth Borough Council

Stage: Funding application – Alpha

Partners: Hinckley and Bosworth Borough Council, Melton Borough Council, Blaby District Council, Oadby and Wigston Borough Council, Leicestershire Revenues and Benefits Partnership

Status: Not funded

Themes: Change of address, Content management system, Digital inclusion, Digital skills and capability, Local government as a platform

Working in partnership, all authorities have investigated options available and explored the benefits of adopting new approach for communication technologies, together with utilising the benefits of a partnership approach to considering the market place, procuring and implementing a new solution. This work has identified the opportunity for modern telephony, unified…

Social prescription

Council name: Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames

Stage: Funding application – Alpha

Partners: London Borough of Sutton

Status: Not funded

Themes: Adult social care, Communities, Data standards sharing and modelling, Directory of services, Homelessness, Independent and assistive living

By utilising physical and digital interactions to offer human-centred support before needs become critical we could save money on expensive high-need treatments and also ensure our population is happier, healthier and more socially active (win-win). Social Prescription programmes are becoming more prevalent in the UK. Whether a model will succeed…

Strengthening Information Governance, Ethics and Data Standards

Council name: London Borough of Islington

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: Surrey County Council, Kaleidoschope Ltd, Oxford Insights

Status: Not funded

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

The ability to use data better has benefits for councils, their public sector partners, and citizens. However, as local government strives to make better use of data assets, issues of privacy, confidentiality, cybersecurity, and ethics emerge, particularly around data linkage, analytics, and the use of predictive models. For data linkage…

Supporting and connecting people using Artificial Intelligence

Council name: Suffolk County Council

Stage: Funding application – Alpha

Partners: Norfolk County Council, Service Robotics

Status: Not funded

Themes: Adult social care, Artificial intelligence and robotic process automation, Independent and assistive living

The problem that we intend to address is whether we can support and connect people with social care needs through the use of personal AI devices. The capabilities of these devices to augment and enhance our lives is almost limitless, and their value is being proven by the dramatic uptake…

Supporting households at risk of homelessness

Council name: London Borough of Lewisham

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: London Borough of Lewisham, London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham, Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea

Status: Not funded

Themes: Homelessness, Housing application

The nature of homelessness has changed in the past decade. In the first quarter of 2008, 20% of households that were accepted as Homeless in England had lost their rented or tied accommodation, by the first quarter of 2018 this had risen to 31%[1]. As rents continue to increase[2] at…

Supporting residents by leveraging Big Data and Artificial Intelligence

Council name: Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Status: Not funded

Local Authorities (LA) face a shared problem: they manage a wide range of services and receive a high volume of visits and calls to reception and contact centres from which common questions are frequently asked by residents (users), as well as freedom of information enquirers. The information made available on…

Taxi driver licensing applications – fixing complexity, inefficiency and risk

Council name: Gateshead Council

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: Leeds City Council, Northumberland County Council and Sunderland City Council

Status: Not funded

Themes: Taxi Licencing

The common problem we propose to investigate builds on the previous discovery, Taxi licensing – fixing complexity, inefficiency and risk. This round of discovery will focus on one service within the taxi licencing space, new taxi driver applications. The aim is to refine user stories collected with an emphasis on…

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…

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…

To explore the feasibility of creating a true customer focused, configurable, cost effective IT system for processing Revenue and Benefits data

Council name: Teignbridge District Council

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Status: Funded

Every Council in the country is required to process Revenue and Benefits data, either in-house or using an outsourced model. In order to achieve this, each Council requires an IT platform to enable customer’s data to be processed in a timely, accurate and efficient manner. Currently the market for these…

To improve the Electoral Registration process

Council name: Harrow Council

Stage: Funding application – Discovery

Partners: TBC

Status: Not funded

Themes: Single sign on, Website improvement

The current processes around electoral registration and the annual canvass are both paper driven and resource intensive. As a result, these services are unnecessarily costly to run. The chance to digitise and potentially automate this service area offers the opportunity to reduce cost, improve the carbon footprint and enhance the…