Podcasts about mhclg

Our Special Guest this week is Lord Ben Houchen, Mayor of the Tees Valley to discuss the English Devolution White Paper published by MHCLG before Christmas. The proposal gives Mayors new responsibilities for strategic planning and much more. Latest News Update on planning related matters. Decision of the Court of Appeal dated 11 December 2024 which deals in great detail with the service provisions relating to Section 288 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 relating to the statutory right of appeal after an Inspectors decision by way of Section 78 and a detailed examination of the requirements in law relating to both lodging the proceedings in court and service under that statutory provision. This is a seminal decision for anyone who is or might be involved in planning appeals litigation. Decision of an Inspector dated 9 January 2025 which deals with the service of an enforcement notice by Royal Borough of Greenwich relating to a 15 storey and 23 storey residential blocks requiring the demolition of the building in which the Inspector upheld the notice but crucially allowed the retention of the buildings by materially amending the requirements of the notice. Decision of an Inspector dated 7 January 2025 which deals with a significant solar farm proposal for 47.28 MWp in Mid Suffolk District Council in which the Inspector granted planning permission by concluding that the proposal was supported by the planning balance and that the proposal accorded with the development plan as a whole and the appeal should be allowed. Visit our Website: hwgpnfy.com #HWGPNFY

This week's guests are James Cairncross and Angela Lewis from the Midlands Parks Forum which has its annual conference on the 17th of October at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. Highlights include keynote speaker Dr. William Bird, a GP who contributed to a select committee report on access to green space who will speak on health benefits of physical activity and green spaces."Other speakers include people from MHCLG, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, Heritage Lottery Fund, and also some experience from out in the real world, such as Islington Borough Council" Angela explains and she outlines workshops also to be run at the event.James addresses the "perennial problem" of parks budget cuts. "Despite there being quite a clear return on any investment in parks, local authority officers are still struggling to protect what they've got, let alone improve the funding for green spaces."Our chair of trustees Liz Stuffins attended the previous Government's DEFRA inquiry into urban parks, and they found that both the quality and the quantity of urban parks are in quite serious decline.This exacerbates the skills shortages suffered by the parks sector but The Midlands Park Forum aims to help overcome this by offering learning events, the conference and webinars "focused on the skills and competencies in a framework that aligns with the Landscape Institute's framework on competencies identifying over 60 skills in six categories, which we've identified as being important for a good park manager. And it's not just about cutting grass. This is people skills, environmental stewardship, income and finance, future visioning and planning, and all the competencies that go with being a professional."The lack and loss of expertise in the sector combined with budget cuts means some parks "are already losing their green flag awards because the authorities can just no longer attain the quality that's needed to keep those award...some councils now can't even afford the cost of the application, let alone the quality".With a new Government installed, James acknowledges parks will have to "join the queue" when asking for more state funding but top of his list of asks is "a national urban parks strategy and it needs to be integrated into public health because the benefits of that are both obvious." Close behind is a wish that the Green Jobs Task Force be expanded to include the green spaces sector.They discuss best practice in the sector and for Angela it means "local spaces that can become the hub of the local community and making sure that people do look at different collaborations locally, whether that's with local charities providing physical activity and exercise or local charities that provide volunteers to look after the green spaces and just making sure that all those things are considered in terms of local people having that space that they've got within 15 minutes of home".For the future, the Forum wants to "continue to deliver quality service to members" including CPD offerings, via learning events and knowledge sharing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Long-serving Listeners might recall that for Episode 6 of 50 Shades of Planning Sam Stafford published a chat with Euan Mills, then of the Connected Places Catapult, on the potential for digital innovation, urban data, and user-centred design to improve the planning system. Euan, now CEO and co-founder of Blocktype, got in touch with Sam Stafford earlier this year and asked if he could put together an episode on the progress that has been made over the past five years towards this aim. This was both a kind invitation and a coincidental one because at around the same time the Spring Budget Statement included reference to “piloting the use of AI solutions to support planning authorities to streamline their local plan development processes, producing plans in 30 months rather than the current average of seven years. This builds on work to date which has already reduced planning officer processing times by up to 30% per application.” This episode features four conversations that Euan recorded back in March with four people both very knowledgeable and very active in this space. They are Alistair Parvin, CEO of Open Systems Lab; Dr Sue Chadwick, Strategic & Digital Planning Advisor at Pinsent Masons; Matt Wood-Hill, Head of Digital Planning Software at MHCLG; and Paul Downey, Planning Data Service Owner at MHLCG. During the course of this episode Listeners will learn a lot about how digital innovation, urban data, and user-centred design are improving the UK planning system. Some accompanying reading. Blocktype blocktype.co.uk Plan X  planx.uk Planning Data Planning.data.gov.uk Open Digital Planning opendigitalplanning.org The Future of Planning - How we can rewire the planning system for the digital age https://medium.com/@alastairparvin/the-future-of-planning-8a1f93e17ae1 Some accompanying listening. Digital – Goldie (feat. KRS One) (Armand Van Helden Remix) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1dgKcpgKxs 50 Shades T-Shirts! If you have listened to Episode 45 of 50 Shades of Planning you will have heard Clive Betts say that... 'In the Netherlands planning is seen as part of the solution. In the UK, too often, planning is seen as part of the problem'. Sam said in reply that that would look good on a t-shirt and it does. Further details can be found here. You can also sign up for the 50 Shades Newsletter via the 50 Shades Blog. Any other business. Sam is on Bluesky (@samuelstafford.bsky.social) and Instagram (@samuel__stafford). He shares bits and pieces of planning-related interest on Instagram (@50shadesofplanning) and LinkedIn so please follow those accounts as well.

In this episode, Daniel Moore speaks with one of the guest keynote speakers at this year's Australian Architecture Conference, Executive Director, Head of Design Studio, and a founder of Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, Paul Monaghan. Paul is a registered architect in the UK, internationally acclaimed with a focus on redefining the built environment. His key projects in workplace design, arts, education, residential and masterplanning sectors have all been recognised with numerous UK and international awards, including the 2015 RIBA Stirling Prize for Burntwood School. As a strong advocate for better cities, Paul is a member of the UK government's Office for Place Advisory Board and The Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government's steering group for the establishment of an expert design body working towards greater design quality and community involvement in planning decisions in England. Paul was a member of the advisory group for MHCLG's Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, which published its report in 2020. We're thrilled that Paul will be joining us in person this year at the Australian Architecture Conference. This episode serves as an introduction to Paul's keynote lecture at the conference. Hearing Architecture is proudly sponsored by Brickworks. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much to our guest, UK registered architect, Executive Director, Head of Design Studio, and a founder of Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, Paul Monaghan. Thank you so much for sharing your stories about building better housing in the UK and Europe. We know there is a lot we can learn from your work here in Australia and we can't wait to hear your lecture at this year's conference. Our sponsor Brickworks also produces architecture podcasts hosted by Tim Ross. You can find ‘The Art of Living', ‘Architects Abroad, and ‘The Power of Two', at brickworks.com.au or your favourite podcast platform. If you'd like to show your support please rate, review, and subscribe to Hearing Architecture in your favourite podcast app. If you want to know more about what the Australian Institute of Architects is doing to support architects and the community please visit architecture.com.au This is a production by the Australian Institute of Architects Emerging Architects and Graduates Network, in collaboration with Open Creative Studio. The Institute production team was Madelynn Jenkins, and Claudia McCarthy, and the EmAGN production team was Daniel Moore. This content is brought to you by the Australian Institute of Architects Emerging Architects and Graduates Network, in collaboration with Open Creative Studio. This content does not take into account specific circumstances and should not be relied on in that way. This content does not constitute legal, financial, insurance, or other types of advice. You should seek independent verification or advice before relying on this content in circumstances where loss or damage may result. The Institute endeavours to publish content that is accurate at the time it is published, but does not accept responsibility for content that may or will become inaccurate over time.

Amanda is an Executive Director at CBRE where she is Chair of the Strategy Board, Head of Strategic Advisory, and Head of the Public Sector. Amanda is also a Member of the UK Executive Committee and Management Board. She is an experienced senior executive leading on strategy, business transformation and programme management having spent over 35 years working across the built environment sector. Amanda is an experienced senior executive having spent over 30 years working across the built environment sector. During her career Amanda has been a partner in PwC LLP and EY LLP, where she was Head of Infrastructure (Advisory). She has worked across some of the major public and private infrastructure clients in the UK. She is a Past President of RICS, becoming the longest serving in 123 years, where her themes were infrastructure, cities and the war for talent. Awarded “Most Influential Surveyor” in RICS Pride in the Profession Top Surveyors of all time for 150th Anniversary. Amanda established and chairs the RICS Construction & Infrastructure Market Forum. Listed in Who's Who - Amanda is a senior property professional in real estate, infrastructure and construction.  She is a member of the Mayor of London's Infrastructure Advisory Panel, as well as having been involved in the DfT Infrastructure Efficiency Challenge Panel, the APPG for Excellence in the Built Environment - Skills (2016) & Women in Construction (2019), the Independent Expert Advisory Panel advising MHCLG on building safety following the Grenfell Tower Fire, and the Lord Mayor of London's Trust Advisory Group. She has received numerous awards, including an Honorary Doctorate of Science from the University of Westminster. Her Non-Executive Director roles comprise: - Chair of Trustees for University College of Estate Management (UCEM) - Non-Executive Board Member for Countryside Partnerships PLC listed on the FTSE - Development Board Member of London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) - Senior Special Advisor and Member of the Building Safety Challenge Panel to the Construction Leadership Council (CLC) She is co-author of : "Managing Diversity and Inclusion in Real Estate" (published 2019) and a practical guide for CEO's on Diversity and Inclusion in Real Estate: ‘Diversity Management in der Immobilienbranch - ein Praxisguide' (published 2017) Amanda is an experienced public speaker and author. What you'll discover in this episode: How to increase your level of achievement and capacity. Why the vision is more important than you. The mindset and skillset you need to reach the top. Why and how you need to seize opportunity in your career and life. Why influence is key to your leadership impact. Who you need to become to be an industry titan in 10 years time. And so much more. Resources:  "Managing Diversity and Inclusion in Real Estate" By Amanda Clack and Judith Gabler Millenials Poised to Lead: For A Generation Who Is The Future, by Dr. Mona Shah  Rethinking Real Estate: A Roadmpa to Technology's Impac on the World's Largest Asset Class by Dror Poleg. Show notes: If you enjoyed this episode, and you've learnt something or it inspired you in some way, I'd love to hear about it and know your biggest takeaway. Take a screenshot of you listening on your device, and post it to your Instagram Stories, and tag me, @elinormoshe_ or Elinor Moshe on LinkedIn.   Don't forget you can also join the Facebook community to be part of the growing family of constructors who chose exceptional futures. Search for Constructing You Community and join today.  

We caught up with Broadway Malyan's Director of Urbanism Danny Crump to find out more about one of Birmingham's most ambitious masterplans, the public realm transformation of Snow Hill. Danny has been at the heart of this project since its inception back in 2015 and has been instrumental in enhancing this district. We look at how the area has transformed over the past seven years since the project begin and what it means to enhance a public realm in the heart of a major city.   The Building Brum podcast is sponsored by reality capture and point cloud modeling specialists ScanTech Digital, Solus, one of the UK's leading suppliers of commercial floor and wall tiles and Sunbelt Rentals with over 200,000 items of equipment- they are the largest providers of equipment hire in the UK. Danny is a Chartered Landscape Architect with over 20 years of professional experience. He joined Broadway Malyan in 2011 and leads the Manchester Studio and UK Landscape Architecture team. He is a passionate placemaker establishing and leading Broadway Malyan's 'Place Team' providing value driven advocacy within the built environment for multi-sectoral clients.His experience is wide ranging and has included a number of award winning projects. Particular expertise includes city core regeneration and urban realm masterplanning, city street and space design and public squares and parks. He has also led and delivered a number of projects at university campuses across the UK.Danny's experience of working in urban centres was recognised recently with his appointed to MHCLG's HighStreet Task Force Expert/Mentor and Facilitator Panel.Most often working in a multidisciplinary environment,Danny has delivered a number of significant major projects.He is experienced in lead designer and consultant roleundertaking this position on the majority of commissions. He is experienced in site diagnosis techniques with a focus on urban data analytics, using this skill to inform the design process.

About Phil:Starting in business at just 16 Phil has extensive experience in successful startups over the last 15 years, across a wide range of sectors including; furniture, retail, manufacture, technology, hospitality, interior design and property development.Phil and Karl have been friends for over 12 years and combined their skills to form Winter Melia Developments back in 2015 where they have seen the business scale organically from single dwellings to large scale residential conversions. Phil heads up the business and operations side of the business, while Karl focuses on the construction side of the business. We fell into historic buildings as an investment strategy when purchasing our first listed building in auction back in 2017, since then we have focused on this niche - which doesn't come without its challenges but our desire to create something unique and desirable has led us into this sector of the market. Having won several awards over the past couple of years for our schemes its certainly an area we are looking to explore further and we currently have 2 more Churches in the development pipeline with a combined GDV of £8m.Aside from property we have also recently launched a Proptech startup called BreezeMove, after being so fed up of the slow, opaque and frustrating side of the transaction from both a buyer and seller perspective on many occasions, we decided to set out to change that. Having come up with the ideal of a centralised digital platform to give all parties complete transparency of where the process is up to and which side is accountable for the next stage, we were invited down to The Home Office in 2017 to discuss with MHCLG which is where our journey started!About your host, Tej:Tej graduated from King's' College London with a BSc Biochemistry in 2014, he then pursued a career in Medical Education and Marketing. Soon after his second job… he was fired! A moment of relief and freedom was what he felt, not sure what his mother felt when he told her he was jobless at 23…He then went in search of a more ethical path, a business he could set up where the reward was equal to the work put in. “If they are making pounds, why am I making pennies?” - was his thought process, not happy with slow progression and bureaucracy (& having to wear smart shoes everyday). This lead him to opening a Recruitment business (not sure where the ethics went) which doubled in profit every year, for 4 years. He hated it. Golden handcuffs they call it.Fortunately, he used the cash he'd built up from that business, to educate himself in Property Investing. Soon, he'd stopped the business and transitioned into Property Investment full time. He then had a slow start -Purchasing 15 properties in his first 9 months, using over £650,000 of Investor Finance, he built a £1,200,000 property portfolio and created £30,000 of profit from flips. This gave him ‘financial freedom', but it was the most stressful period of his life. Growing quickly is very painful.Let's not forget that his Podcast grew to be the most-reviewed UK Property Podcast, peaking at 4,000 unique downloads per episode.His Podcast (Tej Talks) now sits at 660,000 downloads in over 100 countries and has 489 reviews, rated 5/5. Links:www.wintermeliadevelopments.comenquiries@wintermeliadevelopments.comhttps://www.instagram.com/wintermelia/https://www.instagram.com/breezemove.co.uk/Tej InvestsTej TalkseLearning See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Our Special Guest this week is Clive Betts MP, Chair of Housing, Communities & Local Government Committee. He is the Labour MP for Sheffield South East, and has been an MP continuously since 9 April 1992. Decisions of the Week: Mark McGaw v Welsh Ministers [2021] EWCA Civ 976a decision of the Court of Appeal dismissing an appeal against the decision of HH Judge Jarman QC who had allowed an appeal against the decision to refuse the Claimant's appeal against Swansea Council's refusal of a certificate of lawful use or development under class E of Schedule 2 of the T&CP(GPD) Order 1995 as it applies in Wales. Valero Logistics UK LTD v Plymouth City Council & Halo Aviation Ltd [2021] EWHC 1792 (Admin) a decision of Mrs Justice Thornton DBE dismissing a claim by an adjoining COMAH site operator challenging the grant of planning permission for development comprising a change of use to commercial heliport at Victoria House, Cattedown Road, Plymouth raising issues about planning & other regulatory regimes. Decision of an inspector dated 25th June 2021 allowing Senior Living's appeal against the decision of South Oxfordshire District Council to refuse a hybrid application for a C2 use of 133 units & 73 assisted living units & an outline application for up to 60 units assisted living units at Sonning Common in the Chilterns AONB. Decision of an Inspector dated 29th June 2021 allowing Redrow Homes' appeal against the refusal by London Borough of Merton Council of an application for 456 homes in 2 blocks of between 7 and 15 storeys on a PDL site occupied by a vacant commercial building & car park, where issues relating to character & appearance, parking & HLS were raised.

In this episode, guest host Sivan Pliskov (Associate Director, Carbon Intelligence) is joined by a panel featuring Oliver Light (Carbon Intelligence), David Delaney (IPSX), Alex Green (British Property Federation) and Paul Gehres (British Land). The panel discuss the race to zero carbon and how it will affect the real estate industry. Topics covered in this episode: How will net zero affect investment in real estate? How will net zero impact valuations? What is the role of occupiers in an asset's net zero journey? How will regulation drive greater transparency around net zero? What are the immediate next steps to net zero? How can IPSX help investors on the reporting of net zero targets? David Delaney David Delaney is the Group Chief Executive at IPSX and is responsible for leading the business and developing the Group strategy. David served as a Non-Executive Director on the IPSX Group Board between February 2019 - July 2019, and joined from fintech communications company VoxSmart, where he was Chief Commercial Officer for two years focused on customer engagement and driving sales. Prior to that, he was Head of Strategic Clients and Solutions, EMEA at Thomson Reuters for just over three years, managing a $1 billion book of business. Before Thomson Reuters he spent more than 25 years at Credit Suisse – latterly as Global Head of Fixed Income Sales for interest rate products – and Barclays Bank Plc. https://www.ipsx.com/ Oliver Light Oliver leads on Real Estate at Carbon Intelligence, with over eight years of experience delivering ESG services to real estate investors and large corporate occupiers. Oliver is focused on accelerating a zero-carbon economy and has helped to implement several net-zero strategies over the past year. Decarbonisation programmes have included initiating a smart building programme that won over 15 awards in 24 months. Oliver also recently joined the BBP REEB Benchmark and AREF ESG Committee and will participate in several collaborations this year with IPSX, the UK-GBC, and GRESB. Oliver has several ESG qualifications, including the RESET air quality certification. https://carbon.ci/ Alex Green Alex is an Assistant Director at the British Property Federation (BPF) and has experience of working in the real estate industry for over 6 years. Alex joining the BPF's policy team in January 2018 to lead on sustainability, development, and healthcare policy, engaging closely with government departments including BEIS, MHCLG, and HMT. He has previously worked in communications, community consultation, and political engagement for a broad range of property industry clients, working as part of project teams delivering mixed-use, residential, commercial, healthcare, and retail developments. https://bpf.org.uk/ Paul Gehres Paul Gehres is the Sustainability Programme Manager at British Land and is responsible for ESG reporting. Paul has worked in corporate sustainability for the last nine years (after a detour through transport planning) and holds an MSc in Environmental Policy from the London School of Economics. https://www.britishland.com/

Better use of data is key to more effective government. Across government, teams are doing fascinating work with data. But those projects don’t get the attention they deserve. At this month's event, the 18th in our series, the speakers presented their data projects in an exciting, quickfire format. Each set of speakers had eight minutes, followed by eight minutes of questions from the audience. Our speakers were: Matthew Gould, CEO at NHSX and Baroness Kate Rock, discussing 'Has Covid changed how government thinks about data?' Pamela Dow, Executive Director, Government Skills and Curriculum Unit in the Cabinet Office, on how Covid has helped the civil service rethink how data is used to make decisions. May-N Leow, Head of Local Digital Collaboration Unit at MHCLG, on levelling up the local government response to Covid with data. Doug Gurr, former CEO at Amazon UK, and government adviser, on the lessons government has learned about data in the past year and how we can build for the future. The event was chaired by Gavin Freeguard, associate at the Institute for Government.

In this episode we discuss new adaptations guidance for private sector landlords, which was launched by the NRLA this week, and look at the unique challenges faced by younger landlords starting out in the business. With an ageing population and research showing four out of five disabled people are living in properties that do not meet their needs, demand for adapted homes is high, however supply is low. Presenters NRLA CEO Ben Beadle (@BeadleBen) and Richard Blanco (@richardblanco_) talk to guests Sallie Stone Bearne and Josh Wintersgill about the new guidance, designed to help landlords whose tenants request adaptations, and look at what more can be done to boost the supply of adapted homes. Sallie is the founder of Branch Properties, which specialises in finding accommodation for disabled people in the private rented sector, and has worked with the NRLA to inform the guidance. Josh is a wheelchair user who has struggled to find a property to meet his needs within the private rented sector (PRS) and is still looking for a suitable home. Elsewhere in the show Catherine Behdad, of the NRLA advice team talks about the hot topics on the phonelines throughout the month, including electrical safety. The NRLA has made representations to MHCLG asking for clarifications to its guidance after reports from members that some electricians are, as standard, issuing certificates only valid until a change of tenancy. Lastly we meet Callum Stevens, an NRLA member who built up a portfolio of properties while in his 20s. He talks about the challenges of getting started in property as a young landlord and how they can be overcome. If you enjoy the show please spread the word on your social media channels using the hashtag #listenuplandlords . For all podcast enquiries email press@nrla.org.uk More information To access the NRLA guidance on property adaptations click here. For the latest on Electrical Installation Condition Reports (EICR) and electrical safety guidance click here. To hear more about Callum's journey from university student to portfolio landlords check out our members' magazine Property To read a transcript of the podcast visit our webpage here.

Vanessa Schneider: Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. Today we will be talking about the Clinically Extremely Vulnerable People Service and we will be joined by several guests.   You'll be hearing from Sally Benson from the Department of Work and Pensions [DWP], Martin Woolhead from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs [DEFRA], Kate Nicholls from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government [MHCLG], and Nick Tait from GDS. As you can tell by this long list of participants, the Clinically Extremely Vulnerable People Service involved a lot of people working for a lot of departments - it was truly a cross-government effort.    But you might not be clear on what it is. In March 2020 as a critical response to the developing COVID-19 pandemic, GDS rapidly built the Clinically Extremely Vulnerable People Service, also known as VPS, to provide support for clinically extremely vulnerable people in England, who had been advised to shield. The service was stood up over one weekend and then continuously iterated to support emerging policy and user needs.   The service enables clinically extremely vulnerable people to register their personal details and support needs, which are securely stored, validated against NHS shielded patient lists for eligibility and securely transferred to frontline service providers. During the period of national shielding from 23 March to 30 July, that is wave one of shielding, the Vulnerable People Service facilitated more than 4.2 million deliveries of essential supplies, support with basic health and care needs, as well as providing priority supermarket deliveries.   Joining me now are Kate Nicholls and Nick Tait. Thank you for being here. Would you mind introducing yourselves to the listeners? Let's start with Kate.   Kate Nicholls:  Sure. Hi, I'm Kate Nicholls. I've been working in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government as part of the shielding programme, particularly on the Data Policy Team. So we work really closely with GDS on the kind of ongoing development of the Vulnerable People Service.    Vanessa Schneider:  Amazing. Thanks for joining us Kate. Nick, would you mind introducing yourself?    Nick Tait:  Absolutely. Hello everybody. My name is Nick Tait. I'm the Service Owner for the Clinically Extremely Vulnerable People Service here in GDS. And I've been with the programme since 5 May 2020.   Vanessa Schneider:  Thank you. So both of you work for parts of government that have been instrumental in the development of the service. I was wondering how you came to join the teams that were working on this?   Nick Tait:  It was pretty much born of necessity really and, and practicality. As you said in your introduction Vanessa, there were a, and there remain, a lot of interested parties, a lot of stakeholders, too much for any one department to do, given the, the nature of our response to the emergency that we found, we find ourselves in. And the 2, as far as GDS and MHCLG were concerned or are concerned, we're the 2 main players: we represent the policy and the delivery of said policy as far as the digital service goes. And furthermore, as the project has progressed, it's become expedient for us to get closer to both policy makers and, and people they know - so relationships with local authorities, for example, are best facilitated by colleagues at MHCLG.    Vanessa Schneider:  Kate, I know that you joined the MHCLG team working on this a little while into the VPS [Vulnerable People Service] being set up. How did you experience that?   Kate Nicholls:  It was actually a really great time to join because all of those kind of key relationships between GDS and MHCLG had already been established. And when I joined the team, it already really had that kind of “one team” feel. So I-I'd come from a completely different job elsewhere in government policy. And I came here and it was just, yeah, this kind of efficient machine [laughs] that was just like achieving things every single day. So, yeah, it was, it was a great kind of feeling joining in with that.   Vanessa Schneider:  Amazing. Both of you touch on relationships being established, being really valuable. Do you think you've experienced anything on this scale where you've had to tap in so many departments working on the same project before? Or do you reckon that this is, and I dare use the dreaded word, unprecedented?   Nick Tait:  M-my experience of a civil servant, there has been nothing quite like this. And for me, the fact--sure, I've worked on other programmes where there are perhaps as many stakeholders, but not at this pace. We have excellent governance practises in, processes in place. But they happen at 2 weekly cycles. But you know, at-at the working level of getting the job done then to really hone in on where those key relationships are, that's something that we have had to do in order to respond at scale. And, and I should add that because there are so many stakeholders, we have Engagement Leads on the project whose main job is to consult with local authorities or with DWP or with the food and medicine supplies and so on and so forth. So it-it multiplies out. But yeah, nothing quite like this before. I think it's fair to say.   Kate Nicholls:  Completely agree with Nick. So I've worked on teams in the Civil Service before where there's been, you know, a degree of close working with departments. But I don't think the kind of level that we've got to where, you know, you could just pick up the phone and speak to anyone on the GDS side if you're in MHCLG and, and vice versa. And it's just kind of, it's just right there at your fingertips. I think that's something I've never quite experienced before.    Vanessa Schneider:  I'm, I'm really glad to hear that went [laughs] well then.What was it like working with colleagues in departments like Department for Health and Social Care [DHSC] and external organisations like the NHS, who may be structured differently because of their work being so focused directly on the public?   Kate Nicholls:  Sure. Yeah, so we've, we've worked really closely with NHS Digital (NHS D) because they sort of provide the shielded patient list, the SPL, which is basically the kind of the heart of the whole project.    So while GDS have built this wonderful registration system, the people that that's targeted at are the people who are identified clinically by doctors and other clinicians to be extremely vulnerable. So we've had to kind of, similarly to how we've done with GDS, we had to build up really good working relationships with them, have sort of regular meetings, joint governance, and really kind of create that kind of “one team” feel to make sure that, that the right sort of data on those who are clinically extremely vulnerable is flowing through our system, is flowing to local authorities, you know, whilst also keeping patient records safe, secure and, and sort of operating legally. So that's kind of the challenge of what we've have to do with NHS D. And I think by building up really good working relationships with them that's how we've managed to kind of overcome that and, and use that data in a way that hasn't, you know, really happened with patient data ever before in the past.   Vanessa Schneider:  Nick, was there anything that you could add about either the working relationship with DHSC or NHS Digital?   Nick Tait:  So my, my experience around DHSC, the one that I'd sort of pinpoint is, is their involvement at the overall, overall programme steering board - where we have had regular contact with the Deputy Chief Medical Officer [DCMO]. And having, having senior stakeholders as, as embodied in DCMO to go, and there is all of this happening helps frame our work a little bit more, and then that comes down to, to working level, where it is the nuts and bolts of the all, all important shielded persons list, which, as Kate says, is, without which we'd be scrabbling about.    Vanessa Schneider:  So we actually talked to Martin Woolhead from DEFRA, which is the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, regarding the Vulnerable People Service. And he also shared with us a little bit about the working relationships between the departments.    [CLIP STARTS]   Martin Woolhead:  I'm Martin Woolhead. I'm Deputy Director for Food for the Vulnerable in DEFRA, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. My role essentially is overseeing policy and work on food for vulnerable people. So that ranges from work with food charities and local authorities to essentially get and look after food needs for vulnerable people.    One of the things I think constantly cropped up throughout the process was that, for example, on what we did on food supply, MHCLG could also have done that, you know MHCLG as programme owners, and working on this across government and leading it, could also have essentially contracted with food suppliers to deliver the, the packages of essential supplies that were delivered. The reason it wasn't done in that way was simply because of those relationships and the urgency that we had. So because we had the existing relationships, DEFRA was able to kind of work specifically on that bit and get it done quickly.   So, so where DEFRA worked on food supply because of its existing relationships, other departments had relationships with others. So in regard to the supply of medical supplies so medicines and things, DHSC led on that element because they had the relationships. And so with MHCLG convening, they were able to kind of use the relationships that other departments had and kind of, you know, outsource those bits. And for me that's part of the reason why it was done so quickly. So with all of the urgency, we used existing relationships to get things done.    From, I think, the first ask for, you know, essential supplies to help shielded people, to boxes of essential supplies starting to appear on doorsteps, took around 10 days. And from the announcement of shielding, so when shielding was first announced publicly, to people first receiving their essential supplies was 5 days. And you know, in the context of panic buying across the country, in the context of the global pandemic, the fact that we were able to organise direct doorstep, essential packages to any doorstep in England, and, and most services don't offer that. You know, most supermarkets won't offer doorstep delivery to every address in England, in just 5 days, I think was an incredible achievement.   [CLIP ENDS]   Kate Nicholls:  Yeah, we already had people that were experts in food supplies that knew the supermarkets. We already had a Government Digital Service with like expert content providers, people who are experts in, in data protection. We already had MHCLG, who have, like, links into councils and a really good understanding of what councils do on the ground and deliver. And also everybody in each of those departments already knew that we already have those people in the other departments. And you know I've missed people: DWP, who, you know, know everything about [laughs] how to set up an outbound call centre. So I guess it's kind of, it's a really positive story about the kind of existing connectivity between departments and different levels of quite, sort of deep expertise in different areas that we were able to draw upon pretty quickly.   Nick Tait:  Yeah, I think, I think I'd echo that. I mean no individual department needed to reinvent any wheels really. The, the programme trusted each department to, to focus on its, its domain area and to do that well. Which, which happened. The, the challenge wasn't sort of reinventing the wheel, it was to build the new one. And the new one was around the data sharing, was around actually gluing a, a relatively disparate bunch of people within, within government to work together. And once people sort of trusted that ‘Department X’ would take care of their stuff and ‘Department Y’ would do theirs, then it was just the governance and the working that needed to be worked out. Which sounds dismissive. It isn't at all. There was, there was hard work to do there. But we didn't sort of go, “'oh, well I've, I've done food policy' says non-food policy department, 'so I'll get involved with that.'” There was, there was no time for that sort of shenanigans, and people were focussed on what they knew best. And that was the, the real strength.    Vanessa Schneider:  I was going to say, in a very cheesy way, everybody brought their own wheels, and it turns out they were cogs that all worked together, and it made a very smooth machine. [laughs]   Nick Tait:  Indeed. Indeed. [laughs]    Vanessa Schneider:  So clearly relationships are a key part to this having worked so well, but are there, are there other drivers that you can think of that supported the development of the service?   Nick Tait:  I guess..so like the-the key driver, as in everything we do, is meeting the needs of our users. That's you know, primary directive: users first. And I think what we've learnt over the project is like, when everything was stood up in April, May 2020, the primary needs to be met were those of the clinically extremely vulnerable population. And, and as we became one team, we, we began to expand or, or more fully understand who our users were, how best are we serving service providers, whether it was wholesalers delivering food boxes, whether it was local authority, civil servants at the front line, who are in fact proxies, or can act as proxies, for CEV [clinically extremely vulnerable] users and use the system themselves and have their own requirements in their own local authorities.   And then sort of a, a third section of, of our users would be our stakeholders in terms of those who consume and then act upon the data that is presented via the dashboards that, that the Management, Information and Data Analytics teams provide. So I think, you know, the key driver has, has always been and will remain our users and that's sort of enshrined in how the service has been built. But what has changed, and, and continues to be iterated upon, is, is how we understand who our user population is and, and how best to serve that.    Vanessa Schneider:  Do you think that the service benefited from products such as GOV.UK Notify already being in place? But also, for instance, the data lists for the shielded people - because that data already existed, was that something that made your lives easier?   Nick Tait:  Notify, yes, I can't, I don't, I don't want to entertain thinking about how things might have been had we not had a readily accessible solution to communicate in as many channels as possible, whether it's a physical letter, whether it was an email or a text message, which would have happened via Notify. And, and don't forget that, either t-that DWP colleagues had o-outward bound call centres. We also had our interactive voice recognition system that was part of the initial wave one service that allowed people to, to register - that was inbound only, but, but nonetheless. So having, having access to tools and technology that, that we could trust because they've been tried and tested before us, made, made our lives easier.   Vanessa Schneider:  I was wondering as well: because the user was required to submit their details that were checked against that list provided by the NHS and DEFRA provided details to retailers under specific and secure conditions, I was wondering how the safety and security of user data was ensured and how was the data joined up to make sure the right people were giving the appropriate support?   Kate Nicholls:  That was something that again is kind of, to use the, the much used word, unprecedented. So that was an area where we had to get all of the right people with the right legal expertise and data protection expertise - so with you know, the data protection leads across DEFRA, DWP, MHCLG, GDS, the Data Protection Officers - all together. They formed a kind of data governance oversight board. Whilst we you know, we were kind of under a lot of pressure to work really quickly and get data to, to you know supermarkets, to councils, et cetera as quickly as we could, we had a really kind of rigorous group of experts holding us [laughs] to account to make sure that we had the right data sharing agreements in place, the right MoUs [Memorandum of Understanding] and, and all of that kind of information governance documentation. So that was really appreciated, and it sort of goes back to the running theme of that cross-government working - if we hadn't been able to get all of those people in place and we just couldn't have made it work.   Vanessa Schneider:  I believe there was a transfer tool as well. Could you tell me more about that perhaps? I believe it meant that you could select how people or which people could access what data if I got that right.    Nick Tait: So we-we use...for the cloud hosting service that we use for our data storage, ben-benefits from its own internal security reviews that they perform on the overall system. And then their secure storage solutions are compliant with our strict regulatory requirements. So in our case what this means, and this is where the, the data transfer tool comes in, is that all of our data is encrypted, both when we store it in the database and when we share it with whosoever we are sharing it with, whether it is a local authority or another government department.   And then at the same time, and talking of regulations, we've, we've established a sort of our own processes around the database. So if you think about GDPR and the principle of the 'right to be forgotten', that's, we have our own processes for this. And if, if our listener is interested, then they can, they can go to our service page and our, all of our privacy documentation is open and, and available there.   So like even for our teams or members of the engineering teams who have access to production, only those with security clearance can access them. It's not available to Tom, Dick or Harriet, so to speak. And we, we log and audit everything. So at any given time, who accessed which piece of data at one point, that information is always available to us. So, you know, we, we take personally identifiable information very, very seriously on this.    Vanessa Schneider:  It sounds like you're doing your due diligence, I hope the listeners are heartened by that.   Nick Tait:  Yeah. [laughs]   Vanessa Schneider:  So next I was wondering, obviously we hope that something like this never happens again. That's the whole point behind the unprecedented language of course. But I was wondering if at the very least, there are learnings that you can take away from this project and the collaboration that you've carried out as well as maybe what not to do?   Kate Nicholls:  I guess the main, the main thing I've learnt as somebody who's a-a policy official, who's never worked on a digital project before, I think I've learnt something very valuable from colleagues in GDS about, about that user base development and continuous improvement, particularly in an environment where you're setting something up very, very quickly as an emergency response.   And I think the more, as we've gone along, the more we've consulted our users - and I'm particularly, from an MHCLG perspective, thinking about councils - and ask them you know, what they think and take in their feedback and expose ourselves to kind of their, their comments and their perspectives, the better the system has become. And I think that's definitely, I guess, a general learning for me. But also if, if I, if, you know, we were ever in a position to be doing something like this again, doing that kind of immediate, constant almost consultation with users would be my main learning from kind of a policy person from the digital world, because I know user base, [laughs] user base development is already a kind of a thing that, that is common across the development of digital platforms.   Vanessa Schneider:  You're sounding like an ambassador for Agile and user-based research there. That's amazing. But I was also really keen on you identifying, sort of, users outside of the clinically extremely vulnerable people and the local authorities. Because obviously the, the service has now changed because it's a much more local approach to providing these services, isn't it?   Kate Nicholls:  Yeah, definitely. I think there are, so both in wave one and wave two, on the ground in councils, the picture is a lot more complex. You know, our service talks about kind of basic support needs, but the kind of detailed assessment of each individual is happening at that council level, and, and the delivery of that support is happening across all sorts of organisations, voluntary organisations, NHS volunteer responders, charities, et cetera. And I think a-another kind of key, I guess key groups that we've tried to listen to are you know, groups like Age UK, all those voluntary groups that are actually on the ground doing these things. They're not direct users of our service, but kind of by proxy of, of being connected to the council, they are linked to the eventual kind of frontline service that our platform leads to.   Nick Tait:  To echo Kate: having policy at a sort of a, a high level, have, having policy and delivery in the same room a-a-around the same virtual whiteboard makes for better service delivery. And I-I think that's the, you know, p-personally and then sort of to, to share more widely within GDS that that, for me, it feels like the only way that this can work. Because otherwise it, it will be a far more protracted process. So, I mean, we, we talk about closer working and collaboration and the tools that sort of facilitate all of this, but we, in my experience, we do that because it's true. And this, and this project is, is proof to me at least, and I, and I hope to our users that, that is the case.   So I think the other thing I, I'd reflect on over the time of the project was: at, at the very beginning, our, our, our overall governance was, was weighty. There was a lot of it. And over, over time as the working relationships have developed and the collaboration has developed and some of that governance has been more focussed on the bits that we're actually working on. So I think that's another reflection from me.    And I, yeah, again we say it very sort of readily now, and, and we took it quite lightly to start with, but the whole “hashtag one team”. Again, i-it's not a joke, it really is, it's the real deal for us and wi-without that, we, we wouldn't be, I think, having a happy conversation like this. And as you say, I hope we don't have to respond on this level before, but there is enough learning here to, well to make an, a really active and considered response quickly, rather than as fast as you can, which is kind of where we were to, to start with, back in 2020.   Vanessa Schneider:  Of course. At the time, you know it was just about getting it stood up, wasn't it?    So we did talk to a couple of your colleagues in other departments. And one of them was Sally Benson from the DWP, that’s the Department for Work and Pensions. So we’re just going to listen to something that Sally shared with us.    [CLIP STARTS]   Sally Benson:  My name is Sally Benson, and my day job before being involved on the National Shielding Helpline as part of the critically extremely vulnerable service is working for the Department for Work and Pensions. More specifically, I'm a Senior Operational Leader in the Child Maintenance Group.   I think when we actually bring it home, 2 people stick out in my mind in terms of people that we phoned. Samantha, a blind lady that had no, no friends or family, immediate support around her, wasn't on a, you know, a mobile telephone. But the National Shielding Helpline were able to get in contact with her and, and put her in touch with those people that were able to help her.   Another lady that we also spoke to was a lady called Carol. And it became apparent from the outset of the call that, that Carol was, was experiencing some, some health difficulties on the phone and was talking to us about how she was having trouble breathing. And actually, we had a process in place that enabled us to call the emergency services. Our call centre agents remained on the call talking to Carol, making sure that she was ok and staying with her until the emergency services actually arrived.   It turns out that Carol was actually suffering a heart attack whilst on the phone to us. And unfortunately, there were 1,400 people throughout the whole of the, of the shielding contact centre process that, that actually needed us to refer to the emergency services. And I think, you know, w-wherever you are and whatever part you played in the, in the national shielding service, whether it be, you know, the data side of it and, and enabling us to actually contact people like Carol in the first place, whether it be decision makers and policy makers that, that actually decided that people like Carol needed, needed our help and our attention, or whether or not you were part of the actual contact centre that, for Department of Work and Pensions.    Everybody played a part in, in making sure that we genuinely supported and protected those most vulnerable. And I think we've got to keep Samantha and Carol at the forefront of our mind when, when we are truly understanding the difference that, that we made. And, and it's those, those things that really give that sense of pride, real sense of purpose, and, and how together working across government, we, we really do look after those most vulnerable in our society. And the National Shielding Service was a perfect example of, of that.   [CLIP ENDS]   Nick Tait:  For the GDS teams, we are intimately connected on the user research level because our user research involves speaking directly with the clinically extremely vulnerable as well as our other user groups. And this is on one hand, very, very stressful for people; especially in the earlier days of the service when people were in dire straits for the need of basic care supplies. And that, that has an impact and an effect on, on the people who are conducting that research. And we have to take care to support and, and look after our own team members who are open to this.   It's a very present now-now validation of the work that you're doing. I think as civil servants we are all contributing to the enhancement, I hope, of the society within which we live, but to have that [finger snap] instant feedback or relatively instant feedback is very, very powerful indeed.   Kate Nicholls:  Yeah, I'd agree with Nick on that point. I think you always, you know, as a civil servant, working on, kind of, policies that you hope will have an impact on the public. But often you might be waiting months or years to actually see that manifest - just because of, you know, how long policy development in normal times takes. But yeah, to be able to, kind of, immediately see how what you're doing is actually helping people in, in some small or big way is, is a really great thing about working on this. Even though it definitely comes with some of it's, kind of, pressure and stresses.    Vanessa Schneider:  I was wondering if you had any achievements that you wanted to call out specifically, any milestones, any, maybe shoutouts to colleagues that you wanted to praise publicly?   Nick Tait:  So I think it's, it's...whilst I'm not a huge fan of milestones, there are certainly achievements that, that it serves us well to remember. So the service itself was stood up over a weekend, 4 days or thereabouts. And then for those registered users, essential supplies were arriving on doorsteps 10 days later. That's pretty amazing. And then over time in, in, in, from the March to the end of July 2020, just over 4 million deliveries of essential supplies were made. So you know this is real stuff happening. So I'm, I'm quietly proud of those things. And I think all of the teams genuinely have done the, the best they could with the tools they had at hand a-and with the information they had at the time, and we've taken time throughout the, the project, or the programme, to pause and to reflect and to ask ourselves: 'what can we do better?'    And some, and some of that has been sort of like recognised formally. So in terms of shout outs, then I-I guess we'd give a shout out to David Dilley from GDS, who was very surprised on a personal level and nonetheless very, very happy to receive an excellence and leadership award at the, the Cabbies last week. So, these things are all good to have. And, and to work on a service that, that impacts people's lives pretty quickly is often enough.   Kate Nicholls:  Yeah, again, I-I feel like specific milestones maybe aren't quite what the thing that makes me kind of the proudest of the, of working on the project. I think the kind of continuous professionalism and kind of, I guess thirst for improvement is what impresses me about working on this project. So obviously the beginning, you know there was a very clear emergency response and, and a lot of momentum [laughs] that kind of comes with that. But I think it's really impressive that even though that kind of initial phase is, you know, of emergency is, is past us now, there's still kind of that appetite to constantly, to constantly test [laughs] with the users, to constantly improve. We just, just last week, we kind of implemented some improvements to the data feeds based on local authority feedback. And I think it's really inspiring to see people who are so enthusiastic about, sort of, delivering not just something that's good enough and does the job, but something that is constantly getting better.    Nick Tait:  A-a really like serious achievement in terms of like the overall, sort of, easing of some of the pressure has been the overall relationship with, with local authorities. So we, we meet regularly, fortnightly at the moment. It used to be weekly with our, our local authority working group, which is made up of, unsurprisingly, members of local authorities from different parts of the country who have different experiences and, sort of, maturity of, of, of digital. And when we started there were a lot of, sort of, folded arms and like, 'what, what are we all doing here then?'   But that group of people has stayed relatively constant, has put the hours in, has, sort of, really risen to the challenge of collective working and collaborative working. And, and now, as Kate has just, sort of, evidenced, that group of people is co-designing the service. And, and that for me is an, is an achievement. But there's no, sort of, milestone because it's been continually being, being worked at and worked t-towards by, by everybody in that group. And, and again, like so many things, it, it hasn't been a particularly smooth ride, it's been a bit bumpy in places. And that's totally fine. But because, again as Kate said, everybody was kind and humble and professional about it and, and felt free to, to air any concerns that they had. And, and collectively that group is delivering, and that's just wonderful.   Kate Nicholls:  Yeah, I definitely think we owe a lot to the kind of openness and, and I guess willingness to give us their time of local authorities. Obviously I would say that being from MHCLG. But you know, in, in so many different fora we have across the shielding directorate, the stakeholder engagement forum, where we get lots of valid feedback, we run kind of weekly surgery sessions with councils where we get so much kind of valuable insight into what it's actually like to use our service on the ground to deliver real stuff [laughs] to people.    Yeah, as Nick said, we've got our invaluable local authority, working group. So, yeah, I think that's a really, really big part of any of the success that we can, we can claim to have had from the system comes from that, for sure.   Vanessa Schneider:  Amazing. Yeah, it's, it's not always easy for these external parties who might not have been there from the beginning to work on this in a way that they might not be familiar with. Obviously, it's a very Agile approach with GDS, and that's been something that's been spreading around government. But it's not necessarily something that local government has had to work with yet. So it's, it's great that they're signing on and that they're really engaged with it as well.   Well [laughs] on that positive note - thank you so much to all of our guests for coming on today. You can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. And the transcripts are available on Podbean. Goodbye.    Nick Tait:  Goodbye.   Kate Nicholls:  Goodbye.

Property chiefs have warmly welcomed moves by the Government to create a new planning body across the Oxford Cambridge Arc as part of an ambitious two-year plan to build homes and create significant new commercial space to house Britain’s life sciences revolution. Responding to MHCLG’s OxCam Spatial Framework, Bidwells partner Mike Derbyshire and Perkins&Will head of urban design Peter Baird join Blackstock Consulting (www.blackstock.co.uk) founder Andrew Teacher to talk about future investment across the Oxford Cambridge Arc. It follows a year-long campaign around the Radical Regeneration Manifesto, an industry report edited by Blackstock and published jointly by Blackstock, Bidwells and P&W. You can download the full report here: www.blackstock.co.uk/rrm

For this free event, Mark will is joined by a panel of Urbano Member architects to discuss the outlook for architecture in 2021, including industry trends, their approach to sustainability, both in terms of the economy and commitments to zero carbon, and the Built Environment as a whole. In a lively session, all sizes and practice specialities of architect practices are represented on the panel: AHR, FT Architects, Gluckman Smith, InsideOut, Mackay + Partners & The RPA Group.They share their opinions on the proposed changes by the MHCLG to the Architects Act 1997, including competences of architects and registration.Support the show (https://www.urbanonetwork.co.uk/membership)

Laura Stevens:   Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Laura Stevens and I'm a Creative Content Producer here at GDS.   For this month's episode, we're going to be taking a look at GOV.UK Pay. GOV.UK Pay is the government's payment platform, letting service teams across the public sector take payments quickly and securely.   It's hit a few milestones this year as it's now used in more than 400 services in around 150 organisations. These services include applying for a Blue Badge, sending money to someone in prison and further afield in many British embassies around the world as part of the apply for an emergency travel document service.    And since it started in 2015, GOV.UK Pay has processed more than 10 million payments to the total value of more than £537 million. And today, we're going to hear from users of GOV.UK Pay from central and local government, and we're also talking to Miriam and Steve from the GOV.UK Pay Team to hear about the product, its features and where it's going next.   So welcome, Miriam and Steve. Please could you both introduce yourselves and what you do on GOV.UK Pay. Miriam, first, please.   Miriam Raines:  Hi, I'm Miriam Raines. I am a Product Manager on GOV.UK Pay.   Steve Messer:  And hello, I'm Steve Messer. I'm also a Product Manager on GOV.UK Pay.    Laura Stevens:  I gave a brief introduction to GOV.UK Pay at the start, but I was hoping that you could both maybe explain a bit more about what it is and how it helps service teams across the public sector. So could you describe a bit more about the product, please?   Steve Messer:  So the GOV.UK Pay is like a part of the Government as a Platform programme. And the basic idea behind that is that service teams across government and local government have to do a bunch of the same stuff in order to move users through transactional services. So loads of people have to pay for things inside of a service, people have to apply for things, they have to receive emails - that kind of stuff.   And there was an idea a while ago to turn those common problems and solve them with like components, common components. And that's where the products from Government as a Platform come from.   Miriam Raines:  And there's sort of 2 parts to Pay: there's the bit that the paying user would see and they're one of our key groups of users. So these are the payment pages that will ask for your card details and give you sort of helpful guidance and helpful error messages, make it really easy to pay, they're really accessible, they're designed in line with the Service Standard and Design System and they're intended to be really easy to use and we're really regularly user testing those to give a sort of consistent, trusted, experienced for users who are paying online across the public sector.   And then there's the other part of Pay, which is for our other group of users, which is sort of public sector workers. So that is civil servants in central government and arm’s length bodies, it is police teams, it's finance people or digital teams in local government or the NHS. And this allows you to set up and manage your services, to take payments to really easily see what money you've had come in and make, issue refunds and track cases and applications and transactions.    Again, very much designed to be as simple to use as possible. We don't want to make this something that needs like a whole lot of training. We want to be really intuitive.    Laura Stevens: Ok, so how does GOV.UK Pay work with a service?   Miriam Raines:  So you can plug Pay into your service. So if you've already got an existing online service, you-your users are on that service, they're paying for their licence, they're paying for, they're, they're making their application. At the point in which they're ready to pay, they're transferred over to Pay, it should look really seamless for that user, and it doesn't feel like jolting that they're going somewhere unexpected. That user can then really easily pay and is redirected back to that service. So that's when we do it in a sort of fully automated, integrated way.   And we've also got options for teams that don't have digital services to really be able to take payments online instead of taking payments via a cheque or expecting someone to call up and pay over the phone, which we know can be time consuming, it could be quite expensive to handle those, you're much more restricted on the hours that you're able to manage those payments. So we've got those 2, those 2 options for different users.    Laura Stevens:  And can you describe some of the services it's been used in?    Miriam Raines:  Yeah, we've got sort of a whole range of services. We've got some really big central government services right through to, so you mentioned, ours, we're open to local government, to NHS and police forces as well. So at sort of big central government level, we work with DVLA, we work with the Passport Office, so if you're making a digital application for passport, you'd be paying on GOV.UK Pay. We work some national services like Blue Badge. So we support a, lots of local authorities to handle Blue Badge payments. Right down to some really like small services that don't see a lot of transactions: we can have like yacht racing certificates. If you want to pay for an image of Field Marshal Montgomery at the National Archives, you can pay for that using Pay. It's quite, quite a variety. It's absolutely fascinating seeing all the things that government handles money for.  Laura Stevens:  So you mentioned there how some of the people who use it are from health and also from local government and central government, and I’ve got here as a brief history, we started off in 2015 with central government departments, then opened up to local government in 2017 and then in 2018 the health sector started using GOV.UK Pay.    But I also wanted to talk about some of the successes that have happened this year, 'cause this year has been a big year for GOV.UK Pay. I see from Steve's weeknotes - every week there seems to be a new headline. So I just wondered if you could just take me through some of the highlights from this year in GOV.UK Pay.   Steve Messer:  Yep. So I think it was a couple of weeks ago, so maybe mid-October when we had our 400th service go live, which was a good milestone. I think compared to last year, there were, I think there was something around about 100 live services. So we've seen a massive increase over the last 12 months, which is fantastic. It's good to see that the product is being used and talked about, but you know, it does mean that we have to work a bit harder now. So many more needs coming up, but that's fine, that's what we're here for.    I think we've also just before then, so I think it was around about September, we passed a milestone in the value of payments that we've taken and we've now taken well over £500 million from users and passed that on to government departments. So you know half a billion pounds moving through the product is quite a big milestone because you know, a lot of people on the team remember when the first quid went through.   But it's also it's, it's, it's exciting to see the benefits that it can generate as well. So in our economic model, we know that it can save service teams, tens of thousands of pounds in procurement costs and the time that's associated with that.    Miriam Raines:  I think we've also seen, we've able to sort of respond quickly when teams have needed to get set up with services that related to sort of COVID support. You know we are one small part of that massive thing that those services are handling, but if we can make just even the payments bit of it that bit easier and take that burden off the team when they've got all these other things to work on and get people set up really quickly, that's felt really valuable.   Steve Messer:  There was another episode just after the lockdown got lifted as well where like, no-one was applying for fishing licences because everyone was inside obviously. And then all of a sudden the, the, the break of the stay at home order was announced and people could go fishing again. And the number of fishing licence applications went from 0 to up to something like 2,000 per minute or something like that, within an hour. And it was just, it was fascinating to watch the dashboard just go, 'bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep' and you know things start happening. It was, it was a very cool.    Laura Stevens: And yes Steve, you actually set that up very nicely as well, because we're now going to hear from the Environment Agency and they are talking about fishing, so you've clearly got some friends over there. ----- Haroon Tariq:  I’m Haroon Tariq. I'm the Delivery Manager for the I Want to Fish Team, who are responsible for digital service that enables anglers to purchase fishing licences and submit catch returns.     Laura Stevens:  Can you tell me a bit more about what the service provides?     Haroon Tariq:  So the I Want to Fish Team looks after the service, which allows anglers to buy fishing licences which are legally required by law and also to submit catch returns, which basically means that if you go fishing for salmon and sea trout fishing, then we need to know where you fished, where you've caught, et cetera. So that's what I help look after.     Laura Stevens:  And so I wanted to just give our listeners some context for this service for anyone who doesn't regularly fish, and because the numbers involved are quite big, aren't they? I've got here a million licences are purchased a year.   Haroon Tariq:  That's right, yeah, so so about kind of a million licences get purchased a year. I mean, just to give some context, in England alone, angling is worth 1.4 billion and supports at least 27,000 jobs. Angling is increasingly being used to address mental and physical health, social inclusion, which are key issues in society, especially pertinent in recent times with the COVID-19 pandemic.    Laura Stevens:  And can you describe what the licence is? Is it something that's on your phone? Is it a physical licence or how does that work?    Haroon Tariq:  So the licence is basically provided via you get an email confirmation and you will typically get a paper card with that licence as well. And that is something that we're looking to review going forward, so watch this space! But at the moment, it's a legal requirement. If you get caught fishing in England or Wales and you don't have a fishing licence, then it is a prosecutable offence. So it is very important that anglers do have a fishing licence.    Laura Stevens:  And how does GOV.UK Pay work with this service?   Haroon Tariq:  So GOV.UK Pay is our kind of payment services platform. So we use it to process online card payments for fishing licences. We are one of the larger volume services that use Pay. So we process between 2 to 5000 transactions per day.   Laura Stevens:  And you mentioned it earlier, and also from my research you mentioned about how more people are fishing now with coronavirus with the lockdown when it lifted over summer.   So from my research, I’ve seen that when lockdown lifted in summer, there was a huge increase in people who wanted to fish, 6x in fact an increase with a peak of 1,575 applications per hour after the ease of restrictions, when there had been no higher than 252 applications per hour in the previous 30 days. So how did GOV.UK Pay help you process these?   Haroon Tariq:  So when lockdown restrictions eased, licences sales are shot through the roof and the service suitably with the additional load of anglers purchasing licences over a short period of time. This is made really easy due to the close collaboration between our internal teams at I Want to Fish and the GOV.UK Pay teams, making enhancements to service to cope with the surge in demand for fishing licences.    GOV.UK Pay was very good in working with us to understand in terms of the potential spike in peak of kind of people buying fishing licences. So effectively, we made the systems even more resilient than they already were. So they are very resilient anyway, just to kind of try and support that additional surge in demand.    And I'm pleased to report that it did work really well. As you've quoted in some of your figures there, sales figures for fishing licences kind of hit the roof when Boris did kinda ease exercise restrictions back at the beginning of the summer. So, yes, it was very well kind of work together and it worked well for us.   Laura Stevens:  And so what features does the Environment Agency make use of GOV.UK Pay in both now with coronavirus, but also all the time?    Haroon Tariq:  So I think one of the key benefits of working with GOV.UK Pay as a kind of payment services provider is that it allows us to benefit from platform enhancement. So what I mean by that is as the platform evolves and iterates, then we can kind of gain benefit from that.    So one of those examples is the recent card masking feature, which basically masks the card payment details when they’re entered. One of the other features that kind of is out of the box that we use is the transaction reporting, so we can review kind of transaction volumes and look to kind of forecast any potential peaks, such as you've mentioned, in light of Covid and exercise restrictions being eased.   One of the other features that I quite like is that if there are any production instances that occur on the service, we have the access to a live issue monitoring alert system, which allows us to track what those are, keep abreast of any updates and help us kind of predict any volumes going forward.      Laura Stevens:  And looking forward with the future of your service, how can GOV.UK Pay help you with that?    Haroon Tariq:  So we've got lots of exciting stuff coming up on the service for us, on I Want to Fish, which you'll have to wait and see. But GOV.UK Pay is our kind of payment platform provider as it kind of continues to try and add enhancements on the service. We will look to kind of gain the benefit from those as we move forward.    So I've already mentioned about the card masking feature. I'm sure there will be other benefits such as this that will look to glean and take forward. So I think that's one of the key things for us, is having a payment service provider that can iterate and move forward and kind of give us the benefit without us having to kind of spend time and research and money in that area. So with the GOV.UK Pay Team, it's very good. We've worked well together and look forward to working for in the future.     Laura Stevens:  And I'll be playing this back to the GOV.UK Pay Team during the podcast, is there anything you'd want to say to them? Anything, any requests you want to put in for any of these new features?    Haroon Tariq:  Firstly to say thank you, we've kind of created a really good partnership with all the people that we work with, with the team and very much going to continue the good work. We've got some exciting stuff coming up. We're looking at different payment methods, which we're going to be working with GOV.UK Pay going forward on. So watch this space, but for now thank you.  ---------- Steve Messer:  That's just really nice - it's so lov-lovely to hear. That was wonderful.    Miriam Raines:  One, one thing I thought was really good and really interesting to hear about that sort of idea of partnership. I think we really do try and work very closely in partnership with our services. We sort of regularly talking to services about how they're finding it, you know what's working well, what's not working well, and really involve all of our users in shaping that future roadmap. So when we're talking about releasing new features and make sure that functionality is available, and really just sort of like upgrades that get sort of passed through to the teams without them having to do any sort of additional work - all of those things that we build in our roadmap are really based on these conversations with users that come out of the, the feedback we get from them and trying to understand their needs and expand the way that Pay can support that.    Steve Messer:  Yeah, that's, that's the cool thing, really, and that's, I think that's one of the reasons I get up in the morning as a Product Manager, is that the job is never done. There's always more to be doing. So whilst we've created a product which allows government to take card payments pretty easily and simply and then manage those, there's always going to be some other problem around the corner that people need solved. And as you hear from Haroon there, they're sort of looking at other payment methods in the future. Things that were interesting to explore with people and looking at the moment.   Laura Stevens:  And Miriam, to quote your words back at you, you along with Mark Buckley, blogged about the use of GaaP products with Coronavirus, and in there you said “some services needed to stop taking cheques or reduce reliance on call centres as offices close and call centres have fewer staff. GOV.UK Pay has been able to help these services start taking payments within a day and keep important services running.” So what I wanted to do is I want to play a clip from Home Office who, like the Environment Agency, are a long established user of GOV.UK Pay to hear about their journey with GOV.UK Pay.  ------ Lisa Lowton: Yeah, so it's Lisa Lowton. I'm from the Home Office and I am the Head Functional Lead for our ERP solution - and the ERP solution being the Enterprise Resource Planning Tool that we, we look after all of our HR and finance activities.   Laura Stevens:  Lisa, I know you've worked in the Civil Service for quite a long time, particularly in finance and project work, could you just give us a brief description of your career?    Lisa Lowton:  Yeah, sure. So my career started, I was an accountant in the private sector and decided I wanted to change. And an advert came up to work in the Home Office as an Immigration Caseworker - so that's where I started.   Done a number of years as an Operational Caseworker and then moved into the project space. And that slowly moved me then back into finance and looking at ERP [Enterprise resource planning] systems again.    Laura Stevens:  And as well as obviously being in the Civil Service for while, you've also been involved with GOV.UK Pay for a while I believe since its inception back in 2015 with, under Till Wirth at the time, the then Product Manager. So can you tell me how you used the GOV.UK Pay over the years?   Lisa Lowton:  Yeah sure. So, yeah, I met Till 5 years ago it was, at a Civil Service conference down in London, when we were allowed to travel at that point. So, so Till and I met when he was doing a stall and he was talking through payments and, and how things were going to be done in one place for government, and, and I kind of really enjoyed speaking with Till and I was quite interested.    It was literally by chance that about 4 or 5 months later, where I was working at the time, the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS), decided to look at developing a product in-house and that would mean an element of payments that would be taken - so straightaway Till came to mind. So that literally was the-the start of the journey really.    So that was the DBS Basic Disclosure Service and they use all 3 of the GDS products - so Verify, Notify and Pay. So we were the first ones to go live with that. And it took around 2 years and it went live in January ‘18. And Gov.Pay was obviously a key element of that. So it was really nice to see from inception, them conversations in Civil Service Live to then actually it rolling out into that service - so that was where it started.    Laura Stevens:  And more recently, I know coronavirus has, like for many of us, pretty much all of us, have forced you to change some of the way you take payments on services. So can you explain a bit more about this service and how GOV.UK Pay has helped you with that shift?    Lisa Lowton:  So we were looking at the, the pay portal to move all our invoice payments to. So, so currently our card payments were, are taken through another provider, and they're kind of a shared service centre as such, and, and card payments are actually took through manual card terminals, which was, obviously means the-the agents having to obviously be in the office at the time, and also the number of issues that the guys faced with their manual card terminals including lack of, lack of Wi-Fi, that type of thing was-was also an issue.    So we were already looking to move the service to Pay. It was just by chance that COVID came along and meant that there was a real risk that the, the guys in Wales potentially might not be able to be in the office, which meant that we would, we would then have a bit of a gap as to how we would take payments for invoices that needed to be paid over that period, and who, who, people prefer to pay by card as well. So so that was the opportunity that we had.    And therefore we-we had a conversation with your development team as to look how we could use a payment link in that situation. We put it through our internal governance - our DDaT [Digital, Data and Technology] governance - who were really supportive of us in-in getting this up and running. And it took around about 5 weeks and we managed to, to get it up and running to be able to provide that as, as a backup service should, should the team in Newport not be able to be in the office.   Laura Stevens:  And you mentioned payment links there, and I know this is a feature that's been really helpful to you. Could you explain a bit more about what a payment link is and how it helped you?    Lisa Lowton:  Yes, sure. So as I spoke about before the, the COVID response was how, how are we able to give customers the way to make a payment without having to, to call the call centre for example, or where the call centre can't take that payment.   So the payment link was,was really handy so that we were able to put on, counter the IVR - so the telephone solution, where we can say, you know, we can't take a payment right now so if you go to this GOV.UK and, and provide that information, and also we've put it on a number of, or we are about to put it on a number of potentially e-ma, at the bottom of emails that, that go out from the shared service centre, as well as the, the kind of the longer term view of putting it on the back of an invoice, and also on some of the, the penalties, which is also where we need to add that payment linked to as well.     So just on the payment linked functionality - really easy to set up, very quick. Obviously the, we had some thinking internally as to how we make sure people provide the right information, because at this point, weren't quite sure how, how the data would come in. And so, so that was really easy to set up. And there was, you know, we did some internal reviews and to be able to make the changes like we did so quickly, I think there was absolutely astonishment because normally when you make changes on any type of, of portal, it normally takes a number of weeks, a number of months, and normal has a pound sign on it.    And that wasn't the case. It was all, it was all at our fingertips and we were able to change it there and then in the sessions that we were having with the internal business colleagues as well. So that, that was really good.     So we've been going for 5 months now, and again, this is not been advertised anywhere specific, this was only set-up for the, for people who weren't able to make a payment when they called up - to date we've had just under £200,000 of, kind of, revenue coming in. So which is great, which, which has come through a portal that would never existed 5 months ago.   So, so we've got to remember kind of you know, some of our customers you know don't want to, don't want to pay, you know some of these are penalties, and, you know, like any, anything like that, you, you potentially do struggle to, to get the income in. But it does show either how easy the solution is and how people are, the usability of it is really good. Because therefore, you know, we've got that promise to pay and you know, over 90%, which is, which is superb.    Laura Stevens: And what other features have you used?   Lisa Lowton: I guess one of the advantages of going to GOV.Pay was that obviously as the payments industry develops, GOV.Pay are absolutely there at, at the frontend of this. And a recent example, well maybe not that recent but you know, 12 months ago when Apple and Google Pay we're, we're very much kind of hot on the heels of, of how people want to pay. That was something that, as part of where I spoke about before the Disclosure and Barring Service, Basic Service, that's something that we wanted to use. Again it gives people the opportunity to you know, more, more opportunity to pay through however they want to pay.   I was really surprised, I don’t know why I was surprised, it was just a really good example of the where you guys had built the technology, and all I did was click a switch and that was it. And then my customers were then able to pay by Apple and Google Pay. And, and that for me was a real key benefit because it was something similar that we were looking at in another area of the service, which potentially would have cost that organisation quite a lot of money. So that is, that is something that I'll always remember that first kind of, I suppose it's an enhancement as such, of how that work was done you know, in GDS and we were all able to benefit from it. And that's something that I want to kind of make sure that people are aware of these types of things and the benefits of moving to GOV.UK Pay.    Laura Stevens:  And when I'm playing this clip back to the GOV.UK Pay Team, is there anything you'd want to say to them, or any requests you have or anything else?    Lisa Lowton:  Ooh..so, so firstly it is a massive thank you. And I guess it's, it's just what I suppose, you know, when I think about how, how can we make this service better, we've got to get the word out there. So things like this podcast, you know other, other advertisements that we can do, that I can do as a department to try and sell this service will only help longer term, and will also mean that you know the guys back in the GDS office, or in the, or in their living room or wherever they are now, understand that the important job that they do for central government.    It's very easy for people in the back office not to understand the impact of, of the front line. And I can give you an example really, a quite recent example of conversations that we're having with our colleagues at the border who want to be able to make sure they've got access to see information 24 hours a day, you know, our operation does not close down in the Home Office, it absolutely stays open 24 hours a day.    And we are now working with them and using the Pay, using the Pay portal to provide them some information to which they, they're over the moon with. We're still early days. But just, you know, just for me to hear these guys tell me the impact of having this information 24 hours a day was, was quite emotional if, if I'm being honest, and sometimes people like ourselves and people in GDS might not see that front end impact, but it absolutely does, it does make a difference. And we need to make sure that we always keep that in mind - is that why we're doing it.     --------   Miriam Raines:  I'm pretty happy to hear Lisa's happy. Lisa's been such a great advocate for Pay, and you know, as she said we've been working with her you know, for the last 5 years through various, through her various jobs that have taken her to different parts of central government. As Pay has grown and changed and been thinking about the new things that we can offer, and hopefully you know, sounds like she's had some benefits from, from using us and from the things we've been able to add, but we've also gained hugely from like getting her insight into what it is like to be a finance person in central government. Like how, how can that work better, what are the problems they've got, what are the things that we can help with to make that easier. So she's been really great with her time sort of sharing that information with us.    Steve Messer:  So that's one of the things that really excites me, is thinking about these different scenarios that people are in when they do need to pay government. So they might be on their way to work, on the bus using their phone, and they don't really want to like have the hassle of sort of going through a government service really. They have to do it. But knowing that they can just like coming along to GOV.UK, go to a service, fill in a form, use Pay to pay us, and then get on with the rest of their life quickly, simply and easily, I think is the value of what we do.   I sort of did actually wonder what are the different devices you can use to pay government on? Because not everyone has access to the latest smartphone or a laptop or a computer or that sort of thing. So I had a bit of a play using some devices that might be more common that are a bit easier to get hold of, like a really old Kindle. So it's nice to know that you know anyone, no matter their digital access or requirements, they should be able to just pay government and get on with their life.   Laura Stevens:  Any other devices or just the Kindle? I know we've had, we've heard before that GOV.UK's been accessed by a PlayStation, services have been used on that as well.    Steve Messer:  Yeah, PlayStations, games consoles, I've used it on a TV as well, that's like quite common. People have smart TVs but might not have a smartphone. So you can use it on that. I don't know what else I've tried it on. That's it - I need to try it on the very first Web browser and see if it works on there, I'm hoping it does. That's a bit of time travelling if you do that, it's quite fun.   Laura Stevens:  And yes, and before we hear from our final clip, which is from Surrey County Council, I wanted to talk about local government. And I wanted to talk about the collaborative project with local authorities and the Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government or MHCLG. Could you tell me a bit more about that, what it was and what you found out about it?    Miriam Raines:  So, yeah, MHCLG had set up the Local Digital Collaboration Unit and GDS has been working very closely with them to support that. They had a fund that local authorities could apply for to help solve common problems. And so local authorities could form groups, partnerships with other local authorities looking at the same problem, apply for money to investigate that either at sort of a discovery level or sort of alpha level if they'd already done some work on this in the past.    And there were a group of local authorities led by North East Lincolnshire that included a few other local authorities of different sizes and different sort of geographic places around the country, who wanted to look at how they could make GOV.UK Pay easier to use and make it more sort of widespread within local government. They saw there was an opportunity there, but they wanted to understand you know, why wasn’t it necessarily being used more, how could they check that it was meeting the needs of local government as well as central government and sort of understanding the case for using Pay. So we worked with them January 2019. And it was really, really interesting.   We travelled round to lots of different local authorities. We watched finance teams and caseworkers sort of doing their jobs, what the tools they were using at the moment. Try to understand what the current payment platforms that they use, what were sort of good things about that, what were the pain points around that, how Pay might be able to address it now with the functionality we had at the time and what things you might need to do to enhance Pay. So again, basing our future roadmap entirely on the feedback that we've got from users, making it much easier to use and thinking about some specific issues for local, for local government as well. And I think it's been really beneficial so we've been able to do some of the changes that we looked at.    Steve Messer:  Yeah, that would be great actually, if everyone could go to our website and look at the roadmap and just let us know if something's not on there or definitely let us know if something's on there and you're excited about it. This kind of feedback is what helps us make Pay and make it work for people.   Laura Stevens:  And now we're going to hear from a local government user from Surrey County Council.  ------- David Farquharson:  So my name's David Farqharson and I work at Surrey County Council and I'm a Developer who works in our integration team, which is a team that is specifically concerned with system integration. And part of that integration is the online payment solution.   Laura Stevens: Could you tell me how you came across GOV.UK Pay?   David Farquharson: Yes. So my first exposure to GOV.UK Pay was when we implemented our Blue Badge scheme. And as part of that, there's a payment that has to be made.    We implemented a government solution as part of the end-to-end system, incorporated the GOV.UK Pay platform for online payments and the GOV.UK Notify for the messages and notifications. So that was my first exposure to it.    And as we implemented it, I was quite impressed by what it was offering. And so decided to do an assessment of whether it would be a solution that we could look at for the whole council online payment strategy.    Laura Stevens:  So yes, Surrey came across GOV.UK Pay through the Blue Badge. I also wanted to ask about how GOV.UK Pay helped Surrey County Council during coronavirus. On a blog post on the GDS Blog there was a quote from Surrey County Council talking about a service that was set up in one day using GOV.UK Pay.    David Farquharson:  Yes. I mean, we had a particular example where we needed to take for COVID-19, we needed to take payments for a crisis fund. So it was a sort of fund set up where people could donate money to help people that were in immediate problems due to the COVID-19 issue. And as a result, we needed to get something up as quick as possible, to start taking that money. And so we used the payment links function that is provided by GOV.UK Pay, which is extremely quick way of getting up a payment page and taking those payments online. So that was the particular one that we were probably talking about.    But since COVID-19, we've already set up a number of additional live services, some using the payment links and some using more sort of in-depth integration.    Laura Stevens: And so what features does GOV.UK Pay have that make it helpful to you as somebody working in local government?    David Farquharson:  The GOV.UK Pay platform underpinned fully by the accessible rest APIs [application programming interfaces], which enable developers and local authorities like ourselves to build custom add-ons and to access data and information from the system and embed it in some of our external applications. And also allows us to do things like journaling for our ledger, by accessing the APIs. And the documentation of support for developers is excellent - it's accessible on the website so if anyone went to your website and looked, there's a documentation section and it's excellent on the APIs and how to use them. In fact, on the whole on the whole admin site and how to integrate it, it's very good for that. And the support both online from the call logging system and telephone supports has also been very good and responsive to our needs.    We've also actually been in personal discussion with some developers from your team, and they're very willing to speak to us and listen to our requirements. And we've actually, in conjunction with them, requested some additions and amendments that they have actually now developed and put live.    Another major advantage is how quickly it is to set up a test service on the admin site, it literally takes minutes. You can start, your developers can start carrying out some initial developments and proof of concepts very quickly. So we were able to do that. And it fits in with an agile development approach as well. So you can quickly get something out very quickly, show your, your customers so they immediately get an idea of what it is they're going to be getting.    We've touched on the payment feature, but again, that's a very nice feature. If you are looking at taking online payments that you don't need to integrate with another system and are fairly simple in their nature, you can set that up literally in a day, you could have something up and have a new URL that you can put out for people to take to make online payments.    We also found that each service set up, so we at Surrey, we've got 50 plus payment services that take online payments and that's growing all the time as well. So each one of these we call a different service. So they could be completely different things from highways to education to music tuition. So a lot of different services involved. And each of those is set up as a separate service in the GOV.UK Pay admin site. And you can then control the security and the access to those services. If you will use the admin site and using the admin site for your users, you can control the use of security so that they only see the service they're responsible for. And so in the council where we've got a very disparate level of services and of users, that's was very useful to us.   So, I mean, that's just an example of the advantages. But that’s why we’ve changed our whole strategy, which is to move over to the GOV.UK Pay platform.   Laura Stevens:  If GOV.UK Pay didn't exist, how would that have impacted your work at Surrey?   David Farquharson: We possibly would have had to have built a similar thing ourselves.    So it's probably saved us a lot of our own in-house development work, but would also have been specific to Surrey County Council and one of the things we're looking at with this is the hope that this might lead to more of a standardised local government approach as well. We've been in talks to local authorities because then we can share our experiences. We can look for joint improvements rather than working independently and developing separate solutions. And I think there is a benefit in terms of costs going forward for local authorities to do that.    Laura Stevens:  If any of our listeners are from local government and want to know a bit more, how would they get in touch with you?   David Farquharson:  If anyone wanted to follow up on any of the comments I've made or ask us how at Surrey we've approached some of these issues, I'll be more than happy to talk about that. I think the easiest would be to contact me on my work email address, which is david.farquharson, which I better spell F for Freddie a r q u h a r s o n. S for sugar, s o n. At Surreycc.gov.uk [david.farquharson@surreycc.gov.uk]    So just drop me an email and I'll either get back in the email or I can contact the person that's I’d be more than happy to do it. ---------   Miriam Raines:  Surrey have been such good supporters of, of Pay and we've, it's good to hear they were saying we've worked really closely with them: we've done like a couple of really useful research sessions with them. And yes, as you mentioned, we were able to release some changes pretty recently based on feedback that they'd given us. And yeah, that's really, it's just really positive.    Laura Stevens:  And would you say there, where, what David was talking about the sort of experience of GOV.UK Pay - is that typical for a local government user of GOV.UK Pay?   Miriam Raines:  Yeah. So it's actually interesting, we've got some local government users who do sort of split everything out so they've got a different service in Pay for every different type of transaction and then they can really carefully manage the nuances sort of each of those services and who's got access to it - and in some ways that can make sort of, if it works for their process, it can make finance and reconciliation easier. And that was one of the things that we were doing research with Surrey about.    There are other teams where they just have one service in Pay, and they run absolutely every single thing through it. They've got other ways of handling reconciliation and they like to sort of just, keep, keep it quite simple with their sort of interaction with with Pay. So it will depend on how teams use it.   Laura Stevens:  I was thinking about how GOV.UK Pay will develop next. So we've talked a lot about the various features since it's launched and there seems like there's been lots of things added and has adapted with different users, different features. So what are you thinking about looking forward in the, in your roadmap? What's, what's on the horizon?    Steve Messer:  So there's quite a few things, because the payments industry has changed quite a lot since the internet came along. You know it's not only online payments that have been enabled. Some exciting - if I can say that, regulation, exciting regulation, does it exist? Yes - exciting regulation went through in 2017 I think, which is open banking regulation. And this, what this does is it sort of opens up the way that you can transact with services by using your bank account.   Previously it would have been like quite expensive to build these kinds of things, but now there is a way for any kind of online service to integrate with an open banking solution and then provide information from your bank account to that service. And also to, to send money as well. So there’s quite exciting opportunities there where for people who don't have access to a card maybe could pay by bank account, which in most scenarios is quicker and might be simpler for them.   I think we also want to be looking at how we can make it cheaper for government services to use GOV.UK Pay. We are pretty competitive and we work with the market rather than against the market, which means that you know services can save a lot of money. But again, there are ways that we can really reduce these transaction costs and make it quicker and easier for service teams to convince their governance to start using Pay.    Miriam Raines:  And sort of related to that, we've also been working very closely with Government Finance Function and Government Shared Services. So we're looking at what their aims and ambitions are for sort of better efficiency or sort of automation in those processes in government. And then we looking at how Pay can sort of support that, how we can be the vehicle to enable them to roll out these new sort of finance standards or data standards and make it easier to have that sort of that same technology used and reused across, across government. So that's really, that's really interesting - and Lisa has been very helpful in that. She's been very involved from Home Office as well.    Laura Stevens:  And I guess out of all those plans, what excites you both the most coming up in the next few months to work on GOV.UK Pay?   Steve Messer:  I'm quite excited about so, we do offer a Welsh language service for our services. And so if you're a Welsh language speaker, you can go from start to finish with a completely Welsh journey until Pay sends you an email confirming your payment - that's the only bit we haven't done yet. So I'm quite excited to work on that because it means I get to use the people I live with as a test group because they all speak Welsh. It might make the Christmas dinner quite interesting.   Miriam Raines:  Steve's learning Welsh, so Steve can practice too.    Steve Messer:  Yeah, I can show myself up in how poor I am at my Welsh.   Miriam Raines:  I think we've been thinking about, I don't know if I'm allowed to get excited about invoicing, but I think I might be excited about invoicing. One of the things that Lisa was talking about in her service was they're using Pay for invoices. And definitely we have teams that are using Pay in that way, they might be using our API integration, more likely they're using that payment links functionality. But there's a lot of ways that we could probably make that better and tailor it a bit more to how people share invoices, receive invoices, want to check the invoices have been paid.   So I think there's some work there that we can do because that can be quite expensive to handle in government, it can be quite manual, it can be a bit awkward for users: lot of time they might have to make, you know call up and pay over the phone or something. So we're looking at how we could do that. So that's pretty something we might look at in the, in the New Year.    Laura Stevens:  Fab. And if I've been listening and I want to find out more or I want to get in touch with you, how is best to do so?    Steve Messer:  So probably go to our website, which is payments.service.gov.uk. There you'll be able to find information on what Pay is, how to get started, our roadmap that shows you what we're working on now, next and things that we're exploring. It also has a page that can allow you to get in touch with us. You can contact the support team or get in touch with us to tell us about anything you're excited about.    Laura Stevens:  So yes, thank you both and thank you to all our guests for coming on the podcast today. This is actually my last episode as I'm moving onto a new role in GDS so it's been great to leave on a, such a great product. And you can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service Podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and other major podcast platforms. And the transcripts are available on PodBean. So thank you again both.    Miriam Raines:  Thanks, Laura.    Steve Messer:  Thank you. That was great.

Our Very Special Guest this week is Simon Gallagher, Director of Planning at MHCLG. Simon is leading the civil service in the Ministry in respect of the Planning White Paper and the consultation on the Changes to the Current Planning System. Court Judgments of the Week Norfolk Homes V North Norfolk DC [2020] EWHC 2265 a decision of Holgate J confirming that a planning permission granted pursuant to section 73 was not subject to a section 106 obligation which governed the original no longer extant permission. Gathercole V Suffolk CC [2020] EWCA Civ 1179 a decision of the Court of Appeal dismissing an appeal upholding the County Council's grant of permission for a new primary school despite a failure to have due regard to the public sector equality duty under section 149 of the Equality Act 2010 in respect of the effect of aircraft noise on children with protected characteristics. Appeals of the Week Successful appeal by Retirement Villages & Nottcuts Ltd for a 84 unit C2 facility against decision of Mid Sussex dated 11 September 2020 in circumstances where the proposal was contrary to the recently adopted Mid-Sussex Local Plan and the most important policies were judged up to date Highthorn a Secretary of State redetermination of a mineral appeal whereby, contrary to the inspector's recommendation, the appeal was dismissed. This raises issues around the Government's Clean Growth Strategy, the application of footnote 65 to [205] & [211 (b)] of NPPF, the need for coal as well as less than substantial harm to heritage assets.

Our Very Special Guest this week is Joanna Averley, the new Chief Planner at MHCLG. Court Judgments of the Week Wainhomes v SOSHCLG [2020]EWHC 2294; a decision of Dove J who quashed a decision of the Secretary of State to dismiss an appeal for 100 homes and remitted it for redetermination. The case centred upon a failure of reasons to explain why a policy agreed by three authorities was considered to be up to date despite the authorities agreeing a subsequent redistribution based on an MoU based on an aggregated Standard Methodology figure. Peel Investments v SOSHCLG [2020] EWCA Civ 1836 a decision of the Court of Appeal upholding the decision of Dove J. who in turn upheld an Inspector's decision to dismiss appeals in respect of residential development up to 600 dwellings. The case turned upon how to approach whether policy is out of date which is fundamentally a matter of planning judgment – so here policies in a plan without saved strategic policies could still be up to date. Appeals of the Week Successful appeal by Gladman against decision of Chorley BC for 180 homes Aug 20 Tiptree appeal [18 August 2020] permission refused for 255 homes; Wokingham decision [25 August 2020] permission refused for 216 dwellings Braintree decision permission granted for up to 300 homes [17/8/20]

Laura Stevens: Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Laura Stevens and I’m a Creative Content Producer at GDS. And today we’re going to be talking about the Local Digital Declaration. This is a set of guiding principles that help support local authorities, of all sizes and capabilities, to deliver great digital services and platforms that meet the needs of their users. And since it launched 2 years ago, 223 public sector organisations have signed up to it.    And to tell me more about the work the declaration has done is Lisa Jeffrey and May-N Leow. So welcome both to the podcast, please could you tell me who you are, where you work and how you’re involved with the Local Digital Declaration.    Lisa Jeffery: So yeah, I'm Lisa Jeffery. I'm a Regional Relationship Manager for Government Digital Service, GDS, I'm based in Leeds. And we're here to help open doors and raise awareness of the support that's available from GDS and to connect people where it's beneficial to do so to support digital transformation. I started working at GDS in May 2018, and that's just a couple months before the Local Digital Declaration launched in July 2018, and I've been involved ever since then really over the last 2 years.    May-N Leow: Hi everyone. I’m May-N Leow, and Head of the Local Digital Collaboration Unit. So almost a year now at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government [MHCLG], and yeah, Lisa is a fantastic champion of, of the declaration and we love working with her and GDS.   So I’ve actually seen it from both sides. So when I was working in the council in Southwark, we were co-signatories of the declaration, we also applied for the funds - so I have that perspective of what it feels like to be in the council. So yeah, it’s been really fantastic seeing it from both sides of, of the pond.   Laura Stevens: So I described the Local Digital Declaration briefly in the introduction. But I’d like to hear a bit more about it. It’s a set of 5 principles - could we talk through them?   May-N Leow: So it's, it’s, as you say kind of Laura, it’s, we’ve got 5 principles in the declaration, and it's based around the GDS Service Manual as well as the Technology Code of Practice.    But the key things for us is that obviously we want users and citizens need to be first when you know, designing a system and offering good local services. And the second one is around fixing the plumbing - so we want to fix the hard, complex problems. It's not very sexy but it's completely vital for delivering good services. And then we want to design safe, secure and useful ways of sharing information and data and that's even more critical from COVID and what we've learned in the crisis response. And then the fourth one is to kind of demonstrate leadership in creating the conditions for genuine organisational transformation, making sure that it can actually happen. And then lastly, working in the open whenever we can so as many people can learn from, from each other.    So those are kind of, the 5 principles we have in the declaration.   Laura Stevens: So the Local Digital Declaration is a joint initiative from GDS and MHCLG. And can you describe for me who is it for?    Lisa Jeffery:   So it's aimed primarily at local authorities and other public sector organisations that meet the requirements of signing the Local Digital Declaration.    I think the Local Digital Declaration is a, is a great example of what can be achieved if, if we all work together. It's co-written by 45 different organisations, so it's really about shared ambition for the future of public services in the internet age. And it's now been signed by 223 different organisations.   Laura Stevens: And can you describe some of the councils who have signed it? Sort of, are they big councils, are they small councils, who’s signed up?   May-N Leow: I think it's all across the board. So we have obviously your big city, metropolitan kind of councils right through to your county and district councils. Obviously there are other organisations, other than councils, that have signed up to the declaration, so we're pretty much approaching that three quarter mark of, of all councils in England, which is you know, great and shows the level of ambition that, that councils are, are showcasing in terms of wanting to deliver like modern, amazing services to, to their citizens and community.    Laura Stevens: And I know you, both of you referenced this in the introduction, I wanted to go back in time a bit, looking back to 2018 because it's obviously its 2 year birthday coming up very shortly. So could you tell me, perhaps Lisa from the GDS point of view and May-N from when you were working Southwark Council point of view, why was the Local Digital Declaration created?   May-N Leow: Yeah. And, and I would say certainly being on the other side when the Declaration was being created, it was, it was, the need born out from it's kind of like a place, one place can state what does good look like for local services and what the ambition looks like for local services? And certainly in, again, in, in Southwark, I used it as a mechanism to drive forward a lot of things that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise - so saying here's the declaration, we’ve committed to it, you know other organisations have committed to it and this is the bar that we should try to kind of meet. So using that to say you know, we need to have user research, we need to do-build services in that user-centered way.    Again I could not have done without the Declaration, without kind of the Local Digital Fund. So certainly being a council officer, having something like that, it's just such a powerful mechanism to not only showcase what's possible, what we should be doing but then, but then also sort of say to senior management, this is what we're committing to so let's do it.   Lisa Jeffery: And at the beginning as well, we did, we did some roadshows. I think it was really important that we got out and about around the country when, when we could, and that we could understand each other and work together across local and national government.    Laura Stevens: You mentioned there about the roadshows, and you mentioned there about how you, it showed you what good looked like specifically for local councils, how important was that creation and collaboration between local and central government?   May-N Leow: I mean, I-I think it was crucial to make something like this actually work, because you, you need both perspectives of organisations from a council side, what central government is trying to achieve, and other organisations like LGA [Local Government Association] as well, that kind of fed into the, the declaration.   So it's, it’s not really that MHCLG kind of holds the declaration or is responsible for it, we're just kind of like keeping it for, for the sector at this point in time. And it's very much like a shared commitment and an ownership of, of the declaration. So I think it was really crucial that it was co-written and co-published.   Lisa Jeffery: Yeah I-I think I'd agree. As in there's, there's, it's more like a movement of course, than a mandate. So I think we're all on a journey to improve public services and to make things better for people fundamentally - so collaboration and building capability and community and being human centered and understanding how we are connected, are all enablers to that goal really.    Laura Stevens: And Lisa, so can you explain a bit about your role as a Regional Relationship Manager? Because I know since you've been here for 2 years, you’ve made about, over 40 visits in person to councils?   Lisa Jeffery: Yep. So as a Regional Relationship Manager for the Government Digital Service, GDS, based in Leeds, we’re here to sort of open doors to GDS, raise awareness of the support that's available from GDS and to connect people where it's beneficial to support digital transformation. And since the launch of the Local Digital Declaration, I’ve made 40 visits in person to local authorities and I've also met with many more local authorities through communities and events like LocalGovCamp, where the Local Digital Declaration had a launch.   It's been really helpful to connect with local authorities and to learn with them and to visit them in their own context. And I've seen the value of that and joining up services, people and places to act as an enabler for collaboration.   Laura Stevens: May-N, I know your team is the Local Digital Collaboration Unit. Can you talk about your work there and also how you saw it from the other side at Southwark?   May-N Leow: Yeah. So currently we've got a number of projects that we're funding via the Local Digital Fund.    So we’re funding basically projects to solve common challenges that councils have. So we're currently in round 4 of our funding, so we do it in a stage kind of way, and some of the rounds are open so councils can apply with completely new challenges or new ideas, and some of our rounds are closed - those ones, those rounds are to allow our funded projects to kind of progress to, to the next stage.   So we've actually funded 23 projects so far and 100 distinct councils have actually worked collaboratively together on those projects - so we've, we've definitely shown via the fund that you know councils can actually come together and work on common challenges. And like to be completely frank, I, when, when I was still there, I was a bit dubious about this myself, ‘cause everyone knows it's hard - like yeah, everyone wants to kind of share and collaborate together but you know, everyone's got their own day jobs, it takes time, it takes you know resources to actually do collaborative working.    So with, with the fund, it actually managed to bring councils together that we wouldn't have necessarily work together before. So for example, when we were running the housing repairs project in Southwark, we had Lincoln, Gravesham and Lewisham working with Southwark. And we didn't have a relationship from a housing repair side before, but because that was a priority problem for those councils, we actually came together and it worked!    So I think it kind of demonstrates that when those problems are you know, unique but a priority to certain councils, councils will come together to, to solve those common challenges. So I think that's the great thing we've actually seen and proven is that, that is possible as long as we remove and de-risk a lot of those barriers to collaborative working. So obviously that's why we offer the funds so that you know councils with really stretched budgets are not using kind of like their own money and, and resources to actually solve those challenges. And some of these problems are really big for, for just one council to solve.    Lisa Jeffery: It's been super helpful I think to connect and to learn alongside with local authorities and going to visit them in their context through my visits, and I've seen the value in cross-organisational sort of connections and to join up services, people and places to, to enable the collaboration.     I think it's really helpful what the, what the Local Digital Declaration is doing to sort of highlight the good work that councils are doing, and finding those assets that we can build on together and it's also helping create that space for the people and organisations to create their own value within, within that space.    Laura Stevens: And this has sort of preempted my next bit of question, because I was gonna ask about what has it allowed to happen over the 2 years.   May-N Leow: Yeah. I guess that, that bit about demonstrating the willingness and the ambition in council. So when the Local Digital Fund was first announced and we'd launched the first round, we had 389 expressions of interest which was amazing, and the majority of the ideas were all really sound.   And I think that, that bit about, what Lisa was saying, on the amplifying the great work that is happening - most councils just don't have the time to kind of blog and write about the amazing things that they're doing, and a lot of the times they don't think it's amazing.    So I think the, the sharing and the learning from each other can't, can’t be underrated - it's, it's so important, whether they're funded projects or not funded projects, I think it's really important to get all these different approaches out so people can say, ‘yeah that works, that will work for me’, or ‘no I can actually just tweak this kind of approach’, so they're not starting from zero.    Laura Stevens: And I think one thing as well, in terms of not starting from zero, we've seen the increased use of common components across local government. Pete Herlihy, in last month's podcast, said we do have nearly as many service teams in local government using GOV.UK Notify as we do in central government. And so, and things like GOV.UK Pay as well, that local government able to pick up and use in their service. And Lisa, I know you've spoken at design calls about, about this as well.   Lisa Jeffery: Yeah, absolutely. I think local authorities, they're delivering complex services, there's, there’s limited resources and it's often done at pace in, in these super challenging times - so there's real potential for platforms to improve outcomes.    So for example, yeah Lisa Trickey, at Dorset Council, ran a great session with us the other week about how they are using GOV.UK Notify and Pay within their services. We announced GOV.UK Notify and Pay local authority pilots back in 2017, and then we opened a lot more alongside the launch of the Local Digital Declaration. And since then uptake of these platforms, especially Notify, has grown a lot as you say, in local government. And there does seem to be a universal willingness as May-N said, among Local Digital Declaration projects to be using government platforms - so that's just fantastic to see.    Laura Stevens: And you've teed that up very nicely, because we now have a clip from Lisa Trickey.    Lisa Trickey:  So I am Lisa Trickey. I was appointed last summer as the Service Manager for Digital Strategy and Design at Dorset Council. So we're a relatively new council. We were only formed on the 1 April last year, and prior to that I worked in the County Council and I was, I've always pretty much been involved in technology and digital work.    Laura Stevens:  So as you said Dorset is a new council, and in a blog post you wrote, by signing the Local Digital Declaration in the summer of 2018, “it was great timing for us because it aligned with our digital aspirations, work we were already doing and has enabled digital to be at the heart of the new Dorset Council that is being formed”. So can you talk a bit more about that, how it's helped you?    Lisa Trickey:  We, we were really keen. we wanted to create this brand new council you know taking the best of the bits of the work from previous councils but we wanted to create something new and different. But obviously on day one we didn't have all the policies and strategies that you would normally have in place for a new council. So the declaration for me in particular has been that mandate that I can reference, I can hook the work onto and I can talk about to the organisation.    We were able to create dedicated capacity for digital and change. So we've got that dedicated capacity to help the organisation to adopt digital but what was really important is we didn't want it to be seen as technology - we wanted it to be seen as something different to that. And from my perspective for digital to be a success it has to permeate through everything in the organisation.   But there is this really fine balance all the time between technology and then bringing it back to people and designing services. So the other thing that we've done is celebrated Services Week. So that's been a brilliant initiative from GDS because actually when we started to celebrate Services Week, which we've done for 2 years, we actually had a different set of people coming to the room and suddenly realised that actually digital isn't just about technology it's about yeah, doing things really differently and making sure that we meet the needs of our customers.    Laura Stevens:  What do you think by signing the Local Digital Declaration, it’s allowed Dorset to do that it would have been able to do otherwise?   Lisa Trickey: So I think in, in local government there are always lots of competing agendas, lots of competing priorities and unless you have legislation or some sort of government policy or guidance to hook your work on to it can be really hard to drive that work forward. Unless you've got a Chief Executive that really gets it you know and we're actually quite fortunate in Dorset that we do have a really fantastic Chief Executive when it comes to digital. But what the declaration does then is gives you a clear mandate to have those conversations, you can reference what is happening elsewhere and that's really helpful. And it's really clear it's really clear about what we should be doing and so you can start to think about the plans and priorities you know for your particular council as a result of that.    Laura Stevens: And I just wanted to ask about the common components because I know Dorset uses GOV.UK Pay for lots of your services including things like abandoned vehicle charges, highway licenses. And you also use GOV.UK Notify for other public sector services like blood online reporting tool and services to support young people. How in particular has Dorset used GOV.UK Notify?   Lisa Trickey:  So we've used Notify to both integrated with our systems and just using the backend of Notify to to send information. And we've used Notify for text messaging information, emailing but also probably the biggest through posting letters. So our waste partnership for example, have used it to notify residents of changes to rounds or recycling schemes. We've used it during COVID to respond to residents, keep residents informed and even a group of staff that don't have access to the IT network informed. It's so quick and easy to set up and in terms of trying to save money, using GOV Notify over the last year we've saved £55,000. Which I know is not massive in the scale of things but actually every penny counts at the moment for local government. So if you can quickly replace posting a letter with Notify or even better doing it by email or by text then that's that's really, really helpful.   We've also used it to think about how we improve our communication with customers and particularly around parents who have children with special educational needs and we had this concept of the educational health and care plan process takes 20 weeks so it's quite a long time. So how do we keep them better up-to-date? And that's changed the experience of that service completely for parents. It's improved the relationship between the service and parents so these components have a really you have a really big impact really positive impact for relatively, for relatively low time investment.   Laura Stevens:  So how has being part of the Local Digital Declaration community, how, how have you been able to connect with others? Have you spoken to other councils, perhaps in other areas of the country that you maybe might not connected with before?    Lisa Trickey:  Definitely. One of the best things for me that, that came out of the declaration is now we're able to connect with people through the Slack channel that has been put in place for this. And that's just brilliant - you can reach out to anybody and just ask ‘are you doing this?’, you know or ‘we're doing this’ and that's just been brilliant.    In particular we've been working with Barnsley on a Local Digital Funded project around income. So it's enabled us to get involved in that. But you know before it was just really difficult. You didn't know, especially I think being down in the south west, you know it's not like when you're in the London boroughs and you've got those connections quite close by.   So to, to be able to be part of that network and to be able to reach out to people. And I have to say it's one of the the best communities in terms of people are always so helpful to share information, prior to COVID, meet you, show you what they've been doing, you know it's absolutely fantastic to have that, that network, and to be able to use that.   Laura Stevens: And you mentioned COVID and I saw this month you tweeted: ‘the declaration and fund has been so positive for local government in raising the digital agenda locally, sharing and learning from each other across the country, it’s definitely positioned us better to respond to COVID-19’. Could you talk a bit more how the declaration has helped you?   Lisa Trickey:  Definitely. I mean because we've been in a place where we've been doing our own sort of low code and development, we’ve stood up over 10 online services. They've taken over 20,000 sort of applications so, we were able to move at pace for those things which was, which was really helpful.   In terms of the department, MHCLG, having the Friday calls and you know quickly putting those in place so we were able to connect into those and hear what other people were doing. And you know learn from others continually so they were brilliant - you didn’t feel so alone in what you were doing. And we, you, what we often find in the world of digital we find that information then you can share across the rest of the organisation and push into different areas so that's really helpful.    Laura Stevens:  Part of the declaration is committing to a project and Dorset's was about developing the digital skills with Dorset Council Partnership. I don't if you could tell me a bit more about that?   Lisa Trickey:  Yeah, so we've done, so, so our declaration project was around digital skills and we've come at that from sort of multiple different angles and actually we've just been nominated in Digital Leaders for it so quite excited about that.     So one of the strands is around developing champions within the community. So we have about 75 digital champions within the community, helping with that digital inclusion gap that we see. And when COVID hit that was, and that enabled us to be in a position where we could move that offer into a digital hotline and people were able to ring and get that support. So people who'd never even thought about going online pre-COVID suddenly were interested in order to keep in contact with their families. So we've had over 220 calls to that and I think that's just that will remain as a lasting legacy I think of COVID and will continue to grow.   Laura Stevens:  Well congratulations. I wish you luck with all the nominations.   And so if there's somebody from a council or local government who's listening, and they maybe haven't signed it, is there anything you'd like to say to sort of, to them about why or how it's helped you or they're like address anything you think they might be concerned about?    Lisa Trickey:  I, I get quite a lot of contact about people, how you get started? And I think just being part of that bigger network, hearing what other people are doing, learning you know from people like Hackney are, are doing fantastic work - I might not have had sight of that before this. So you know, having that ability to learn from others. And you know I hope we get to a point with the Local Digital Fund alpha projects that, you know they will be able to be shared and you will be able to take those and you know implement them here in Dorset.   You know what the declaration has done is just, it's opened up those networks. You can see what other people are doing. When you're starting out on digital in a local authority, quite often you're the only one trying to champion the cause and having people that you can talk to and see, actually the end, you know the end, well not necessarily the end results, but there's, there's good progress being made and it’s worth, it's worth the effort - that's really helpful. It kind of keeps you going and until you can build that coalition inside your own organisation to help with that messaging, those networks are really valuable.   May-N Leow: I think for me that, what, what Lisa says right at the end about that you're not alone. Certainly again, in a similar kind of feelings when you're, you’re in a council and you're thinking: ‘am I just a mad digital person in the entire council?’ So that definitely resonates with me when I was working in council, is like I said, being a part of that community, being able to say here's what good looks like and here's what we should be doing, is, is so powerful. So it's great to hear that you know, we're supporting Lisa in that kind of way and also giving her a place to call home - that she's, she's not the odd one out, there's lots of people in this space and, and everyone's willing to kind of share and help each other out - so that was really heartwarming for me.   Lisa Jeffery: Yeah. I think it just really struck me that, that local authorities are on the frontline of public service provision, and really helping people to do the things that they need to do within their communities and delivering such a lot, really.   I thought the, the comments around leadership, we're really interesting and getting that buy-in. And the focus on user-centered design as well, is really interesting.   I think that's kind of opened up - when we, when we held the Local, the first Local #GovDesign Day as well, in partnership with Birmingham City Council as well, that's kind of something that's kind of opened up as a, as, as, as something that's kind of come out of us all working together I think, with MHCLG - and that was something the user-centered design community did and that was attended by around 200 people.   Laura Stevens: Also part of the Digital Declaration is building digital capability, we’re now going to hear from Paul Fleming, who’s organisation has gone on GDS Academy training.   Paul Fleming: So, so my name is Paul Fleming. I’m the Director of Digital and Business Change in Blackburn with Darwen Council, which is a unitary authority in the north west of England.   Laura Stevens: And am I right in saying you've been at the council for about 2 years now? And it's been quite a busy time for the digital team over that period - there's a new digital directorate that’s been formed, and you’ve had a new website published.   Paul Fleming: Yeah it's been a bit of a rollercoaster couple of years. So I came over from the NHS, I'd, I’d worked sort of locally and nationally in the NHS. And decided to make the leap into local government and that was, that was - I think that’s 2 years this week. So it's been a really exciting couple of years.  It was a new directorate that was formed, quite a large team - just under 150 staff.  And it was really the dawn of a new era with, with digital and, and trying to take things further for our local population.   Laura Stevens: And you signed the Local Digital Declaration in February 2019, how has it helped you?   Paul Fleming: It’s helped us in many ways I think.    So first of all, it was a real visible commitment for us, signing the declaration. It was something that was really exciting for me. I've always been around collaboration, around learning. And I think it, it provided this, this brilliant framework for us. But, but first and foremost, it was a visible commitment for us - we, we got our exec member - our, our elected member - you know stood up in front of the press with me, talking about, about that locally. It was a sign to, to the public - it was a real sign to our organisation of, of a path of travel for us.   And it really it gave us a framework from, from there on in that I've been able to, to work with my teams and wider teams on to, to... I suppose beyond that create, create a bit of a culture with the organisation. I think you know, a lot of that would have been achievable without, without a sort of national and local collaboration like, like the declaration, but it, it definitely helped me. It definitely legitimised a lot of the thinking that we were doing.    And I suppose since then what, what it's opened up - you know some of the learning and some of the collaboration has definitely been able to take us, enabled us to go further than what we could have done I think, without it.   Laura Stevens: And you mentioned there about the collaboration and learning. Could you give me some examples of that?    Paul Fleming: Yeah, I think one of the major things the declaration has brought is the blogs, to me. I find this really interesting that there’s this open way of working. As a council, we launched our blog - I had my eye on many of the blogs, like learning from others, and, and I just found, found them so open and, and, and so much learning in there, that was a really refreshing change for me.    I think you know wider than that, collaborating on bids has been interesting. We've not, I don't think we've, we've been successful with a bid yet through, through the sort of collaborative funding over the last whatever, 18 months it's been. But what we have got from working on those bids is collaborating with others. So I know we were working with Lincolnshire Council around waste and we've talked to a number of others, Leeds Council amongst other local authorities.    I think important for me - I came from a different sector, a different part the public sector in the NHS, and it's helped me speed up those connections with, with people you know, through social media off the back of the blogs, off the back of the collaborations and, and I just think that would have took me a longer time, it would have took me more, more than this couple of years to really build some decent conversations up with people.   Laura Stevens: You’ve preempted my, my next question which was, if you, ‘cause you're talking there about how the Local Digital Declaration like really massively sped up things for you. I was gonna ask if you hadn't signed it, what do you think would have been different?   Paul Fleming: I think the pace of change might, might have been different, I think it would have been slower. And maybe you know, if I hadn't have signed it, I'd have been looking from the outside in. So I would have been picking up all of this but without being a signatory, and we wouldn't have then made that commitment to the wider cause and that's important.   And since signing the declaration and picking up all those different connections, I just have a much better network. And it's really important that I commit to that network and, and you know our counsellors are full signatory to that, so that I, I share that learning so other people don't go through maybe the pain I went through before in, in trying work some of these things out. So, so really really progress and transformation can work faster by this sort of you know, super learning network that, that is built up.   And you know when I looked into everything, there was some really good networks going on. And, and this is kind of, this brings together a bit of, a bit of a family of, of those networks. So it just opened, opened up my eyes to the sector, opened up a lot of connections, and yeah, definitely, definitely speeded up both pace for me, and hopefully pace for others learning from us now.   Laura Stevens: Yeah for sure. I think the community aspect of it is something, that when I've been researching, has come up a lot. So what shared challenges do councils have?   Paul Fleming: We're all trying to do the same things - we've got the same challenges, the same requirements for people. And it's up to us then to land those solutions, working with people locally, co-designing what we're doing to get that right for people. And the more we share those designs and those approaches, I think the faster we can get to the right conversation with, with people and residents locally.    We've shared challenges around, certainly COVID-19 and the pandemic and the challenges that’s thrown up. Massive amount of collaboration and good open working on that, that’s helped us. I think the website, when we released the website last year, we went open source and was doing a lot of learning from others on that.    Laura Stevens: And talking about the coronavirus response, and that is a challenge faced by everybody, I was reading a blog post you’d written where you said: ‘last summer we had undergone Government Digital Service training in Agile ways of working including rapid development of solutions, multidisciplinary development and user research - and we’re using this learning in dealing with the pandemic’.    And this learning was provided through the digital declaration, wasn’t it?    Paul Fleming: It was yeah. I mean this has been, this has been, I don't know if it's luck - it's definitely part design, part luck at around timing. But we, we went through the GDS Agile teams training last summer, summer 2019. That, that was perfect timing going into such a huge crisis because everything we've learned and, and, and expanded on since then, has, has been used. And I don't think we would have handle this pandemic as well without that training.    We, we really went on a journey after doing the agile teams training. A lot of the team started to get really interested in the agenda obviously, and get interested in, in the individual lines of learning you know, customer research or, or service design or, or other sections. So that started to break out, we developed our own internal learning track off the back of that, and we've expanded that across the council. And so we started with my directorate and probably, probably trained 100 people in the directorate on, on the GDS team’s approach, Agile teams approach.    But then we started to break that out into different departments. So we had people from social care, we had people from environmental health, we had people from environment and waste - all doing the same sort of training that we had through, through GDS. So it, I can't, I can't stress how valuable that, that has been going through that. And the fact that it was you know, it was complimentary, it was free training for us at that time through signing the declaration, was just, was just great and massive for us. I don't know if we could have invested as much as we did. So, so we created this movement off the back of that. And you know, it's part declaration, but the big part of signing up was, was, was the input we got from the training.    And the movement kind of started, the first thing we did, the first agile project we did was to redesign the space that the digital team worked in. And this engaged the whole team, they ran it on sprints, they ran it with kanbans in this one corner of the office that, that they had, you know. So the office then you know, a couple of months later looked completely different. I think that then grew, other people saw that, HR then saw that and they started looking at the, the department and changing their layouts, and this was all based on the learning that we picked up in those courses from, from GDS through the declaration.    So yeah I can't stress how important it's been. It’s, it's kind of really changed the game culturally for us, and importantly it's give us those strong methods, that methodology, because you do need that, you do need that real learning and those real strong methods and approaches to create something good.   Laura Stevens: So it seems like there's been a big ripple effect from it?   Paul Fleming: Yeah, and you know that's exactly what we want. We want, we want a movement, we want a movement around digital and, and design and Agile and the best things for our residents, and, and you know these approaches help us, help us to achieve that.   So, so it, it has created a ripple effect, and it's really heartening to see people taking on board the, the thinking. I see things now just happening in the organisation that you know, I suppose many, many years ago you, you would have controlled that from an IT section and it would have gone a lot slower, and people would have been you know against IT sometimes, the technology teams for slowing things down. We, we've now created a movement where things, things are happening.    Laura Stevens: It's clear this has had a big effect in your organisation. And I guess is there one thing you'd say to somebody who was looking to sign up to the Local Digital Declaration?   Paul Fleming: So I-I think it's multifaceted, I don't think I could say one thing why you should. You know if I was to say one thing, it would be you know come and join, join this collaboration. but really it's multifaceted in, in the fact that, you need to commit - you need to make a visible commitment. And I think you know, as, as a local authority, you’re getting the buy-in from the politicians, ‘cause really you can't sign that declaration without getting executive membership buy-in to that. And by getting that, you're raising the profile of digital. So, so I think commitment, visible commitment and political commitment is important.   And then the other things are, and I think 2 more things - one is the framework and the skills you get out of it. And then the third, third part would be around the learning and the collaboration. And I've not even talked, I suppose when I first looked at it you know, I saw there was opportunities around funding. And, and when I was talking to politicians, I said you know if, if we sign this declaration, there is training, there is funding available, it opens up more doors. But the funding has, has not been; I mean we, we’ve not been successful in the funding rounds, but, but that hasn't mattered. We've actually got more out of those other aspects than you know, I can't put a price on some of that stuff because it's going to be taking hundreds of thousands of pounds off our cost lines by working in this way.    So yeah I suppose my, my eyes have been opened the more I've been part of, of what, what the declaration has opened up really is a whole new world for us.   Laura Stevens: So, what about next things you’d like to see the declaration offering?   Paul Fleming: Yeah, I think something I-I kind of called out very early on around, because I come from the NHS and they had like an academy for basically the CIOs [Chief Information Officers] that would go through you know a training, and that was basically like looking at the leadership issues we’ve gotten digital in the NHS. So I came out of that world and when I came into the council, I was looking for the equivalent. And I know the GDS Academy does certain things. I think the, the Digital Declaration could probably go a step further and look at like how we develop that leadership a little bit more in depth. I think that would be an area I’d be really interested in.    But what I did think was can we post more people out, can we either have short secondments, can we expose people. I would love to expose some of my people to GDS teams, and you know some of these central team were, I think you know sometimes you're at the really sharp end. So I think more, taking that collaboration a step further and actually exposing people - so whether that's across different local authorities, whether that's working between central and local. I think that's, that's an area I'd love to see developed up. You know I'd love to personally sit in another team for a few days and see how things work and invite others to come in and do the same in our team, and, and you know ditto for all, all of my staff who have got the interest on, on that side.   May-N Leow: Just fantastic to hear from, from Paul and the feedback that he's had in his council. It kind of mirrors the experience I had in Southwark as well as that. You know when you're initially trying to sell why you should sign the Declaration, you obviously use the funding and the free training as that kind of carrot to get your senior management and politicians interested, but then seeing the wider benefits of like the, the results of the training as well as that kind of organisational transformation and that ingraining of digital and user-centeredness approach is, is always fantastic to, to hear. And Paul's like a great example to showcase what, what is possible when you've got that someone who believes that and drives it and use the declaration, as well as all the benefits, to kind of spearhead the movement in his council. So I think that, that again, stuck with me.    And other, in terms of training, obviously it’s partner-partnership with GDS Academy. We've put through 1,183 Council Officers and leaders to date, on free training. And yeah, we've just had amazing feedback in response on, on that - especially the Agile for Teams, that kind Paul references. And because we go to the councils when we run that training - I think that's the great thing about that particular course, where it's in the council, it's with other people in your council rather than you in isolation doing that training.    So because of COVID-19, a lot of our training is on pause at the moment. But we are going to be looking with GDS Academy to start the training back up again. Obviously following government regulations.   Lisa Jeffery: Yeah,I mean wow, what, what, what a great story of, of change and, and overcoming challenges.   I really like how Paul is involving everyone on, on this journey and including people, and thinking about the enablers to change, even down to redesigning the space in which people work. So yeah, there was, as May-N said, there's MHCLG and GDS Academy run, run training to build this capability. And courses, some of them were delivered at the time at the GDS Academy venues, and then the Agile for Teams was delivered at the local authorities’s own location, and it kind of enables the teams to get this really hands-on experience about how to apply Agile methodologies within their own environment, within their own context. And I thought it was great how Paul's kind of really embedded the learning that he took from the, from the training and he's embedded it and really been able to, to use it.    Laura Stevens: Paul spoke about how the training has helped his organisation during coronavirus. And how else has the declaration helping during this pandemic?   May-N Leow: Yeah. So initially at the beginning of COVID, we had weekly calls specifically around the crisis response that local authorities are facing obviously, on the sharp end of the stick on supporting the communities.    And then now we're kind of moving to bi-weekly calls on that kind of phase recovery, as again councils start to kind of think of reopening services like libraries, community centres. But as well as that, that blend of face-to-face interaction versus remote interaction.    And there's a real willingness and thing of momentum now from not, to not go back to the way it was. So councils have seen that you know we can do things fast, we can share data, we can do things securely, but do it in a way that actually meets resident needs. So I think there's a real ambition and a real, the right time really to kind of look at all organisational transformation and seeing how digital can actually make service delivery even better and get in, engage more, more residents.    And so we’re, we're also looking at launching a special COVID round, which hopefully will be live once this podcast goes out, so that's in recognition of all that you know, the moving from crisis response now to phase recovery. So again, councils are coming up with similar challenges that we would like to help support councils with.   Laura Stevens: And sort of on that, if somebody is listening from local government, how do they get in touch, how do they stay connected, how do they sign up to the declaration?   Lisa Jeffery: Now I just say, the Slack channels are absolutely fantastic, and the Local Digital Community’s brilliant. And you've got GDS folks on there from all different teams wanting to support you, and answer any questions about any of the kind of support wrap that we had around the Local Digital Declaration, whether that's common platforms, GDS Academy training, we kind of raised a bit of awareness around the Digital Marketplace or the Crown Commercial Service and you know, the Service Standards.    May-N Leow: Sure, so our website, localdigital.gov.uk, has all the information on how to sign up as a signatory. You can also follow us on Twitter at LDgovUK, and we're all there. And yeah by all means, DM directly to us or to the channel, and we'd love to hear from you.   And because we're obviously coming up to our 2 year anniversary in July, not only the podcast, which again thank you for the opportunity to speak about the declaration, we're going to be launching a, a, a whole campaign in celebration, which is going to last a month. So there's going to be lots of activities that will amplify all the amazing work that the local councils are doing at the moment, but also kind of get people to think about how, what does it means to kind of recommit to the declaration, to like properly bring in more of the principles of the declaration, and what, what’s that kind of journey that councils, not just Lisa and Paul, but other people have had.    So we'll be showcasing a lot of those great stories more as well.   Laura Stevens:  So thank you both so much for coming on the podcast today, it's been great having you. And you can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms, and the transcripts are available on PodBean.    May-N Leow: Thanks Lisa and Laura. It’s been good fun.   Lisa Jeffery: Thanks very much. It’s been brilliant. Thank you.

Better use of data is key to more effective government. Across government, teams are doing fascinating work with data. But those projects don’t get the attention they deserve. At this event, the eleventh in our series, our speakers presented their data projects in an exciting, quickfire format. Each set of speakers had eight minutes, followed by eight minutes of questions from the audience. In June we heard from: Sean O'Callaghan, Architect and Design Thinking Coach, SAP, on infant mortality in Indiana – data driven government in action. Rachel Tsang, Head of Policy and Strategy, and Catriona Fraser, Policy and Strategy Lead, GOV.UK, on responding to C-19 and how this has accelerated GOV.UK's strategy to develop a more personalised offering for our user Andy Helliwell, Executive Director, Government Shared Services, Cabinet Office, on shared services' critical role before, during and after COVID-19. Natalie Record, Digital Housing and Planning Policy Lead at MHCLG, on how data can transform housing and planning. This event was chaired by Gavin Freeguard, Programme Director and Head of Data and Transparency at the Institute for Government. We would like to thank SAP for supporting this event.

In this first episode of 'Barton Willmore Uncut. In Conversation'. Partners Iain Painting and Robin Shepherd are 'finding a way with' Chris Cobbold of Wessex Economics, previously the head of DTZ's residential team and an MHCLG expert advisor, to discuss our and wider recent proclamations about the depth and significance of this crisis on the housing market. Highlights from the podcast include:Chris's views on the depth of this economic downturn Debate on the source of a 300k housing completions target The role for Homes England and Local Authorities in de-risking supplyThe role for government in supporting demandInfrastructure or housebuilding – Does the latter provide a better government investment opportunity?

The government collects and publishes a lot of data as official statistics, but currently citizens, businesses and government itself are not taking full advantage of that. Darren and Bill from Swirrl will report on the Connected Open Government Statistics (COGS) project, seeking to make ambitious changes in the way that statistics are disseminated and used. The established approach to stats releases, of PDF commentary and accompanying spreadsheet tables is part of the picture, but not enough in this age of data, the web and automation. That means big changes to technology choices and more importantly to culture, data governance and mindset. About the speakers Bill Roberts is CEO of Swirrl, a company specialising in software for government organisations to publish their data in standards-based machine-readable ways. As well as providing the software platform for statistics.gov.scot, Swirrl works with the Office for National Statistics, Defra, MHCLG, the Scottish Government and others on ensuring open government data can have the maximum positive impact. Swirrl is a member of the W3C. Darren Barnes has worked in ONS for nearly 30 years and much of this time has been spent in transformational roles. Over the last 12 months his focus has been on what the Government Statistical Service landscape looks like and how we can improve the situation for both statistical producers and users alike.

Robert Jenrick set out on 12 March 2020 proposals “to bring Britain's planning system into the 21st century as part of plans to get the country building”. Within a week it was announced that schools were closing and local authority staff, including planning officers, have been dealing with a public health emergency. Sam Stafford is joined in this episode by Jonathan Easton, Barrister at Kings Chambers; Anna Rose, Head of the Planning Advisory Service at the Local Government Association; and Stefan Webb, Place Director at FutureGov to discuss the impact of Coronavirus on the planning system. Twitter handles: @samuel_stafford, @jonnye47, @EPlanna and @Stef_W. Some links: Planning Inspectorate Guidance: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/coronavirus-covid-19-planning-inspectorate-guidance ADSO and LLG letter to MHCLG on decision-making and democracy: https://www.adso.co.uk/letter-to-sos-covid-19-implications-for-local-authority-governance/ Greater Flexibility For Planning Permissions: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/5997/1729942.pdf The Landmark Chambers paper: https://cached.offlinehbpl.hbpl.co.uk/NewsAttachments/RLP/LandmarkSOSletter.pdf Simon Ricketts' Blog: https://simonicity.com/2020/03/21/what-to-do/ The Planning Advisory Service's resource: https://local.gov.uk/pas/pas-topics/coronavirus The RTPI survey to inform discussions with Governments across the UK and Ireland: https://r1.dotmailer-surveys.com/b43esd27-db4kml95

On this week's Civil Service World Podcast, the last of the series, Jess and Suzannah are discussing changes to diversity and inclusion within the civil service, and how that's changed and challenged preconceptions about who civil servants are. For the conversation, they're joined by Charlotte Dring, co-founder of the Cross-Government Social Mobility Network, and Emran Mian, Director General, Decentralisation and Growth at MHCLG. Hosted by Jess Bowie and Suzannah Brecknell. With Charlotte Dring and Emran Mian. Produced and edited by Nick Hilton for Podot. Visit www.civilserviceworld.com/ for more!

Fire Engineer Anthony Robson of Frankham helps us interpret the recent Guidance Notes issued since Grenfell.

Back in December 2017, Government announced it would tackle unfair practices in the leasehold market by introducing new legislation to prohibit new residential long leases from being granted on houses, and to restrict ground rents in newly-established leases to a nominal amount. In this podcast, we take a look at MHCLG’s recently published response to […]

Engineering Success interview Mark Farmer the Founding Director and CEO of Cast. Cast is a Real Estate and Construction Consultancy business with a strong heritage within the UK property development and investment sector. Mark has 30 years experience in construction and real estate and is a recognised international commentator on a variety of industry and policy related issues. Mark is a member of the Mayor of London's Construction Skills Advisory Group, a Board Member for the Construction Scotland Innovation Centre, a Co-Chair of Construction Excellence, a Vice Chair of the ULI UK Residential Council, A Trustee of the MOBIE educational charity and is an Honorary Professor at The University of Salford's School of Built Environment. Mark authored the 'Farmer Review', an influential 2016 independent government review of the UK's construction labour model entitled 'Modernise or Die'. He is a member of the Construction Innovation Hub Industry Board and Chairs the MHCLG joint industry working group tasked with enabling greater use of Modern Methods of Construction in the residential sector.

A new Housing Complaints Resolution Service has been announced in January for the entire housing market and for the first time ever, private landlords will be legally required to join a housing redress scheme. Click here to view the MHCLG release: Private landlords including providers of purpose-built student housing and park home sites will be legally required to become members of a redress scheme – with a fine of up to £5,000 if they fail to do so. James Brokenshire, Communities Secretary, has announced an overhaul of the ‘broken housing complaints system’ as they put it with plans for a new housing complaints service for the entire housing market ensuring both homeowners and tenants know where to go when things go wrong. Dissatisfied homeowners and tenants will have simple and quick access to help when things go wrong, thanks to new plans announced today (24 January 2019) by Communities Secretary Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP. From broken boilers to cracks in the wall, the new Housing Complaints Resolution Service will potentially help millions by providing a straight-forward way of getting help when faced with unresolved disputes about problems with their home – such as repairs and maintenance. Unlike other sectors, such as financial services, the housing market has several different complaints bodies, with homeowners and tenants having to navigate their way through a complicated and bureaucratic system just to work out where to register a grievance. Establishing a single housing complaints service for all residents – no matter whether they rent or own their home – will prevent people from battling with their landlord or builder to resolve issues on their own and make it easier to claim compensation where it’s owed. Communities Secretary Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, said: “Creating a housing market that works for everyone isn’t just about building homes – it’s about ensuring people can get the help they need when something goes wrong. “But all too often the process can be confusing and overly bureaucratic, leaving many homeowners and tenants feeling like there is nowhere to go in the event of problems with their home. “The proposals I have announced will help ensure all residents are able to access help when they need it, so disputes can be resolved faster, and people can get compensation where it’s owed.” Currently, the housing complaints system is confusing – there are multiple complaint bodies covering the housing market, and membership of redress schemes is compulsory for some tenures but not others. For example, in the private rented sector, there is currently no obligation for landlords to register with a complaints system – leaving thousands of renters without any course for redress. To combat this, the Communities Secretary has announced that private landlords will be legally required to become members of a redress scheme – with a fine of up to £5,000 if they fail to do so. And to protect the interests of home-owners who buy new build homes, government has also reiterated its commitment to establishing a New Homes Ombudsman which will champion home buyers, protect their interests and hold developers to account. Legislation will be brought forward at the earliest possible opportunity to require all new developers to belong to the Ombudsman – giving homebuyers the confidence that when they get the keys to a new home they are getting the quality of build they expect. Developers will also have to belong to the new body by 2021 if they wish to participate in the government’s landmark Help to Buy scheme. FREEHOLDERS TOO Other measures alongside this include requiring all freeholders to join a redress scheme regardless of...

Councils are facing unprecedented financial pressure and core services are creaking. How did we get here and what needs to happen? In this week’s bumper episode we speak to council leaders, the LGA, SOLACE and experts from the NAO, IFS and CfPS about their reaction to the findings of LGiU’s State of Local Government Finance survey. A fascinating exploration of how councils across the country are dealing with ongoing budget cuts, the impact on their residents and the path to a sustainable funding model. We cover everything from tax devolution to commercialisation, how to make business rates and council tax fit for purpose to the problems with getting our message out to residents and Government. Essential listening for anyone who wants to see local government thrive in the future. Guests: Cllr Michelle Lowe, Deputy Leader of Sevenoaks District Council (0:10:30) Cllr Roger Lawrence, Leader of City of Wolverhampton Council (0:14.52) Cllr Paul Carter, Leader of Kent County Council & Chair of the County Councils Network (0:17:31) Cllr Doina Cornell, Leader of Stroud District Council (0:19:48) Cllr Abdul Jabbar, Deputy Leader of Oldham Council (0:23:05) Aileen Murphie, Director of MHCLG & Local Government Value for Money at National Audit Office (0:31:45) Piali Das Gupta, Director of Policy at SOLACE (Society of Local Authority Chief Executives) (0:53:37) David Phillips, Associate Director leading on Local Government Finance at the Institute of Fiscal Studies (0:57:10) Jacqui McKinlay, Chief Executive of the CfPS (Centre for Public Scrutiny)(1:09:00) Cllr Richard Watts, Leader of Islington Council & Chair of the LGA Resources Board (1:14:37) Hosted by Jennifer Glover and Jonathan Carr-West, with interviews by Ingrid Koehler.

Observers surprised that some of the projects selected for funding under the programme – eg managing missed bins, providing taxi licensing services or dealing with FoI requests - are not at the forefront of innovation are missing a key point. The Fund is not about blue sky innovation, but rather about ‘fixing the plumbing' of everyday services by making it easy for all councils to replicate a good digital solution that has been proven elsewhere. Take missed bins. Many councils have worked out good solutions for the particular context, collection practice and supplier set up that operates in their patch. But such solutions cannot easily be replicated elsewhere because typically they won't integrate easily with back office systems and processes operated by other authorities and the technologies used by their contractors.  Local Digital Funding is for creating, testing and documenting solutions in such a way as they can be easily plugged in anywhere, rather than being reinvented endlessly to accommodate 300+ different local set ups.    

The days when an SME would have to sacrifice up to 65 (non-earning) hours to pitch for a government contract are, if not over, then at least coming to an end, insists Emilia Cedeno, who is running the Digital Outcomes and Specialists (DOS) framework for government procurement agency the Crown Commercial Service. In this video she describes the measures CCS is taking as it works towards a target of getting 33% of government business awarded to SMEs. Among these are a much shorter, more simple, public sector contract, written in plain English; work with government (including local government) buyers to improve briefs and to be clearer about budgets; and encouragement of ‘pre-tender engagement' to open up contracts to not-just-the-usual-suspects. Poss Apostolou, who has recently joined the private sector from GDS, describes the involvement of GDS in the moves to make procurement more SME-friendly and also the impact of MHCLG's ‘Local Digital Declaration' which councils must sign up to in order to pitch for funding for local digital projects. Workshops with local authorities, which among other things will promote the procurement of digital components as a means of breaking up traditional, all-encompassing council service contracts, are being rolled out as part of the campaign.

On 24 September the Ministry for Housing, Communities & Local Government launched its £7.5m Local Digital Fund via a post on the Local Digital Collaboration Unit's blog by Minister Rishi Sunak. In this video, MHCLG's Chief Digital Officer Paul Malty describes the Fund as part of a wider initiative that is also asking local councils to sign up to a 'Digital Declaration' that, if its princlples are followed, will help break dependence on inflexible technology, allow adoption of the best digital ways of working, and ultimately help authorities excellent local services for less. Also part of the programme is a commitment to train around 1000 local government staff in digital skills. Emma Collingridge, who spent 15 years on digital transformation at Stockport Council until moving to a role in central government in August, describes how innovative councils like Stockport might use the Fund to enable them to create reusable tools and products that will help service teams in other authorities redesign their services to Declaration standards. Timing is tight. Councils interested in funding must sign up to the Local Digital Declaration and put in an expression of interest by 5 October.  MHCLG's Local Digital Team will evaluate expressions of interest and cluster applications where similar projects are proposed to encourage collaboration on common issues. Successful 'expressions of interest' will be able to apply for funding between 15 October and 18 November, and decisions will be announced on 3 December. The Local Digital Team is using the local digital peer network LocalGov Digital's Slack as a community base. Interested parties need to become a member and join the #mhclg-digital Slack channel to ask questions and identify others to join up with. CLGdotTV has also seen calls for collaboration by individuals preparing expressions of interest going out through Twitter and other social media channels. Twitter hashtags #localdigital and #localgovdigital are good hashtags for discovering these.

This week I talk to Jane Ballantyne about her research into fire safety within high rise buildings and her reaction to the findings of the enquiry into the disaster at Grenfell.   We also talk about what you can do as a Landlord / Investor / Surveyor to prevent such atrocities from occurring in your building.   This conversation is a necessity. No one should be dying as a result of fires in buildings. It's time to put this right. Useful links: www.ncrealestate.co.uk Property Investment Mastery Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/propertyinvestmentmastery/  This is the link to the MHCLG site – Building Safety Programme – which gives good advice for building owners post Grenfell - https://www.gov.uk/guidance/building-safety-programme UCEM – www.ucem.ac.uk