Blog posts

MHCLG has awarded further funding to 6 projects through the Local Digital Fund. Read about the projects that are continuing their work to fix the plumbing of public services.

Read about the continued work of the Local Digital Collaboration Unit and the events the team attended during the recent pre-election period.

MHCLG pledged to train 1000 local authority staff as part of our mission to support the ‘Local Digital’ movement. Read about how the Local Digital Collaboration Unit have achieved this and how your local authority can access free digital training.

Round 3 of the Local Digital Fund has closed and MHCLG has backed 7 more collaborative digital projects across local government.

The Local Digital Fund is opening to applications from new collaborative projects across local government. Read about our latest updates.

It’s been one year since the Local Digital Declaration was published. The Local Digital Collaboration Unit at MHCLG reflect upon the achievements so far, and how their future work can further deliver upon the promises and principles of the Declaration.

The Digital Land team was represented at this year’s FUTURE: PropTech event to engage with and learn from innovators in the housing and planning sector. Find out more about the event and what we learned.

Members of the Local Digital Collaboration Unit at MHCLG have been working closely with the 16 Local Digital Fund projects. Read about the information they’re gathering, how they aim to measure the value of collaborative working and the collaborative tools that the funded projects have utilised so far.

We ran a discovery workshop on 12 February with 10 municipal digital leaders, Bloomberg Associates and Socitm to understand how we might better network and support them. Read the summary, the full event log and what we’re planning as a result.

The Digital Land Policy team are working to support digital innovation in the PropTech sector. Peter Latham talks about who has joined the team, the findings they have already made and what they’re planning to do next.

MHCLG is traditionally a policy department of government. Paul Maltby, who leads the Digital directorate, talks about the ways in which digital and policy can work together, and how the principles of OneTeamGov could define the future of the Civil Service.

The Digital Land Services team and the Developer Contributions Planning Policy team have been working together to make developer contributions open and transparent. Read more to learn about how ways of working can impact collaboration within an organisation.

145 signatories of the Local Digital Declaration committed to projects that work towards better outcomes for citizens through digital. All of these commitments have now been published on the Local Digital website.

We are delighted to announce that the Local Digital Fund is backing 16 projects in its first round, supporting 57 councils to find innovative routes towards improved digital services.

An expert panel joined the Local Digital Collaboration Unit team to review the projects shortlisted for the Local Digital Fund awards. Read how the successful bids were decided upon from the 77 full applications received.

Hosted by techUK, this co-design workshop invited tech suppliers and vendors to explore different areas of response to the Declaration. See the progress made at the event by each working group and the planned next steps.

What we’ve learnt from the expressions of interest stage and how we’ll be taking the full Local Digital Fund applications forward from here.

The Local Digital team is delighted to announce that since its launch in July, the Local Digital Declaration has had senior sign-off from 86 organisations.

This has been an important, madly busy week for our new Local Digital Collaboration Unit. In just a 2-week period, we received 389 unique expressions of interest in running collaborative Local Digital Fund projects from 171 organisations. Taking open to the whole next level, our next next task is to publish the whole lot on our website.

In this blog post, Local Government Minister Rishi Sunak announces the launch of the Local Digital Fund and outlines the application process. The fund will be used to enable local councils to work together on a digital project, as well as to enhance the digital capability of local teams.