Advice and benefits

Local authorities experience common problems – dealing with increasing demand, reduced budget and as a result less staff. They are also experiencing a vast set of common goals and needs […]

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 […]

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 […]

Open source communities and practices in technology have been around since the early 1960s with many academics distributing free and open software to encourage and support openness and co-operation. As […]

Debt poverty is an issue that affects all Local Authorities in the UK. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimates that approximately 22% of people in the UK are living in poverty. […]

This Discovery Project looks to explore Wi-Fi print solutions so that local authorities have a greater understanding of the available solutions in the common marketplace and can make better informed […]

Our initial research suggests there is currently a gap between young people, particularly aged 16-24, and their local councils. For the Discovery phase we are focusing on young people and […]

This project aims to allow councils, through video calling, to gain the benefits of face-to-face communication without the traditional associated costs. When redeveloping its website in 2015, AVDC found that costs for […]

We know that there are currently huge issues for local residents in Lincolnshire in accessing the internet. In addition, local health care providers are often frustrated by the lack of […]

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 […]

In order to tackle public sector wide problems like the increasing cost of social care and health and the lack of affordable housing or jobs councils need to switch from […]

Residents that are embedded into a community are less likely to have a bad situation develop into crisis and are more able to draw on support from sources other than […]

This discovery project breaks into three parts a common problem facing local authorities; The first part of the common problem is understanding whether voice truly represents a long-term change in […]

East Lindsey District Council alongside Boston Borough Council and South Holland District Council cover 2,250 km² of East Lincolnshire with a combined population of over 300,000. The sparsely distributed population […]

The problem of low account take-up exists in many authorities; particularly with low take-up across high volume transactional services such as Benefits; Council Tax; Rent etc. Some of the perceived […]

At the moment, none of the partner authorities have sufficient skills or capacity to carry out effective user research. Therefore we are all unsure whether we are meeting user needs. […]

A recent Select Committee report concluded that “the Government does not understand citizen’s views on how their data should be used” (https://bit.ly/2k2U1P0). This knowledge gap problem exists at national, regional […]

Stevenage Borough Council and East Herts District Council run  shared ICT and Revenue and benefits partnership. At present many processes and information transfers within both organisations are a manual process.  […]

TellJO is a digital self-assessment sent out by a local authority to its customers, enabling the local authority to proactively identify and engage with their vulnerable citizens at pre-crisis. The […]

This alpha will explore and test the hypotheses that a digital triage tool, combining a best of breed web app with carefully constructed animations will enable clients, and their immediate […]