Planning and development

Information gathered through the planning system operates as the gateway to development for residents, objectors and builders as well as a go to place for post occupancy information.  The quality […]

The problem of low account take-up exists in many authorities; particularly with low take-up across high volume transactional services such as Benefits; Council Tax; Rent etc. Some of the perceived […]

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.  […]

This alpha does not follow-on from a single discovery project, but is the result of insights that have become clear during other projects by the partners and their collaborators. These […]

The alpha stage of the project will be the development of a digital planning tool (the Tool) which will be a live functional prototype based on Gateshead Council data to […]

From our discovery, we identified council tenants’ and leaseholders’ user needs and barriers for going online to report and book a repair and that a common service pattern for online […]

Our work during discovery was largely focussed on exploring the user needs of planning officers to understand the challenges they face and the potential benefits of improving the back-end management […]

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 […]

HMLR Local Land Charges (LLC) project aims to streamline the LLC ‘service’. Its scope did not include the second element of the current service i.e. provision of replies to questions, which […]

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 […]

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 […]

Southwark Council wants to ensure that affordable housing is available to the people who need it. Southwark Council, together with the MHCLG and other organisations, such as housing associations, want […]

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 […]

We are seeking to speed up the viability assessment process and reduce administration, while also increasing the provision of affordable homes. Main objectives for the alpha phase are to: Build […]

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 […]

Planning services are dependent on proprietary solutions that are developing slowly and resistant to interoperability. The market is dominated by just two providers. This software does not meet the aspirations […]

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’ […]