Barking and Dagenham Scoop Two Further Gold Awards

LBBD scooped two further Gold awards at the iESE Transformation Awards: the Community Focus Award and Intelligent Council.

Community Focus Award: Gold winner. LBBD took the Gold award in the Community Focus category for its flagship transformation programme Community Solutions. Formally launched in April 2018, it brought together 16 distinct and traditional people-based Council services, comprising 500 staff.

The service acts as the ‘front-door’ to the council - a single integrated offer for early help, prevention and targeted support. Skills and expertise across a breadth of areas such as housing, welfare reform, children and adult social care, youth services, work and skills are pooled, supporting residents through blended teams, reducing hierarchy, streamlining referral processes and enabling stronger integration with services and wider partners.

The Homes and Money Hubs show how Community Solutions is working. Provided in partnership with Citizens Advice Bureau, Job Centre Plus and other partners, it provides support for people experiencing or nearing financial difficulty and in the worst cases, crisis. Since its launch in early 2018, the Hubs have helped more than 2,500 people, 52 evictions have been prevented, 89 people have been supported into employment, and 217 people have been helped to manage their rent and/or council tax arrears.

Community Solutions is also securing better outcomes for less. To date £3.8 million in savings have been delivered, with a further £1.2 million on track for delivery by 2021.

Intelligent Council: Gold winner. The Intelligent Council Gold award was given to the LBBD Insight Hub - a team of data and behavioural scientists who are the analytical driving force behind the entire Council's operating model. First established in 2017 with a mission to 'turn data into insight-led action' the team’s projects have had global acclaim in the past two years.

LBBD’s mission to 'leave no resident behind' is underpinned by an evidence base known as the Social Progress Index (SPI) produced by the Insight Hub; just one example of their pioneering work. The SPI has been instrumental in decision making around resource allocation and predicting area-based service demand. The tool is also currently being embedded into the council’s social value policy.

The SPI started as a global index comparing the social progress of countries against GDP. LBBD’s Insight team are the pioneers of a ward level application of this index, which brings together more than 50 datasets into the SPI framework. First published in October 2018, LBBD’s SPI includes four years’ worth of data across each of its 17 wards. Due to the world’s first nature of this project, the team is frequently asked to present its work on a global stage. In the past year, the team has presented its work in Iceland, Sweden and the United States. The project has inspired other cities and local governments to build the same model, with the latest local SPI being developed by the City of San Jose, California.

Read more about the Public Sector Transformation Awards at: https://iese.org.uk/project/the-public-sector-transformation-awards/