The DLUHC Local Digital team is supporting councils in England to build their cyber resilience.
Through our work to date, we know that one of the challenges councils face is having a clear baseline standard to assess their cyber security. To address this, DLUHC will be introducing the Cyber Assessment Framework (CAF) for Local Government in 2024.
In this blog post, we’ll get you up to speed on our work to develop the CAF for Local Government and let you know how your council can start getting ready.
The Cyber Assessment Framework (CAF) was developed in 2018 by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) to help organisations assess the extent to which they’re managing their own cyber security risks.
The Government Cyber Security Strategy 2022-2030 outlines how lead government departments are required to adapt the CAF in a way that is appropriate for the public sector organisations within their scope. To guide the local government sector through the CAF, DLUHC is developing supporting documentation, guidance and templates. We’re calling this the Cyber Assessment Framework (CAF) for Local Government.
The aim of the CAF is to promote good cyber security practices and cultures in councils by allowing them to understand their cyber posture against a national benchmark.
Once it’s rolled out, councils will be responsible for undertaking the CAF and using the assessment to manage their own cyber security. DLUHC will use the results to understand any risks or issues within the sector, and consider how these risks can be addressed. This will likely include working closely with partners such as SOLACE or the Local Government Association (LGA).
Our vision is for councils to be able to undertake the CAF themselves, and to use their knowledge of their council and level of risk to decide what to prioritise for assessment. We’re keen to understand the resource required to undertake the CAF and to design the service to reduce additional burden on councils. By thoroughly testing the CAF with councils, we can identify the pain points and which elements are the most time and resource consuming.
We first piloted the CAF with the local government sector in Autumn 2022 with 10 councils. This confirmed that although the NCSC’s CAF could be used effectively by the sector, the scope was too broad to make it a useful tool for local government.
Since May 2023 we’ve carried out further testing with 8 councils through the Future Councils pilot, but with a narrower scope. This has included testing local government-specific documentation, guidance and templates to guide the pilot councils through a CAF assessment. We have also undertaken a discovery project to explore what services DLUHC needs to build to support delivery of the CAF in local government.
In February this year, we kicked off an alpha project to design and test a service to help councils get ready for the CAF, assess themselves against it, and submit it to DLUHC. Alongside the alpha project, we’ll be running a third pilot to test the service with a cohort of councils.
To help us support the sector ahead of the wider roll-out later this year, we’ve invited councils representing different areas of the country to take part in a six-month pilot from March 2024. The pilot councils will receive £50,000 to adopt the CAF with minimal direct support from us, and to take part in user research and testing to help us refine the service.
Through this latest pilot, we want to understand:
We plan to share updates on the progress of the pilot on our CAF webpage and we’ll also be blogging about our progress.
In order to complete the CAF, councils will be required to identify their critical systems and produce network architecture diagrams. We will be providing additional support to councils to enable them to do this before the CAF is rolled-out, including providing funding of £15,000 to each council that successfully completes the work.
We're currently testing guidance and conducting a series of workshops with a small group of councils before we make this support offer available to the rest of the sector in late Spring 2024. We will be able to share an update on this work at the end of March.
Although the CAF for Local Government is still in development, we want to make sure councils are aware that it’s coming so they can start getting ready to undertake a CAF assessment.
We will share more information and guidance on how to get your organisation ready for the CAF over the coming months, as well as run a webinar to answer your questions – more info on that to come.
To follow our progress and hear about upcoming Show and Tells, make sure to:
You can also read more about Local Digital’s work to understand and improve local government cyber resilience on our website.
]]>In September 2022, I started on a new project as a content designer in the Funding Service Design team, where the aim was to:
Here are a few things I learned along the way.
In a nutshell, part of my role on the project was to help onboard funds to our GOV.UK service. The service was essentially an application form for whichever fund we were working with at the time.
By the time we started to work with fund teams, they were usually already thinking about the data they wanted to collect from applicants as part of the application stage. Sometimes that data was more of a ‘nice to have’ instead of fundamental information an assessor would need to make a decision.
We found that running question protocol workshops really helped prompt the fund teams to think about:
If a data point could not be justified, then it probably was not necessary.
These sessions took time – often longer than an hour – but were always our most valuable tool. With that information, we were then able to start thinking about the flow and the content of the questions.
The best thing about question protocols is that they’re relatively easy to set up and run. All you need is a table with some column headings to get started.
Read more about question protocols from UX Matters.
Our work with fund teams meant there were always things to show, like user journeys, patterns, components and content.
One thing we soon realised was that we were spending too much time on creating polished mock-ups in Mural. I think there’s a tendency to do this as designers. We want things to look good, especially if we’re showing it to other people.
It was also always inevitable that we’d have to make changes to these designs because we were still so early on in the process, meaning that all our hard work to make things look polished was a waste.
Instead of Mural boards, we decided to trial a simple Excel spreadsheet. We included columns for:
After trialling the approach, we found that overall this was a quicker way to:
Using spreadsheets for design work is not groundbreaking, but it’s not something I’d ever really considered before.
Our next goal is to continue building up a bank of standard questions, so that fund teams can take question blocks off the shelf and do not need to spend time reinventing the wheel.
There will always be a small amount of bespoke questions, because each fund is unique, but there are many questions which are the same across multiple funds – such as organisation name. This will mean we have reduced the burden on fund delivery teams, as well as the burden on fund applicants. Win win.
Read more about the brilliant work happening in DLUHC’s funding service design team.
Subscribe to our blog for the latest updates from the team or visit our careers page if you're interested in working with us.
In celebration of International Women's Day 2024, 4 colleagues working in digital roles in DLUHC share their perspectives on this year’s theme ‘Inspiring Inclusion’. Join us as we delve into their thoughts and experiences, shedding light on the power of inclusivity in shaping a better workplace.
As a cyber risk analyst with a background in computer science and software testing, I am very familiar with being a woman in a field still dominated by men.
Despite that, I’m glad to say I have not felt alienated or held back because of my gender. I have always been able to hit the ground running, also thanks to my dedication to self-study, personal development and the valuable training I have benefitted from in digital government. I have progressed to become a subject matter expert in my field.
To women aspiring to work in similar roles, I cannot stress enough the importance of finding a mentor. Having someone independent to bounce ideas off of has been invaluable to me. Shadowing someone who is already doing the job is also a great way to gain insight and experience. Additionally, it is crucial to engage with and learn from other women working in technology across the department. A starting point for this can be through joining our technology community of practice.
One gender issue that I think generally persists for women starting a career is the unconscious expectation that they will handle more administrative tasks than their male colleagues. This perpetuates stereotypes and can hinder career growth.
It is also important to see women in leadership positions, such as our Chief Digital Officer Gill Stewart here in DLUHC; they can serve as role models to demonstrate that there are no limits to our aspirations.
As a Business Architect, people and teams have always been a big part of my job; making sure we have the right people also means figuring out how they can be their best.
Whilst some of the things we do in DLUHC Digital, such as reaching out to women digital talent through dedicated job boards or blind sifting are important, I believe that ensuring gender balance goes beyond ticking boxes.
One of the recent initiatives I led to inspire inclusion in digital was a series of workshops in partnership with Beyond Equality to raise awareness on practical actions teams and individuals can take to make inclusion a reality in the workplace. Central to these sessions was the question: 'What influence could I have to remove some of the barriers to other people's inclusion?'.
Another similar initiative centred on psychological safety in our teams – the shared belief that it's ok to take risks, speak up or make mistakes without fear of retaliation, thus creating a more inclusive environment and fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement in digital. We continue to include these elements in our digital and agile learning offering.
Unfortunately, unconscious bias can still manifest in various ways. But instead of pointing fingers, I believe in finding ways to help people recognise their bias and understand what they’re doing. Most of us do not have ill intentions – we simply need guidance. Throughout my Civil Service career, I often wondered why there were not more senior leaders who looked and sounded like me. However, thanks to my leader, I no longer feel different or isolated. Her inclusive leadership style has made a significant impact, fostering a sense of belonging and empowerment in our teams.
DLUHC is my first experience in central government. One of the reasons I initially applied was because of the flexibility in ways of working offered by the role. As a single mum to 2 primary school children, work life balance is particularly important to me, and it’s great to feel that my parental responsibilities are understood and accommodated by the caring and compassionate leadership of my employer.
I’m not going to lie – juggling a career with the ‘mental load’ that comes from raising children and managing a household can be really tough! I think this is getting more recognition from employers generally, but this requires additional flexibility and support to be available and preventative measures to be in place where needed to ensure that employee wellbeing is maintained where there might be conflicts between work and personal priorities.
It is obvious that diversity, equality and inclusion are highly valued within DLUHC. There are a number of support groups available for staff, including a gender equality network, which are all really diverse and active. I am a member of the Working Parents Network and, as well as providing a sense of community and support, being part of this network helps me to feel that my needs are being represented in wider conversations about policy changes within the department.
I’d encourage any woman aspiring to work in digital to approach women who inspire them to ask for the opportunity to talk about their career journeys, seek out opportunities to shadow and observe, and take part in coaching or mentorship, where offered to you. Never be intimidated by a successful, empowered, inspiring female leader or colleague. They have so much to offer in terms of experience, advice and wisdom, and your approach will probably give them a confidence boost too. In my experience, women very rarely realise quite how amazing they are.
Unconscious bias is an issue that we need to address. I once witnessed an example of this at a product conference where only men product owners were featured in a presentation. It was an eye-opener for me to realise the unintended impact this had on our colleagues and the perception of inclusivity.
To enable inclusion, it’s also important to create a culture where open communication is encouraged. In my team, we foster a very open culture where everyone has the freedom to present their ideas and ask challenging questions to leaders.
You don’t necessarily need to have a degree in maths or engineering to excel in a digital role. By providing a clear understanding of the different roles and their requirements, we can help individuals of all backgrounds realise their potential and that the right attitude is what matters.
It's inspiring to see that we have a good gender balance on our senior leadership team. You still do not see that often in the sector. Such visible models can really motivate other women.
But crucially, inspiring inclusion starts early. Waiting until university is too late to encourage women to pursue careers in technology. We should go to schools, inspiring kids to consider digital careers. Whether it's becoming a software engineer, a delivery manager or a product specialist, we need to emphasise the importance of STEM subjects and show that anyone can be involved in creating and programming, regardless of their gender.
Feeling inspired? Join us for our Digital Recruitment Days event in Manchester on 14 and 15 March. Find out more and register in this blog post or register via this jobs board, which has all the roles we'll be recruiting for.
Subscribe to our blog for the latest updates from the team or visit our career page if you're interested in working with us.
The Local Digital team is pleased to announce an ambitious three year plan for the Open Referral UK (ORUK) data standard that could potentially deliver millions of pounds in annual savings and help citizens access better quality information when they need it. An initial fund of £600k will be allocated to drive further adoption and to set up a Cross-Government Advisory Group.
After receiving endorsement by the Cabinet Office’s Data Standards Authority and completing a Local Digital funded beta phase, we are now looking to accelerate widespread adoption of the standard across local government.
Learn more about the benefits of the standard, our three year plan, and how you can join the community in this blog post.
Local authorities spend significant time and resources connecting residents with relevant community services, handling over 2 million requests related to adult social care alone in 2021/22. Each council maintains their own directory of community services but managing this information is challenging, often leading to duplication of efforts even within the same local area. Different organisations also hold and share their information in different ways. This means that directories can lack consistency and residents find it difficult to access the right information.
Four councils worked together to define the Open Referral data standard, which organises community service data in a common way so directories can communicate with each other. The standard means they can share data in real-time, citizens receive information quicker, and there is improved connectivity among our local communities and services.
A video developed during the beta phase to explain what the data standard is and what problem it solves.
By implementing the standard, councils can streamline their administrative processes, as well as the work of front-line staff who find and recommend services to citizens. This could save the taxpayer millions of pounds a year.
Nick Parker from Leeds City Digital Partnerships Team describes the benefits he’s seen:
We no longer needed to negotiate the alignment of many different data structures owned by different directories. This saved us time and money. There was greater collaboration among stakeholders when discussing the best ways to tag and update a record.
Additionally, It has supported the ability for statutory organisations and a number of voluntary sector organisations in Leeds to build or rebuild their websites to include content from the Leeds Online Open Platform. This is a platform for service directories to pull data from.
To hear more testimonials, you can visit the case studies on the Open Referral website.
Local Digital have been supporting Open Referral since 2018, starting with funding for a discovery project: data standards for local community services. As part of our recent programme review and updated approach, we commissioned TPXimpact to analyse the work to date and help to inform our next steps. Their report is available to read in full on our website.
The report identified consistent barriers to wider adoption of the standard and we recognise that it’s DLUHC’s role to help address these, which should unlock valuable benefits for the sector.
Over the next three years, we’ll be producing materials that make adoption of the standard easier for councils and their suppliers. These will be both practical how-to guides and business cases that show the benefits of adoption.
We’ll also be funding an Open Referral UK Cross-Government Advisory Group, which will provide clear, broad endorsement of the standard. We believe that showcasing ORUK and its sustainability is crucial in encouraging others to invest in its adoption.
While Open Referral stands out as a well designed standard that can benefit both councils and citizens, our vision extends beyond the adoption of one standard.
There are many areas where data standards could have a positive impact, so we’re actively looking for what next. We’ll utilise our experience with Open Referral to test and gain insights on effective adoption strategies, designing a playbook to streamline the introduction of standards into councils.
This reflects our updated approach to act as a ‘steward’ for the sector.
There are many ways you can join the Open Referral community to keep updated, adopt the standard, or share your experiences to help others.
Do you work in technology, digital or data, and are looking for a fulfilling and impactful career opportunity?
Join us for our Digital Recruitment Days event in Manchester on 14 and 15 March. We will be recruiting for the following roles at DLUHC. Find out more and apply to attend:
Our Manchester event builds on the success of our previous recruitment days – in Darlington in February, in Leeds in January, and in Wolverhampton in November last year. We welcomed over 200 people in total from a wide range of backgrounds across a variety of digital, data and technology specialisms, which subsequently resulted in over 80 job offers made across different specialisms and levels.
“The assessment centre was a unique format – it offered a nice change to the typical interview process. After registering, I received a call to answer any questions I had about the event, which I found very helpful.
The intro was informative, and the technical assessment provided a good opportunity to talk about previous projects and current skills. The staff were very friendly and made me feel comfortable during the whole event.
Following the event, I have received good communication about the next steps and an indication of how long the onboarding process will take.”
Cloud Solutions Engineer participant and new colleague, Leeds event
Our Digital Recruitment Days provide a unique opportunity for you to meet, connect and engage in two-way conversations with our digital teams. You will meet professionals who work in your specialism, as well as our senior leadership team.
It's a chance for you to learn more about DLUHC Digital and how we work, ways to develop and grow your career with us, and the range of staff benefits we offer.
You will also get an opportunity to tell us about yourself, your skills, experience and aspirations.
The event will be informal and, for the right people, we’re looking to make job offers shortly after the event, which means it’s potentially a great way to fast-track your job search.
“The digital recruitment day was a nice way to get to meet various people in the department and get a feel for what to expect. The passion was brought through, you could tell that staff were happy and that there is a big focus on user-centred approaches.”
Live Service Manager participant and new colleague, Wolverhampton event
At DLUHC, our work focuses on solving problems, delivering innovative services and achieving ambitious outcomes that have a big impact on communities and people right across the UK.
We work in autonomous, multi-disciplinary teams in 20 locations across the UK, including Manchester, Warrington, Leeds and Sheffield, and our people enjoy flexible and hybrid working, plus generous benefits and development routes for learning and progression.
Find out more about what it’s like to work in a digital, data or technology role at DLUHC.
If it sounds like something you’d like to be part of, meet us and let’s chat.
Use the links at the top of this post to apply and attend our recruitment days.
If you have any questions contact our recruitment team.
]]>The DLUHC Digital Planning Programme is supporting further Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) through the latest funding round for digital services to improve planning.
The LPA work we’re funding aligns with our vision of enabling a modern and efficient planning system in England, shifting a documents-based system to one that is data-driven, standards-based and powered by modern user-centred products and services.
LPAs were able to submit applications to 2 funds:
Building on work with councils last year, the Digital Planning Improvement Fund is providing 43 LPAs with £100,000 of funding to support the adoption of modern planning practices within planning data, digital capabilities and development management software.
The funding will support LPAs to take advantage of digital service improvements, prepare for forthcoming legislation and begin collaborating with other local authorities, technology providers and DLUHC on software and data projects.
The successful LPAs will embark on a 5-step process where they will complete the following activities:
The successful LPAs are:
You can find out more about the Open Digital Planning community through our dedicated website, our LinkedIn page, and subscribe to the regular newsletter for all news and updates.
The PropTech Innovation Fund is the largest UK Government PropTech programme and it has supported 65 pilots across 47 LPAs to work with industry at pace and scale to radically transform how communities engage in the planning system.
Key achievements from Round 1 of the PropTech Innovation Fund included a 119% increase in citizen participation and 280 hours of planning officer time saved. Round 2 saw some projects achieving 3 times greater response levels compared with previous consultations, a 40% reduction in officer time, and a 342% increase in respondents under the age of 34.
Both were successful in increasing the quality and quantity of responses, engaging with different demographics, and enabling resource savings for local authorities.
The remit of Round 4 projects responds to increased industry demand to accelerate land assessment and viability alongside visualisation of citizen engagement and plan-making.
Round 4 will support 37 pilot projects across 49 LPAs that demonstrate the benefits of how digital solutions can be leveraged across land assessment (improving current approaches to identifying and evaluating sites, including viability and feasibility assessments, analysing small sites, or land assembly projects) as well as digital citizen engagement work on visualising planning proposals.
The pilots will cover a wide range of potential use cases from local plan-making, capacity and constraints modelling, strategic housing or economic land availability, biodiversity net gain, small sites and visualisation for citizen engagement.
We are delighted to announce that the following 49 councils have been awarded funding to deliver outcomes under the themes above:
To find out more, you can visit our Digital Planning LinkedIn page or subscribe to the regular newsletter for news and updates.
The Local Digital team has two key ambitions: to improve the cyber resilience of the local government sector, and to use digital transformation to help councils deliver better services and increase their productivity.
In 2022 we announced our next steps for Local Digital, and outlined a 3-year plan to address sector challenges and fix some of the structural issues holding us back.
Now, 18 months in, we want to reflect on our progress to date and share our plans to adapt our approach to take on a more strategic role as a ‘steward’. We’re excited about the role we aim to play moving forward, which has been informed by your feedback and input.
In the blog post from 2022, we said that “our approach has always been to support the Local Digital community to deliver more user-centred, cost-effective and secure local public services. This won’t change, and neither will the core principles of the Declaration.”
This is still true in 2024, and the principles of the Local Digital Declaration will continue to be a key part of our current and future offer. Since 2018, a community of 361 public sector organisations (including the majority of councils in England) have formed around the Declaration, committing to improve local public services in line with its principles.
Recent user research has shown that the Declaration still has an important role to play in supporting cyber and digital transformation in the sector. As the Declaration nears its sixth anniversary, we’re working to make it a more useful tool for councils to use to bring about change and transformation.
We know that one size doesn’t fit all, but by developing common building blocks, local authorities will be able to build services more quickly, flexibly and effectively.
Over the last 5 years, we’ve been helping local government unlock the benefits of digital ways of working, to find solutions to common problems. There has been lots of great work, including seeing our funded projects inform a national Digital Planning Programme, the creation of LocalGov Drupal, and a growing movement in Open Referral Standard - among many others.
Through the Local Digital Declaration and the Local Digital Fund, we’ve championed a collaborative approach to improving local public services. The Local Digital team has provided support across project management, product ownership, agile delivery, user research and service design, and councils have fed back that the support and expert advice provided has been a valuable enabler for the sector. We’ve also provided training to over 3,000 council staff to develop their digital and cyber skills.
While the Local Digital Fund has helped councils resolve specific service-level issues, the Future Councils programme took a ‘whole council’ approach, bringing together digital services and cyber security. The aim of the pilot, which ran between May and November 2023 with 8 diverse councils, was to understand the recurring barriers faced by councils when it came to innovation.
As well as highlighting how many of our council colleagues are dedicated to digital transformation, the pilot enabled us to gain valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities for digital transformation in local government.
We’re going to share our findings from the pilot very soon, but in the meantime we’ve developed a playbook of tools to help councils understand complex problems and their impact within organisations.
Our work to date has provided councils with support and funding to help them resolve specific issues, and explore wider systemic issues. But as a team we are committed to continuously improve what we do.
Insights from our ongoing conversations with councils were the driver behind our current intensive period of review, which includes the ongoing evaluation study and analysis of our processes. So far, this has been critical in highlighting that, while we’ve delivered some real successes for the sector, our current structure isn’t able to deliver a big step-change when it comes to digital. We know our previous model also has limits when it comes to targeting key areas in the most effective way.
That’s why we want to change our focus as a team. Reviewing our work to date and testing new approaches in Future Councils has shown we can be most effective where we lean into our position as a central government department. This means we’ll be working in a more strategic role as a ‘steward’, looking to bring the sector together to deliver modern digital services that enhance citizens’ lives.
We’re still working out what this might mean in practice—more to come shortly!—but broadly it means we’ll work more closely with key partners to draw together expertise, redefine our engagement with suppliers, and support the development of data standards and the scaling of digital solutions.
We will continue to make grants to local government, as well as providing integral support and expertise, to support councils to build, accelerate and advance their digital maturity. However, in the short term, there are no plans for further funding through the current Local Digital Fund model. Our immediate focus for that workstream is supporting funded projects to deliver their outputs and share these across the sector to maximise impact.
We’ve always viewed cyber and digital as two sides of the same coin; securely designed user-centred services, that are not reliant on legacy technology, will ensure citizens can easily access the services they need, with the confidence that their data is safe. Since 2020, we have provided £19.9m of grant funding and technical support to 192 local authorities to improve their cyber maturity. Now, 90% of councils have fully implemented offline backups of their critical data, and the remaining 10% have work in progress to achieve this by May 2024.
One of the challenges we know councils face is the lack of a clear baseline standard against which to assess their cyber security. To tackle this, we will be introducing the Cyber Assessment Framework (CAF) for the local government sector from 2024.
We’ve undertaken a great deal of testing and piloting to ensure that we can introduce the CAF in an appropriate way, with helpful guidance that will support councils through the process. We’ll shortly be kicking off a final pilot to test our approach, before rolling the CAF out to the wider sector. We’ll share more about our plans in a blog post in the coming weeks.
The cyber threat to the local government sector is very real, present, and continuing to evolve. In response to this, we are excited to share that we are accelerating plans to support the sector to ‘Defend as One’ - harnessing the value of sharing cyber security data, expertise and capabilities across the sector.
Thank you to everyone who has supported, engaged with, and helped to shape our work to date. We’re really excited for what’s to come.
To stay up-to-date with Local Digital, including imminent Future Councils pilot findings and the latest on our cyber work, follow us on our usual channels:
]]>I'm Elliott, a Software Engineer within the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC). In DLUHC we are applying innovative techniques with open, publicly accessible data sources to support place-based decision-making.
I have led the development of a new tool that allows internal users to browse and visualise data at national and neighbourhood levels across the UK.
The tool features a dynamic map visualisation that enables users to zoom through multiple geography levels that span all 4 devolved administrations. It also supports timeseries to explore how UK datasets have changed over time. Within DLUHC, this tool has helped visualise the Levelling Up Mission framework, as outlined in the White Paper.
DLUHC needed a data tool with high-quality granular maps and data to help inform policy, programming and decision-making.
In order to deliver a prototype at pace, we adopted technologies used in the Office for National Statistics’ Census Maps. This was due to the similarity in requirements to use the same statistical boundaries. The prototype was tested with the Index of Multiple Deprivation publication at Local Authority District level.
User feedback was overwhelmingly positive and justified the investment of resource into further developing the tool.
The internal product has recently moved into private Beta release, and work is underway to internally deploy the tool.
Our users now have first-hand access to:
DLUHC uses the agile delivery framework. We iterate on user-centred design and feedback regularly to refine and continuously improve. We’ve worked to deploy and scale our cloud infrastructure to ensure the application conforms to security, performance, and accessibility requirements.
Delivery has involved negotiating through several governance stages, for example service assessments, pipeline assurance board and technical design authority.
The interactive tool is more than a pretty map — a huge amount of thought has gone into its design, architecture and ongoing management. With user experience being our highest priority, we needed a fast, responsive and intuitive solution. We’ve worked with design experts to adopt the GOV.UK Design System, and with geospatial data scientists and data engineers to complete the complex dynamic spatial data visualisation.
The data explorer tool uses Sveltekit, Typescript, Mapbox and Python. All published datasets are publicly available and approved for use by the government department responsible.
We’ve configured a data catalogue to source, transform and deliver all the data consumed where our pipelines are able to adapt to new datasets, including file download, APIs, and web scraping, or if we require data from a new provider. Our team uses design principles and patterns to ensure our code is extendable and responsive to emerging requirements.
This new capability has been showcased at Civil Service events to help share knowledge and learning with others across government, such as Civil Service Live and DataConnect.
The team have been encouraged and supported by the wealth of positive comments and suggestions for continuous improvement. We've also used this feedback together with ongoing user research, and provide updates on the progress of our work through our internal monthly show-and-tells.
We ensure the data we use is accurate and up to date, and validated by data science/engineering experts to ensure our data modelling is robust and accurate.
The team is actively working to support several new geography types to accommodate a wider range of datasets and provide finer geospatial detail, including police force areas and travel to work areas.
This work is making the exploration of data easier and more accessible for internal users. By centrally co-ordinating the data in one place, DLUHC can now spend less time on data discovery and downloads, and more time applying data to support their decision-making.
If you’re interested in finding out more about this work, get in touch at atlas@levellingup.gov.uk.
Subscribe to our blog for the latest updates from the team or visit our job page if you're interested in working with us.
Like so many people after completing their A levels, I was encouraged to go to university and get a degree. Also, like so many people, I had no idea what I wanted to study or what career was for me.
I had A levels in maths, chemistry and history, and chose to study history simply because it was what I had always done well in.
During my first year of university, however, I made the decision to leave. It was a difficult time. My friends were all over the country and loving university life and I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted to do. I did know that I needed to find what I was passionate about.
To figure this out, I had to get out there and try things. So that’s what I did.
After a week of work experience at a media company in London with their Cyber Security Incident Response team, I decided cyber security was something I wanted to pursue.
In the last few years, cyber security has grown to become the priority of every big organisation. The sector continues to grow rapidly.
It has become more and more common to hear about big company data breaches in the news, and that’s initially what piqued my interest.
I’ve always been someone who loves to investigate and solve problems. I’ve always been quite tech-savvy and I have the analytical skills to match.
So, after completing a Level 3 Infrastructure Technician qualification, accredited by BCS, in March 2021, I joined DLUHC shortly after, in December 2021, as a Level 4 Cyber Security Technologist apprentice.
I spent many hours researching exactly what an apprenticeship was and read countless blog posts and articles from previous apprentices. As I had previously learnt at university, it’s best to fully know what you’re getting into before committing yourself!
I currently work in the Cyber Security team, specifically the Security Operations Centre (SOC). In an organisation, the SOC monitors people, processes and technology to improve its security posture — its overall cyber security strength and resilience to cyber threats.
It’s better to prevent rather than react. However, the SOC is also responsible for escalating alerts and responding to cyber incidents.
A typical day in the team is varied. Tasks include managing alert notifications across a number of systems and analysing security incidents with a view to preventing an attack or minimising the impact of an attack.
Threat hunting is also a big part of my role. This involves proactively seeking out threats within the core IT network, including the use of various threat intelligence sources on threat actors, recent cyber attacks and so on.
I work collaboratively alongside the wider DLUHC Technology Team and our managed service provider for the SOC.
The cyber security apprenticeship has been a valuable experience for me. It’s provided me with the knowledge to really excel within my role, whilst still being challenged with different types of work projects I would never have been exposed to. It also helped with the transition from classroom to office. The flexibility has been good too. I’m in the office twice a week and work remotely for the rest of the week, and though joining a team can be daunting, I’ve been made to feel very welcome.
It has confirmed that I want to stay in the space and progress into more senior cyber security roles. Now my apprenticeship is at an end, I am looking to complete some vendor-specific qualifications to further develop my knowledge in the field, to then think about specialising in an area of cyber security I am particularly passionate about.
If a career in cyber security interests you, I suggest researching the big apprenticeship training providers to see what apprenticeships they offer. Build a rapport with their recruitment and onboarding teams and you'll always be notified when new vacancies become available. It’s how I secured my first one. My current apprenticeship with DLUHC was advertised on Civil Service Jobs, so do sign up to their alerts too.
As part of actively supporting our staff progression, DLUHC offers a range of digital and data apprenticeships for new joiners and existing team members. Find out more about what it’s like to work in digital, data and technology roles in DLUHC.
The Government Security Cyber Apprenticeship schemes offer the opportunity to work in departments across government for 2 years, gaining a level 4 or a level 6 qualification on completion, and the opportunity to move into a permanent job in a department.
If you are interested in our wider work around apprenticeships, contact our digital and data apprenticeship lead Tony Venus.
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]]>The Energy Performance Certificates (EPC) open data site was launched in 2016. It provides both an interface and programmatic access to allow users to search for and download almost 30 million energy performance certificates in England and Wales. The site is well-used, and experiences high volumes of activity, with 30 million API requests and 40,000 zip files downloaded each month.
Over the years, we have been making incremental improvements to the service, and we are pleased to announce another round of improvements applied in January 2024.
To determine which areas to focus on when making improvements, we have taken into account feedback from our users, analysis of usage statistics and a review of support tickets. We have also taken the opportunity to review the site through the lens of the latest design standards, as well as implementing features and approaches to getting data from other sites.
From this analysis, we decided that there were 2 parts of the service that we wanted to improve – both centred around the way that users can get data out of the application.
The application already provides 3 ways for users to get data about energy performance certificates: searching in the application and viewing certificate data on screen, bulk downloading EPC data in CSV files, and accessing data programmatically via the API. Our analysis revealed that the bulk downloads and API access are both well-used, but support tickets and helpdesk enquiries indicated we could make them better.
Improvements to the bulk download part of the service include better visibility of the bulk downloads and more cuts of the data. Improvements to the API include: better documentation, with code snippets for each of the API calls we provide, a better way to get all the data our users need in one go, and application of the OpenAPI standard, giving users access to tools to support better exploration of the API through the new Swagger interface.
While the service has supported bulk downloads of certain cuts of the data for some time, we have improved visibility of the bulk downloads and introduced new bulk download options.
Previously, it was possible to download zip files containing all certificates and recommendations for the 3 certificate types (domestic, non-domestic and DEC), with files organised by local authority, as well as downloads for each local authority in England and Wales.
We have now introduced the ability to download all certificates and recommendations in one file for each of the certificate types. We have also introduced downloads by specific time periods: monthly for each of the last 12 months, and then annually going back to 2008.
Our research indicated the existing local authority downloads were not sufficiently obvious to users, so we have created 3 new pages to provide full lists of all the available files for downloading (all certificates and recommendations, all certificates and recommendations by local authority, and all certificates and recommendations by time period). Find out more about domestic EPCs.
Some of the downloads now have a schema.json file available within the zip bundle to provide machine-readable information about the contents of the files.
All of the download files have a predictable, permanent URL so if you wish, you can programmatically access the files.
Previously, the API provided access to data within the site, but individual requests were limited to a page size of 5,000 records, with an overall limit of 10,000 records. Feedback from users suggested that this limitation makes it difficult to work with the data, requiring multiple requests, applying different filters to build the dataset.
We have reconfigured the underlying database to remove this limitation, so API requests can now provide access to all of the data provided through the service, using a new pagination method. We will be closely monitoring the platform to ensure that there is no degradation in performance for our users. To help reduce the load on the server, please make use of the filters to download the data you need.
In addition to this, we now provide OpenAPI v3 schemas for all of the available APIs. This is a way of describing the APIs in a standard way. Using the OpenAPI standard means we have been able to create a Swagger interface to support developers with building their API calls. We have also updated the documentation to include code snippets in cURL and Python for each API call to make it easier for users to access data programmatically. You can see the updated documentation here.
We will be closely monitoring the platform to ensure that there is no degradation in performance for our users. To help reduce the load on the server, please make use of the filters to download the data you need.
As always, we’d love to hear your feedback on these changes and any other features of the EPC service. Contact us by email at EPC.Enquiry@communities.gov.uk.
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