We will substantially improve the quantity and quality of participation in the community by people in deprived areas of Newham. The project is intended to benefit those who are socially excluded and help combat multiple deprivation. We will improve residents’ knowledge of, and access to, local services, and at the same time allow them to gain new skills, enhancing access to jobs and greater economic independence. We will target in particular those groups who have traditionally not been able or willing to participate in local affairs and/or who have difficulty in accessing local services.

We will achieve these aims by installing computers in people’s homes. This will provide people with access to the Council from the comfort of their own homes in a way which is user-friendly, including multi-language facilities. The project will include full technical back-up training and ongoing support. Each home will be provided with a full range of contemporary technology such as web/thin client, network computing, digital TV and public network infrastructure. It will enable users to access a wide range of information about local services, and to be included in a formal consultation programme by means of on-line focus groups, in real time, with elected members and officers. This will provide the Council with an additional means of consulting on local issues. It can be used to cover Council or other local services, and is a way of using new technology actively to support and advance the Government’s modernising agenda and the Council’s local service strategy.

We will, initially, focus our activity on the 4,000 households which are inside the area covered by the New Deal for Communities initiative. Costings have been done on that basis. We see this project as potentially the leading edge of a larger project which will – once its success has been demonstrated - roll out the IT to further residents of the Borough. The selection of New Deal areas will ensure that the first stage of the project is directed at those residents of the Borough who have the most need for enhanced participation and who have the most to gain from more responsive and high quality services. In particular, the availability of multi lingual facilities will help overcome some of the difficulties faced by those ethnic minority residents who are excluded from conventional consultation procedures because English is not their first language.

Residents will be provided with computer-based access to Council and other providers’ information and services. Full training and support will be provided before and after its installation. The technology has already been tried and tested as part of the ATTACH project, which provides seven touch-screen computer information kiosks throughout the Borough and gives solid experience on which to build. The ongoing evaluation and consultation for the ATTACH project provides solid information on residents’ needs and expectations in this area, and there are minimal risks that the service will not deliver what will be promised. Each computer will –

• Provide information on the full range of Council services, including what services are available, how to access them, where offices are located and so on.
• Provide information on other services available to residents, such as health, benefits and community safety. It will also provide the Access to Jobs package, which helps people to plan successfully their return to work following unemployment.
• Link up to Newham College of Further Education so that lifelong learning opportunities can be accessed, improving skills bases and employment prospects.
• Enable Council members and officers to canvass residents’ views directly on issues, priorities and quality of services. Customer and community surveys could be conducted via the computer.
• Enable residents to feed their views and decisions on local services directly into the Council. This will actively support the Council’s role in increasingly promoting the well being of the community as a whole.
• Link into a network discussion room where regular and frequent focus groups will take place. Residents will have the opportunity to be consulted on a range of issues.

There has already been substantial community involvement in our ATTACH project. We know that people like the system and find it simple to use, and we have incorporated users’ views into the service provided. We would expect a high level of take-up and use of the computers by residents.

As part of the development and detailed planning of the project we will ensure that there is full community participation. We will set up user groups to feed in their views on the service to be provided and to test the systems before they are rolled out into people’s homes. Once the systems have been rolled out, we will ensure these and other users have a continuing role in improving and evaluating the service, helping to set priorities for additional functionality and in testing their effectiveness before they are installed.

We have identified a number of potential partners. Initial soundings have indicated that this will be seen as a prestige project with which a number of private sector firms will want to be associated. It will provide those companies involved with the opportunity to be part of a centre of expertise for any subsequent introduction of similar systems in other local authorities (and possibly elsewhere in the public sector). Cable & Wireless, Oracle Corporation and Bull Information Systems would be likely to sponsor the project with goods and services worth about a third of the total cost. BT and Vertex have expressed interest in the project (no specific sponsorship has been agreed); and we propose to seek sponsorship from British Interactive Broadcasting and the Community TV Network.

This project provides extremely good value for money. Precise costings will be worked up as part of the detailed project planning. Based on good quality information from the ATTACH project, the illustrative cost of this project over seven years amounts to some £2.8 million in capital costs and some £3 million in revenue costs to cover some 4,000 households in the New Deal area. Precise details of the initial functionality and the likely timetable for upgrading the services will be worked up as part of the more detailed project planning.

The nature of the project makes it unlikely there will be any identifiable financial outputs. It is primarily about improving quality. We expect, over time, a modest (but currently unmeasurable) reduction in the Council’s running costs as a result of people accessing services more efficiently and effectively. It is difficult to identify SRB quantified outputs which will be delivered through this project and would not otherwise be delivered.

However, this project will actively support and underpin many of the SRB outputs to be delivered by SRB5/New Deal projects by improving access to services, participation levels and lifelong learning/skills enhancement. It will also contribute to the Government’s objective of modernising local government by enabling the Council to encourage and facilitate greater participation and consultation with local communities.

We will draw up an evaluation and performance management framework as part of the more detailed planning of the project.

The project will be managed with full technical support from our IT Contract Services. We have substantial experience in delivering a similar service through our ATTACH project, and there are therefore minimal risks associated with our capacity to deliver the project to time, cost and quality. We would expect our new IT service company to provide 24 hour support to users so that they and the Council can obtain the full benefits of the service.

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