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.