Taxi licensing applications – fixing complexity, inefficiency and risk

The discovery will be delivered with in-house resources and specialists procured through the digital marketplace, financed by Local Digital Fund.  All partners will provide resource, with Gateshead acting as lead and overarching accountability.

SMART objectives will be created with acceptance criteria to measure the success of sprints and discovery.

Assets will be developed throughout to ensure we are ready to publish by 31 March 19. The table below details outputs to be published:

Current Cost of the problem

Taxi licensing authorities operate on a cost recovery basis, Gateshead for example has delivery costs in excess of £200,000 per year.  Collectively, Gateshead, Sunderland and Northumberland receive around 4000 applications a year, with estimated costs in excess of £1.1M.

A report published by the DfT 2018, showed there were 285,400 licensed vehicles in England in 2017; using regional costs, it is conservatively estimated in 2017 delivery costs across England exceeded £80m.

Costs are attributed to the process being paper based, with online options focused on providing forms to be printed and submitted in person, post or email.  The process is lengthy, with renewals taking on average take 1–3 weeks and new applications 1-2 months. To reach a decision there can be multiple face to face visits, many forms to complete and a high risk of error throughout.

Project Proposal

To identify a digital solution for new and renewal applications, that can be can be scaled rapidly at low cost to other licensing authorities, reducing cost and processing time, whilst enhancing the customer experience and public safety.

Benefits for service providers

A reduction in cost, processing time and errors; a more straightforward, lean process, making it easier for staff to progress and issue licenses;

Enhanced data sharing, using data insights for service delivery to make better decisions resulting in joined up continuous improvement.

Although not part of the project bid, Sheffield and Newcastle City Council’s are keen to see shareable project outputs/benefits.

Benefits for service users

We aim to increase accessibility by cutting face to face visits, saving travel time and cost through self-service.  This will in turn enhance the customer experience, improve service response time and processing will be faster and less convoluted.

Benefits to the public

Improved public safety through faster, more improved decision making, and making it easier to share data between local authorities.

We follow agile values throughout, giving us flexibility to evolve, as our knowledge and understanding of user needs develop. We will create a cross-functional team with representatives from each partner council that follows agile methods. We will carry out day-to-day collaboration using Trello, Google Docs and Slack, along with show and tells with stakeholders across partners in person at key milestones. We will keep other local authorities updated on our progress and invite feedback from other local authorities in real-time through a blog, social media and slack.

Our local authority areas have wide ranging geographies and demographics. We are therefore confident user research will identify user needs that are relevant throughout the UK, therefore scalable and useable by other local authorities. We will collate and publish research findings and quantitative data.  This will provide insights for other local authorities who encounter the same issues.

User Profile

We will undertake research with a minimum six users per local authority as follows:

1)  Hackney carriage and private hire taxi drivers and taxi companies.  There are approximately 4000 applications per year to all three partnering authorities, therefore understanding the needs of those that submit applications is fundamental to solution redesign.

2)  We intend to engage with the public/users of taxi services to ensure that public safety is embedded into any potential future solution.

3)  Thirdly, we intend to engage with licensing teams across all three partner organisations, speaking to those who are responsible for administering and awarding licenses and renewals on site.  Any new solution needs to improve current ways of working, whilst reducing cost, enhancing efficiency and removing waste.

Engagement

• Face to Face and telephone interviews with taxi drivers, the public, staff and taxi company operators;
• User Research sessions with the taxi trade, incentivised to promote take-up;
• Attending local licensing forums;
• Exit interviews within licensing offices, speaking to taxi drivers who have just accessed the service;

User research objectives

• To understand the appetite within the taxi trade for digital solutions, including how digitally aware users are;
• To identify the most efficient and effective process for all stakeholders, whilst ensuring public safety is at the core of any new proposal;
• To identify differences (if any) across the localities of all partners to understand the impact that local geographies, demographic or market may have on user needs.

We would like to be able to benefit from:

• Support and guidance as/if required from MHCLG
• Access to GDS user research labs (to help us bring down the project cost for user research sessions)
• Crash course of basic Agile training for the whole team
• Ability to send comms via MHCLG channels (like newsletter, twitter, etc) to help us ‘work out loud’
• Help with sharing the outputs with the local gov sector
• Help with engaging with other councils that may want to feed into our project.
• Would be beneficial that any GDS Academy training was delivered in the North East

No funding previously received