Challenge

FutureGov is proud to be transformation partners for Bradford Metropolitan District Council. As part of a larger digital transformation partnership for the city, FutureGov was on-site running discovery activities with services across the council. Together, we explored opportunities for improvement, validating and prioritising opportunity areas that would have the biggest impact on the council and its citizens.

Through this discovery phase, Waste Services was highlighted as a big impact area for the council and its citizens. As one of the only council services that reaches every citizen across the district, Waste Services has direct contact with over 500,000 people while also facing significant pressure, needing to meet high cost-saving targets while protecting existing service income.

Approach

Working in multidisciplinary teams, we introduced agile and new ways of working to upskill the existing team and build the foundation for lasting change. Our aim was to redesign the end to end service in a scalable way that was adaptable and transferable to other areas of the council.

Working with the Web Services Team, Waste Team, Contact Centre and Revs and Bens we problem-solved, iterated and prototyped four concepts:

• 2019 garden waste subscription
• data sharing and visualisation for assisted lifts
• reporting missed bins online
• new service models

Bringing together leaders from these four departments on a regular basis, we discussed challenging issues, identified problem areas and built trust across siloed teams. By building a new environment that promotes a culture of empowerment and collaboration, delivery of projects was positively changed. This group still connects and oversees joint projects that cover all services within Bradford Council.

Impact

We successfully implemented a new Garden Waste Subscription Service and Data Sharing tool. The 2019/2020 Garden Waste Subscription service is a simpler and more reliable way for people to pay their annual subscription for monthly garden waste collections. This new service has a projected cost saving of £200,000 and over 32 hours of staff time saved every week, signifying a big shift for Bradford.

Data sharing tool

The council is providing a valuable service to residents who are unable to put their own bin out and require a helping hand. However their records and data on who needs this were years out of date, difficult to maintain and not always accessible by those who need it. We led the team to rethink how they reviewed, stored and shared this information. We created a data set that drew upon other council information sources such as the births and deaths register to keep this up to date.

This simple process saw the removal of 500 people that no longer needed the service, saving £10,000. It also helped the team identify people who may need support in emergency situations such as flooding or heavy snowfall, which could be shared with other services across the council.