dxw’s impact
Achieving better outcomes for communities around the UK in 23/24
A note from our CEO Dave
In an election year and against a difficult economic backdrop, dxw continued to deliver high quality work for clients across the public and non-profit world. Helping teams modernise how they operate and achieving better outcomes for communities around the UK.
I’m proud that we continued to deliver such impactful work through a period that has been challenging for so many citizens and businesses. As the new Government took its place, dxw has remained a valued partner to organisations working across the digital public realm.
This report shares some highlights from 23/24.
We want everything we do to have a positive impact
- creating public services that make life better for people
- improving the capability of the teams that deliver them
- fixing infrastructure foundations so government can benefit from more advanced technology
- improving access to quality data to support informed decision making
Our services
Central government
This year our main focus has been on longer term projects to tackle legacy technology and improve services for schools and some of our most vulnerable citizens. In doing so, we’ve also put in place the foundations needed to explore the use of AI.
Justice
With the prison population still at historically high levels, there’s a well publicised and urgent need to reduce overcrowding.
We know that providing people with the right rehabilitative support significantly reduces their chances of reoffending and ending up back in prison.
Prison leavers who are homeless, for example, are almost 50% more likely to reoffend, with about 800 people per month going straight from prison into homelessness. This brings with it significant costs.
In 2019, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) estimated the cost to society of reoffending was over £18 billion.
Since 2020 we’ve been working in partnership with MoJ to give people leaving prison the best chance of a fresh start. Last year we developed and launched a national accommodation service to find people a suitable place to live. We also transformed the approach to referrals for MoJ’s range of rehabilitative programmes.
Staff referring to these services now spend less time on admin, so they can provide better support for the people in their care. The improved data captured by these services shows which interventions are making the most impact, so the department can make informed decisions about where to focus their resources.
Education
We’ve continued to build on our long running partnership with the Department for Education (DfE).
This year we developed a new service for schools becoming academies across England and Wales, replacing an outdated legacy system.
Academies made up around 44% of all schools and over half of all pupils in England in the 2023/24 academic year. With this number continuing to grow year on year, it’s important to have a smooth conversion process.
“The main thing for me is how seamless the new system is… Also, just having a system that loads in a timely manner and reliably saves the data you input provides a sense of trust.”
DfE Caseworker
With an increasing number of schools expected to become academies, the service means DfE can deal with this demand more efficiently and provide a better service to schools. The vast majority of eligible schools now choose to use the digital service, and most take a month or less to complete the application submission process.
The service also unlocks opportunities to make better use of academy data, with the flexibility to accommodate future changes already built in.
On a related project, we moved the new Manage Free Schools service to public beta. Taking a significant step towards replacing the current process for tracking complex, long running projects to build and open free schools that have more control over how they operate.
The Digital Centre of government
For 10 years we’ve collaborated with the Government Digital Service (GDS) on central government campaigns and blogs.
Our hosting and support services have enabled government teams to create and publish high profile campaign sites like Floods Destroy and Fire Kills.
There are now around 80 campaigns hosted on the platform. This year we rolled out improved feature-rich tracking functionality, which reduces reliance on third party tools.
An important part of working in the open, we host and support the government blog platform which is home to over 200 blogs from different organisations across the public sector. Over 200,000 people subscribed to these blogs this year to keep informed about the work happening in government.
We also partner with GDS to support GOV.UK Publishing, used by civil servants to release information to the public on the UK Government domain https://www.gov.uk/. Our recent work together has improved security, accessibility, user support, and the communication flow for publishing teams.
Our services
Wider public sector
Our work across the public sector has helped organisations take practical steps to achieve better outcomes for citizens and businesses.
The Welsh Government recently introduced a Bill to legislate for a Visiter Levy (or tourism tax) for Wales. If the Bill becomes law, local authorities will be able to introduce a levy to help fund the local costs of tourism and invest in things like maintaining pathways, cleaning beaches, and promoting Welsh heritage.
With the potential to raise up to £33 million per year, we helped the Welsh Revenue Authority translate their policy ideas into prototypes and explore what a visitor levy service might look like.
We examined different legislative models and user experiences, as well as how the service might change over time. The service is now in alpha and beginning to take shape.
Our award-winning project with Redbridge Council provided strategic solutions to improve access to Adult Social Care services. Redbridge, like many other councils, needs to meet increasing demand for adult social care with limited resources.
Last year, gross expenditure on adult social care by local authorities was £27.1 billion, with over 2 million requests for support (equivalent to 5,715 requests per day). This demand is continuing to grow with an expected 26% increase in the population aged over 65 by 2030, and the legacy of the pandemic.
During our research, we spoke to over 100 service users and providers including residents, GPs and community groups to get to the root cause of issues.
Our recommendations show how to use digital to improve efficiency where it’s most beneficial to residents, and how to engage them earlier so fewer people reach crisis point. The findings are openly available for other councils and NHS Trusts to use.
Our services
Charities
We’ve worked with charities and tech-for-good companies to help them do more with less.
dxw family member, Neontribe, has a long term partnership with Alexandra Rose, a national charity that works to alleviate food poverty by giving families access to fresh fruit and veg. They support thousands of families through their vouchers which are redeemed locally for healthy, affordable food.
With demand increasing through the cost-of-living crisis, Neontribe has helped them reach more families by joining up the process and bringing it online for everyone. The charity recently passed the milestone of 2 million vouchers spent.
“The first million vouchers took 7 years for us to achieve in comparison to the second which only took us 18 months. Although this is likely to have been influenced by the pandemic and cost of living crisis, the digital solution has allowed us as a charity to accelerate voucher distribution and manage the demand from the public.”
Head of Operations
Alexandra Rose Charity
Neontribe also continued its work with New Philanthropy Capital on Signpost+, a collaborative programme that uses data and technology to improve how young people access services and empower them to get support whenever they need it.
This year, Neontribe conducted research which focussed on the mindset of young people when they need support to inform how to signpost services in a way that’s accessible and makes sense to them. Providing the information they need to make the right personal choice.
Maximising our impact
When we’re not working with clients we spend time actively developing dxw and widening the benefit of our work for public good.
Supporting the public digital community
We’re long-standing members of the public digital community, sponsoring events like UKGovCamp and the Leeds Digital Festival.
As well as launching and hosting the first ever UKCharityCamp which was attended free of charge by 60 people from large and small charities to learn more about how digital can be used across the sector.
We became the official sponsor of the Digital Inclusion Toolkit, which provides resources to help councils tackle digital poverty. Improving digital inclusion has been cited as a priority by the Government, with figures showing that 1.6 million people in the UK are currently living offline without the devices, connection or skills they need.
Working in the open
We believe that working in the open makes things better.
As part of our work on DfE’s Teaching Vacancies service, we built a mail-notify plugin that allows the service to connect with GOV.UK Notify. The application is open source and we’ve adapted it so it can be used by any product or service looking to integrate with Notify to send emails to users.
This free plugin reduces duplication for public sector teams by providing an open solution for a common need. It’s been downloaded over 400,000 times and used by services including the NHS’s Manage vaccinations in schools.
We share how we work in our Playbook which had over 11,000 unique visitors last year and 35,000 page views.
We blog regularly, whether that’s reflecting on what government is doing around AI or making the case for digital infrastructure for the public sector.
We published our first dxw Accessibility Manual, an open resource on how to ensure the accessibility of our public services.