The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the decline of our high streets and town centres.

At a recent roundtable in partnership with Wired, Doug Brown, Head of Data, Cyber and AI Guild and Chief Data Scientist of Capita Consulting, was joined by Lisa Talia Moretti, a digital sociologist at the Ministry of Justice; Reid Darby, innovation lead at Golden Valley Development in Cheltenham; Carly Kind, Director at the Ada Lovelace Institute and Tavi Kotka, an engineer/entrepreneur and former Chief Information Officer for the Estonian government to discuss data, identity and the digital citizen.

Capita and the Local Government Chronicle hosted a webinar to bring together local government experts and discuss how to secure funding to help revitalise our high streets.

Back in the Thatcher years of the 1980s, the explosion of out-of-town shopping centres arguably presented the biggest threat to our traditional town centres.

Town centres and high streets have traditionally been the focus of urban life, whether this is somewhere like London - often described as ‘a collection of villages’ - or a market or regional town.

Local government exists to serve local people, businesses and those who visit, either to work or for recreation.

Andrew Conroy, Property Director at Capita, explains how local authorities can structure property development partnerships to make sure that residents and local businesses are projects’ major beneficiaries

People want to be able to contact their local council easily, quickly and on whatever channel suits them best.

We recently participated in a panel at the National Planning Summit to discuss how we can support and improve the planning processes for local authorities.

Masterplans are a key tool that planners can use to shape the delivery of a diverse range of projects, from simple layouts of individual sites through to urban extensions, new towns and area-wide regeneration projects.