Hackney are leading a cohort of councils (Woking, Redbridge, Greenwich, Kingston & Sutton and Adur & Worthing) with a DLUHC Local Digital Fund award to explore the procurement of technology for housing services to identify opportunities to ensure technology meets the needs of Local Authorities and residents. 

Find out more

The DLUHC Local Digital Programme ran a six week pre-discovery to look at how central government can influence the adoption of standards in Local Authorities. The research explored past precedents where DLUHC or other central government agencies have tried to scale standards across the local government sector (or other distributed organisations) to understand what is most likely to gain traction and change behaviour. The work proposed an adaptable model of principles and tactics that could be used to build, promote and maintain standards flexibly depending on the scenario at hand. 

See the slides from the show and tell here.

This project aimed to understand the market for housing services technology in the UK and whether it is working for social housing providers. We explored challenges faced by housing providers, technology available in the market, and investigated why many housing providers feel that they experience "vendor lock-in" and are unable to move technology supplier. This work highlighted key barriers to change and identified potential interventions that could improve market competition and break the cycle of poor technology decisions. 

See the final report here. 

This project explored how feasible if would be to reuse open source components to replace existing housing management systems in the majority of local authorities. It concluded that there are neither enough open source components available nor enough local authorities with the technical skills to implement them. 

See the final report here.