Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities
Laying the foundations for the local public services of the future
Many councils in the UK are pivoting to support their residents in response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. Our team’s role has shifted to support digital teams in local government, ensuring that sharing and discussion can continue and open products can be reused where possible.
This web page has links to Google documents managed by the Local Digital Collaboration Unit. OpenDocument Text file downloads are also available.
The Local Digital C-19 Challenge was launched in July 2020 to find Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) projects to help local authorities in England with their COVID-19 recovery and renewal efforts.
11 local government projects were awarded a share of £800,000 to combat some of the challenges they faced as a direct result of COVID-19. You can now access the outputs from the completed projects.
We’ve collated all resources and links shared on various channels into a public Google document, which we’ll continue to update:
Local Digital support for COVID-19 response Google document (file download)
This includes:
We have also put together the following documents based on our desk research and feedback from the organisational culture working group:
We have created a checklist of ways to improve how you communicate your coronavirus support with residents through your council website.
These tips will help you make the most of your existing resources to communicate important information in a way that is user-friendly, accessible and inclusive. They can also be applied to any crisis response in your region, such as flooding.
You can also read about the desk and user research we conducted to help put together these tips in this blog post.
We’ve teamed up with Apolitical to bring you a free online email-based boot camp on best practices for working remotely in local government. This 4-week course will deliver 20-minute lessons (from productivity to wellbeing) direct to your inbox, with articles, case studies and bite-sized activities. Find out more and register for the boot camp.
If you haven’t been able to join us on previous calls, you can find meetings notes and recordings below:
26 June: Microsoft Teams for Demand Management – slide deck, recording (on Youtube) and meeting notes
12 June: Organisational Culture & Remote Working – slide deck, recording (on YouTube) and meeting notes (file download)
29 May: Digital inclusion and playback from workshops – meeting notes (file download) and recording (on YouTube)
15 May: Phased recovery of services workshop 1; Organisational culture workshop 1 (see links in Resources section)
27 May: Phased recovery of services workshop 2; Organisational culture workshop 2 (see links in Resources section)
1 May: Local Digital ‘In the Ether’ workshop – workshop write-up
24 April: Digital and data challenges – meeting notes ( file download) and hangout chat text (file download)
17 April: Common challenges in responding to COVID-19 – meeting notes (file download)
9 April: The continued functions of local government – meeting notes (file download) and hangout chat text (file download)
3 April: Delivering services that connect vulnerable people with volunteer support – meeting notes (file download) and hangout chat text (file download)
27 March: Meeting needs of vulnerable residents – meeting notes (file download) and hangout chat text (file download)
20 March: MHCLG COVID-19 Introduction call – meeting notes (file download) and hangout chat text (file download)
You can contact our team by emailing:
You can keep up with our work by:
