London Borough of Southwark

Outcome of Expression of Interest: Invited to apply

Although councils provide similar online resident services, each have bought or built frontend products on top of legacy backend systems. Some councils openly publish code for reuse, but reuse is hampered due to the rework required to integrate these products into different frontend and backend systems. Other councils have started building their own API abstraction layer, e.g. Hackney, Bristol and Adur & Worthing. Because there is no standard and councils have developed in isolation, this code is similarly hard to reuse.

We want to understand whether standard design patterns and API suite could be developed to abstract different frontend and backend systems so that councils can easily reuse developed modules. Hackney has spent approximately £540k developing repairs and associated APIs. If only 25% of that is spent developing integrations the potential savings across 300 councils are substantial, especially if this in turn facilitates reuse.

Hackney is leading a separate EOI to look at a common API platform however this bid’s focus is on housing services. Hackney’s research and housing APIs will be used as the starting point and HACT’s housing data standard will be incorporated and developed further.

  • Digital leadership training (for council leaders, service managers or senior executives)
  • Digital and agile awareness
  • Introduction to delivery management
  • Agile for teams

Other training requests

Introduction to coding in the open, common APIs and data standards.