Watford Borough Council

When someone wants to launch a new business in an area, there’s a complex mass of bureaucratic public-sector processes to navigate in order to get everything they need to setup. This includes things such as: business rate registration, planning, licensing and much more.

This is, therefore, complex and time-consuming for the business, costly to councils in particular due to processing multiple services for one business and doesn’t readily provide councils with opportunities to upsell or market their services (e.g. waste collection, pest control).

Through this project we want to develop a specification, working with businesses to understand their perspective, that identifies all the individual processes associated with a new business being setup across the public sector footprint (starting from the perspective of a District Council), so that we can design a more streamlined and efficient way for someone to start a business and get setup with the local public sector. The project will also identify indicative efficiency savings to the public sector from this process and indicative time-saving benefits to the business.