Case studies

This programme aims to tackle holiday hunger, isolation, and inactivity during the school holidays. It focuses on children aged 5 to 11 years old who are eligible for free school meals. Children are referred to the programme by their schools and other agencies. This case study is part of the achieving efficiencies section of our online culture hub.

Following an extended period of change and significant service disruption due to poor contractor performance, a review of the council’s waste team was undertaken engaging an expert consultant to help determine the future shape and direction of the service.

This project has effectively built upon its well-established digital housing offer through this project. The team have implemented further resource alleviating solutions into the service while at the same time consolidating back office services under a unitarisation programme of 4 local districts with the county council.

The project team are awaiting delivery of the products from the supplier as migration to the new system and user acceptance testing is completed and verified for the Go-live launch.

This project has enabled a successful channel shift to deliver a flexible service 24/7/365. This delivers a more convenient option to alleviate traffic away from traditional housing options services. The model offers one main consolidated referral route giving customers an efficient and effective way to engage with their local authority.

This project has had to pivot products from one back office system to a new overhauled alternative. This refocused approach provided the team with a solid foundation of experience and resource that will now be embedded in the change programme of the housing IT system. The department will now benefit from the work carried out by the team as the housing system innovates over the upcoming year.

In January 2017 and from September 2019, Islington Council have partnered with social enterprise Behaviour Change to pilot innovative new signage, funded by Mars Wrigley, to help tackle the issue of littered gum in known hotspots such as shopping centres, train stations and transport hubs. The signs are simple and scalable and have been proven to be twice as effective as clean-up alone.

As councils were forced to work remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, central government gave councils the ability to host formal council meetings fully remote. This has unlocked a new landscape for councils to engage with citizens and ensure decision making continues unhindered.

Warwick District Council first broadcast a live Committee meeting on 7 May 2020. Having tested various products, we decided to use Microsoft Teams with live broadcast via YouTube.

With a series of key meetings due just as lockdown came into place, we moved quickly to prepare for virtual meetings without quite knowing what they would - or should - look like. As the council already uses the Google Suite of products for day-to-day working, we adopted Google Meet as our platform for virtual meetings, offered a Google Chromebook to all councillors and worked with Digital and IT colleagues to livestream our committee meetings via YouTube.