image for blog article entitled Driving Digital Transformation

How we are transforming our services

As a council we are developing into a more digitally-savvy authority to reap the benefits that will impact not only us, but our residents too.

We are providing more and more of our services digitally so that residents can make applications and payments when and where they want to, preventing them needing to come to the Civic Centre during office hours.

It's all well and good providing these digital solutions, but what if our residents can't use them? That's where the digital inclusion strand of our strategy comes into play, ensuring we don't leave anyone behind.

Find out more about the digital inclusion event we ran in November 2019.

As a borough with an ever-increasing population, we see digital as a key tool to help us provide essential services to more people as our funding from central government decreases. Web-based transactions can be a lot more cost-effective than the following traditional methods:

  • 20 times cheaper than by phone
  • 30 times cheaper than by post
  • 50 times cheaper than face-to-face

So digitising our services allow us to work more efficiently going forward. By providing self-service for digitally-minded residents, we can then focus more of our attention on the residents that really need our help.

One example where we have yielded a major time and resource efficiency is in the garage application process. Previously, the paper-based application process would have taken 14 days to complete, now it takes just 24 hours and all correspondence is online (also helping our carbon neutral pledge).

As we're now in a new decade, we will continue to provide more dynamic ways for residents and businesses to engage with us, while still being there to help those with lower digital confidence.