• £100,000 funding will enhance Newham’s resident engagement platform and improve digital citizen engagement within the planning process
Newham Council has been announced as one of the 15 local authority beneficiaries to be awarded £100,000 out of a total of £3.2 million of funding through Round 3 of the Proptech Innovation Fund from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.
This is the second time running that Newham has secured funding from the DLUHC Proptech Innovation Fund which was set up in August 2021 to support the widespread adoption of digital citizen engagement tools and services within the planning process for local authorities.
Last year, the £125,000 funding received supported the Council to deliver a series of resident engagement activities through Newham Co-create, Newham’s resident engagement and consultation platform, to shape the community vision for a new neighbourhood and town centre at Beckton Riverside through improved diverse representation. The project is the largest regeneration opportunity in the borough with the potential to provide up to 10,000 new homes alongside significant new public realm, public transport connectivity and community facilities.
The submission for the third round of funding was made in partnership with Citizen Lab, Newham’s resident engagement and consultation supplier. Alongside aiding digital resident engagement, the fund will seek to improve the usability of Newham Co-create, allowing the embedding of planning mapping tools into the platform. This will give residents access to rich map functionalities, increase more collaborative ways of working and enable planning officers to combine powerful mapping and spatial analytics technology with cutting-edge engagement tools.
During the next 12-18 months, the Council will be working in partnership with DLUHC and the Proptech industry to improve the visualisation and processing of consultation data, scaling the use of Newham Co-create to make sure the platform is interoperable.
The technical goal will be to improve Newham Co-Create’s mapping functionality through an ESRI integration and explore the viability of establishing a common solution that can be adopted by other Councils. The project will look to understand what kind of map layers and data is used within ESRI and configure ESRI map layers into Newham Co-Create to allow resident access to more advanced technology during the engagement process.
For more information, please visit the Newham Co-create website.