LocalGov Digital co-publishes the local digital declaration to back a digital revolution

We’re really pleased to be co-publishing the Local Digital Declaration today. The declaration is a cross sector shared mission, enabling the foundations needed for the future generation of local digital public services and was launched at today’s Local Government Association conference by the Minister for Local Government, Rishi Sunak MP.

All our members are committed to ensuring the services our organisations deliver are meeting the needs of citizens, and in doing so keeping the cost of delivering those services down as much as possible. We see digital technology and techniques as a key part of achieving this, and so are delighted that collective action is being taken across the sector.

The declaration embodies five principles of internet age local public services. These are:

1. We will go even further to redesign our services around the needs of the people using them. This means continuing to prioritise citizen and user needs above professional, organisational and technological silos.
2. We will ‘fix our plumbing’ to break our dependence on inflexible and expensive technology that doesn’t join up effectively. This means insisting on modular building blocks for the IT we rely on, and open standards to give a common structure to the data we create.
3. We will design safe, secure and useful ways of sharing information to build trust among our partners and citizens, to better support the most vulnerable members of our communities, and to target our resources more effectively.
4. We will demonstrate digital leadership, creating the conditions for genuine organisational transformation to happen, and challenging all those we work with to embrace this Local Digital Declaration.
5. We will embed an open culture that values, incentivises and expects digital ways of working from every member of our workforce. This means working in the open wherever we can, sharing our plans and experience, working collaboratively with other organisations, and reusing good practice.

At LocalGov Digital we are delivering real digital change to benefit the residents and local businesses that our councils serve. For example, our service standard has helped councils improve the digital services they provide, and we look forward to playing an active role in developing this, and being part of other collaborative projects across the sector.

You can read the declaration in full on the Local Digital website, which gives more detail on the principles and the commitments we’ve made in order to lay the foundations for the public services of the future.