The Local Digital team in Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) has set out a three-year plan to promote local authorities’ take-up of the Open Referral UK data standard.
It has also allocated an initial fund of £600,000 and is setting up a cross-government advisory group to support the effort.
The Open Referral UK (ORUK) standard has been developed with support from Local Digital to make it easier to organise data on community services in a common way so the bodies holding directories can communicate with each other and share data in real time.
Local Digital said ORUK, the development of which began in 2019, has recently been through a beta phase and endorsed by the Cabinet Office’s Data Standards Authority, and that it is now looking to speed up its adoption in local government.
It said in a blogpost that it commissioned digital transformation company TPXimpact to analyse the work to date. The company has produced a report that identifies a number of barriers, including a lack of awareness in local authorities, that the benefits are seen as long term and non-cashable when councils are seeking cuts, and there is an inconsistent understanding of the benefits.
Support plans
This has prompted Local Digital to set up the ORUK advisory group, commit to producing materials such as ‘how to’ guides and business cases for adoption, test adoption strategies and design a playbook for local authorities.
Local Digital added that all this can help councils to streamline administrative processes and the work of frontline staff in finding and recommending services to the public.
According to the ORUK website, so far it has been adopted by 13 organisations, eight are in the process of doing so and another eight are considering the move.
Benefits example
Nick Parker from the Leeds City Digital Partnerships Team provided an example of the benefits of the standard.
“We no longer needed to negotiate the alignment of many different data structures owned by different directories,” he said. “This saved us time and money. There was greater collaboration among stakeholders when discussing the best ways to tag and update a record.
“Additionally, It has supported the ability for statutory organisations and a number of voluntary sector organisations in Leeds to build or rebuild their websites to include content from the Leeds Online Open Platform. This is a platform for service directories to pull data from.”
Speaking at UKAuthority’s Powering Digital Public Services conference this week, DLUHC’s deputy director for digital services Katy Armstrong said the funding granted for ORUK provides an example of the new approach to financial support taken by Local Digital. It has said there are no plans for new allocations through the Local Digital Fund but that it will continue to provide grants to local government.
