The Local Digital team at the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities has identified a series of challenges for the Futures Councils programme.
It has set them out as six problem statements, on which it wants to gather feedback from English local authorities.
Future Councils, launched in October of last year, is aimed at understanding the barriers that councils face in making their organisations more modern and resilient. It is currently running a selection of six-month pilot projects on various themes related to digital services.
Local Digital said the problem statements are to:
- define priorities and where to focus across an array of critical council services;
- make strong cases for investment and overcome cultural barriers and risks;
- fund innovation in a way that makes it proactive rather than reactive;
- overcome working in siloes, including digital, to support council-wide collaboration;
- close the gap in skills to support digital transformation;
- and incentivise the market to support effective service delivery in an ever-changing landscape.
“We are working through these challenges by conducting experiments and co-creating case studies with the pilot cohort, to test internally and with the wider sector,” the team said in a blogpost.
It is taking feedback online and planning to stage a series of roundtable events on the issues, open to anyone working in digital and cyber roles and strategic leaders in councils, in late September and early October.
