Local Digital Fund

About the Local Digital Fund

The Local Digital Fund aims to help local authorities implement the Local Digital Declaration by funding digital skills training and projects that address common local service challenges in common, reusable ways.

The Fund was introduced in July 2018 by the then UK Local Government Minister, Rishi Sunak, of the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC). Since then, DLUHC has awarded over £16 million of funding to 61 council-led projects. 

 

How the Local Digital Fund supports local government

1. Collaborative projects

All signatories of the Local Digital Declaration are invited to apply for funding to support collaborative digital projects. In addition to funding, successful projects receive dedicated support from the DLUHC Local Digital team.

Applications for our most recent round, Round 6, are now closed. You can learn about the projects that have received funding through this round and previous rounds below. Each project has its own webpage where you can follow their progress, or you can browse all funded projects.

Outputs from successful completed projects are also made available on our website for other local authorities to reuse and adopt.

2. Digital skills training

To support councils to deliver the digital projects that we fund, we are committed to meeting the need for digital leadership and agile project delivery training.

We have invited Round 6 projects to put forward relevant team members for the Digital and Agile for Local Government training course. This course is designed to equip local government officers with a deeper understanding of agile and digital and how to use them effectively in digital delivery. We plan to use the feedback from this course to determine what training we offer in future.

You can find more information on our Training page or browse our library of training courses to develop your digital and cyber skills online.

How we’re measuring the impact of the Local Digital Fund

We have commissioned an independent evaluation of the Local Digital Fund to understand its impact and how we can improve and iterate it over time.

To do this, we are measuring councils’ digital standing before the programme, and seeing how that develops over time. In particular, we’ll be measuring the impacts of Local Digital Fund projects in terms of outcomes for residents, council employees and the wider sector.

We’ll be issuing short surveys to some councils who have been funded through the Local Digital Fund, and to some who haven’t, as well as running interviews, workshops and feedback sessions to understand impact.

Learn more about the evaluation study


 

Past funding rounds