Nine digital projects led by local authorities have won shares of over £2.3 million from the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.
They have received the grants under round five of the Local Digital Fund, run by the department’s Local Digital Collaboration Unit (LDCU), coming out on top of 49 applications from 40 councils.
It brings the total number of projects receiving support from the fund to 44 since it was launched 2018.
LCDU said the projects come under two themes: how modern development platforms can enable councils to build different types of front-facing services by themselves; and the development of software to address problems with inflexible legacy systems and cyber vulnerabilities.
Three of the chosen projects have received funding for alpha stage work:
- The London Borough of Redbridge is exploring the development of a low code housing management platform (£150,000).
- Newcastle City Council is working on the integration of grant applications with back office systems (£123,320).
- Birmingham City Council is setting up a digitised brokerage marketplace for child placement in the West Midland (£148,135).
Another six have received backing to go through the beta stage:
- Colchester Borough Council is developing a task management tool for neighbourhood services staff working in the field (£286,000).
- The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead is aiming to build a solution for care workers and volunteers to share referrals for vulnerable individuals to receive support (£260,113).
- Birmingham City Council is developing a platform for field workers to capture data to present casework in a consistent format, and to provide the ability to assign ‘risk markers’ to people or places (£350,000).
- The Royal Borough of Greenwich is creating a re-usable directory of community services for residents and the voluntary sector (£350,000).
- Bristol City Council is developing a digital top-up funding service for special educational needs (£312,400).
- Rugby Borough council is working on a new digital waste service that integrates front end requests from residents with back office delivery functions.
The work on all of this is scheduled to begin this month, with alpha projects expected to produce outputs within 12 weeks and beta projects six months.
Image from iStock, Natalie Mis
