News

In March this year, we teamed up with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Institute to jointly deliver a virtual programme for local government at no cost.

The Local Digital and Cyber teams are going to be making some exciting changes over the next few months, backed by multi-year funding to the tune of £85 million.

In this blog post, I want to reflect back on the lessons learnt and achievements, such as bringing local authorities together to solve common challenges, and in particular how a group of local authorities and suppliers are cooperating together to deliver an open source solution.

For this edition of the Council Spotlight, we are highlighting Achieving for Children — a not-for-profit social enterprise owned by three councils.

Our digital planning software work is moving into a new phase of collaboration and delivery with Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) and software providers.

For November’s edition of the Council Spotlight, we invited East Sussex County Council to share the story of Data to Insight, a national children’s services data collaboration. East Sussex County Council hosts Data to Insight as part of the South East Sector Led Improvement Programme.

Today we’re pleased to announce the 9 council-led digital projects that will be awarded funding through Round 5 of the Local Digital Fund.

It’s been seven months since we launched an online library of training courses to support our local government colleagues to develop their digital skills while working remotely. In that time, we’ve had 218 applications from people working in more than 100 councils for more than 40 courses.

As part of our new council spotlight feature, we invited Croydon Council to share their digital transformation story with us. In this guest blog, Dave Briggs, Head of Digital Operations at Croydon Digital Service, and his colleagues, share their journey to building the Croydon Digital Service and the role of the Local Digital Declaration.

We’re pleased to announce the launch of a private beta of two new council-led digital planning products, funded by MHCLG’s Local Digital Fund. This is an exciting step towards 21st Century digital planning systems that use data and human-centred design to make applying for planning permission significantly simpler, faster and easier to understand.

Earlier this year, we launched a library of online training courses to support our local government colleagues to learn and develop their digital skills while working remotely. We want to share with you what we’ve learned so far and what we plan to do next. You can also find out how we’ve expanded the offer to provide even more training opportunities.

During the cyber security discovery last year, we identified five areas of opportunity for MHCLG to support councils in improving their cyber health. One of these areas was technical remediation: providing support to councils identified through the survey on mitigating malware and ransomware.

During a Cyber discovery in 2020, a Cyber Health Framework was identified as one of the main areas of opportunity to progress into an alpha project, supporting council staff to navigate numerous and sometimes overlapping standards.

The Continuous Funding Model (CFM) is a more flexible way for funding digital projects through the Local Digital Fund. Find out how it’s been developed, how it works and who can apply.

We have developed a virtual training offer that will ensure we can still support local authority staff to learn and develop their digital skills, as well as make it easier to find relevant training opportunities.

In this blog post we share just some of LDCU’S 2020 highlights and momentous moments, plus a teaser for what’s coming up in 2021.

The Local Digital Collaboration Unit Cyber team has come to the end of a two-month discovery into cyber security at local authorities.

We are delighted to announce the 11 projects that will be awarded funding through the Local Digital COVID-19 Challenge.

The team conducted extensive desk research into how councils across England are communicating their COVID-19 support to residents. Find out more about our approach and what we discovered.

The Local Digital Collaboration Unit have published their findings from a 40-day pre-discovery into cyber security in local authorities.