One of these case studies involves North Lanarkshire Council who, along with UrbanTide and Snook, were awarded funding to develop an open data project that explores how data can be used to make public services more efficient, innovative and citizen-focused. 

ODI Case Study

The ODI commissioned UrbanTide, North Lanarkshire Council and Snook, amongst others, to illustrate the use of open data in service redesign. 

The other partner projects and case studies can be summarised as follows:

• Doncaster Council and UsCreates - the team explored helping young people get better, tailored information about their career options for training, education and employment.
• Kent County Council, Kent Energy Efficiency Partnership, and UsCreates - the team looked at datasets from across the NHS and the wider public sector to more accurately and effectively help those at risk of fuel poverty.
• London Borough of Waltham Forest, the Audience Agency and Technology Box - Waltham Forest explored how data can be used to increase and widen engagement in arts and culture. 

Our case study

North Lanarkshire Council is on a mission to 'improve economic opportunities and outcomes for all’. With help from UrbanTide and Snook, NLC has an ‘open by default’ data policy for non-sensitive data. The council applied this open approach to its business rates data in order to better understand the demand for the data and reduce Freedom of Information requests.

The service is expected to reduce the burden of publishing datasets and also provide significant additional information to businesses about the rates landscape across North Lanarkshire.

Significant expansion is also proposed to improve the accuracy of detection of missing non-domestic rates payers and to use machine-learning algorithms to detect payments that are higher or lower than they should be. More accurate collection of rates will help inform policy redevelopment and create more efficient service delivery chains that can increase the level of non-domestic rates collected, enabling reinvestment into public service delivery.

Read the full case study by the Open Data Institute.

About the Open Data Institute’s new service delivery project

The project is part of the ODI’s £6M three year innovation programme, which has an overall aim to build data infrastructure, improve literacy, stimulate data innovation and build trust in the use of data.

This element of the project builds on the report 'Using open data for public services' published in February 2018. In this report, the ODI looked at examples of open data use in public services. Following completion of the four local government projects, they asked the teams to tell them about their experience (e.g. the successes and challenges) in the hope that other service delivery teams working on open data projects will find their experiences helpful to learn from.

There’s a case study from each project and each team will be publishing tools created during the project that anyone can use. Download the UrbanTide toolkit here