Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities
Laying the foundations for better local public services
There’s no pan-local government ‘playbook’ describing how to make code sharing work in practice. We believe this discourages collaboration, and leads to painful reinventions of the wheel in councils where it’s tried. Our Discovery project will work through the issues that […]
Open source communities and practices in technology have been around since the early 1960s with many academics distributing free and open software to encourage and support openness and co-operation. As […]
This discovery project breaks into three parts a common problem facing local authorities; The first part of the common problem is understanding whether voice truly represents a long-term change in […]
Across all local authorities there are significant numbers of staff spending their time out of the office. These staff rely on systems which create as many barriers to doing an […]
East Lindsey District Council alongside Boston Borough Council and South Holland District Council cover 2,250 km² of East Lincolnshire with a combined population of over 300,000. The sparsely distributed population […]
At the moment, none of the partner authorities have sufficient skills or capacity to carry out effective user research. Therefore we are all unsure whether we are meeting user needs. […]
A recent Select Committee report concluded that “the Government does not understand citizen’s views on how their data should be used” (https://bit.ly/2k2U1P0). This knowledge gap problem exists at national, regional […]
Stevenage Borough Council and East Herts District Council run shared ICT and Revenue and benefits partnership. At present many processes and information transfers within both organisations are a manual process. […]
The common problem we propose to investigate builds on the previous discovery, Taxi licensing – fixing complexity, inefficiency and risk. This round of discovery will focus on one service within […]
The structure of local and central government lends itself to public organisations working in silos to devise solutions to meet their own needs. This leads to huge inefficiencies through duplication […]
Problem Statement At Newcastle City Council we have adopted an agile approach to developing digital services for our customers. We don’t, however, have a consistent process to receive, analyse and […]
We would like to learn more about digital skills, exclusion and inclusion in relation to local government digital services and understand how to reduce non-participation and improve the delivery of […]
The processes within B&NES Bereavement Services for burials, cremations and memorialisations are inefficient and outdated meaning the service is unable to maximise income generating opportunities. A discovery project would uncover […]
All local planning authorities face a common problem in terms of significant numbers of the applications found to be invalid. This is frustrating for service users and an unnecessary cost […]
Moving house is stressful and this is not helped by the complexity of the public sector front-end, as a new resident has to navigate individually a disjointed mass of bureaucratic processes in […]
Local Authorities have made significant progress in providing digital services to the public. As this journey continues it is becoming increasingly apparent, both from customer feedback and professional teams, that […]
Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) are a requirement of data protection legislation but are seen as an intensive and onerous process. We know a range of templates are currently used resulting […]
Councils increasingly have transformation teams with digital skills but they tend to be small teams struggling to manage the demand from services wanting digital change. There have been small scale […]
Problem Statement The Digital Economy Act 2017 enables greater powers to share Registration Services data for birth, deaths and marriages with other local public sector partners – the common ‘problem’ […]
Councils across the UK hold an incredible wealth of data but have been slow to mirror the private sector in optimising this data as a strategic and operational tool to […]
