LOTI: Weeknote 41

Identifying common recovery themes

As we shared in our last weeknote, we’re transitioning from supporting boroughs with their emergency Covid-19 responses to starting to think ahead to what a good recovery looks like.

To inform our approach, we met with our members to explore their views on what role digital, data, technology and innovation could play in tackling their recovery challenges.

Five broad themes emerged from our discussion:

1. Smarter Council — boroughs expressed their desire to build on recent positive trends in what they do internally and how they deliver their services and democratic functions. Internally, they are keen to enable sustainable home working in a way that supports employee wellbeing. Externally, during the crisis period, boroughs have been collaborating closely with their local residents and the voluntary and charity sectors and want to continue doing so. With this desire came an acknowledgement that more flexible roles and new ways of working will be needed.
2. Tackling Vulnerability — recent weeks have seen boroughs work swiftly to define, identify and support vulnerable groups. From the elderly to the newly unemployed, boroughs will have to find ways of supporting an increasing number of residents whose needs are constantly changing.
3. Promoting Inclusion — as work, school, culture and so much more have migrated online, boroughs want to redouble their efforts to tackle digital exclusion. Over the coming months, consideration will need to be given to how boroughs increase residents’ access to and understanding of technology devices and services. Boroughs will also need to think about financial and social inclusion: supporting residents whose circumstances may prevent them from accessing the support they need.
4. Economic Recovery — boroughs will need to think differently about how they can support the use and vitality of high streets, public spaces and town centres. The expected post-crisis recession may exacerbate and expedite commercial and social challenges for high streets as businesses struggle to resume activity.
5. Greener Recovery — With travel, work and leisure patterns all changing, councils are keen to explore how the recovery period can lead to a greener, more sustainable future. LOTI is committed to ensuring that all its collaborative work is done as sustainably as possible. ‘Going green’ may well be an end goal in itself.

We’re spending this week developing a methodology for turning these themes into design challenges, which we’ll explore at our next all-member meeting next week. We’ll be collaborating the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s (MHCLG) Digital Team to ensure that recovery strategies in and outside London are adaptable and scalable where possible.

What more can data do?

LOTI has been continuing to work on unblocking data issues to support boroughs’ Covid response.

Free school meals — The Information Governance Group for London has created an Information Sharing Agreement that allows boroughs to share with each other basic details of children who depend on free school meals to ensure they get the support they need during the crisis period. We’re now helping boroughs identify who they can contact in each council to ensure this data gets to where it’s needed.

Death registrations data. In England, all deaths must be registered with the local registration service. The 2017 Digital Economy Act made it possible for local registration services to share information directly with local authorities to carry out a public function. However, very few places have established a data-sharing agreement to do this as the process is complicated, time-consuming and not well publicised. In an initiative started by Social Finance, LOTI and MHCLG are working to help boroughs get more timely access to this vital information so families can be better supported.

Fixing the Plumbing! Prior to the Covid crisis, LOTI’s year one strategy was to fix the plumbing in core areas including data collaboration. With unprecedented attention now being paid to the importance of data, we’re working with boroughs, the GLA’s London DataStore Team and the Information Governance Group for London to ensure data can be shared and used legally, responsibly and ethically. Eddie sketched out the core components of what that plumbing might look like in this article.

Fixing the plumbing for London Data Collaboration

For an update on our collaboration with the GLA’s London Datastore team, please see our latest show & tell here.

This Week

This week, the LOTI Central Team will be…

1. Meeting with IT and procurement colleagues in our member boroughs to inform the development of our City Tools platform. This workshop will focus on better understanding the API connections to procurement systems and their mandatory procurement requirements.
2. Holding the latest meet-up of our Data Analysts’ network, where we’ll be sharing boroughs’ approaches for: 1. Modelling vulnerability using data, 2. Data Visualisation, and 3. Robotic Process Automation. If you’d like to attend, please register here.
3. Meeting with borough Public Realm directors to explore how they can work more closely with their CIOs to use technology to benefit local environmental issues.

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