Housing

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 […]

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. […]

Internet technologies around IoT are promising radical improvements in how we serve our residents and businesses. This gives rise to a range of emerging opportunities to achieve significant social and […]

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 […]

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 […]

Across all local authorities there are significant numbers of staff spending their time out of the office. These staff rely on systems which create as many barriers to doing an […]

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 […]

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.  […]

The alpha stage of the project will be the development of a digital planning tool (the Tool) which will be a live functional prototype based on Gateshead Council data to […]

From our discovery, we identified council tenants’ and leaseholders’ user needs and barriers for going online to report and book a repair and that a common service pattern for online […]

[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 […]

Our work during discovery was largely focussed on exploring the user needs of planning officers to understand the challenges they face and the potential benefits of improving the back-end management […]

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 […]

HMLR Local Land Charges (LLC) project aims to streamline the LLC ‘service’. Its scope did not include the second element of the current service i.e. provision of replies to questions, which […]