It’s hard to believe, but 15 July 2026 marks LOTI’s seventh birthday! 

In this blog, I’d like to share a little of what our incredible community has achieved over the past 12 months, and cue up some big plans we have for our eighth year.

Here are some highlights of LOTI’s work from July 2025 to June 2026 across our four core pillars:

People

People are at the heart of our sector’s ability to innovate. This year, LOTI heavily invested in upskilling staff across our community, delivering 32 training courses to 1,797 professionals on critical topics like GDPR, Lean Six Sigma, workshop design, and data-driven decision-making. Our most popular course – AI (Artificial Intelligence) prompt training – alone upskilled 600 people.

Attracting the right talent is also vital. To that end, we refreshed our Exemplar Job Descriptions Library and launched a brand-new Capabilities and Salaries tool to help boroughs map core skills to roles, and see the average market salaries for specific DDaT positions. And to help boroughs promote their roles far and wide, we launched a new Jobs Hub, advertising over 400 roles, and running targeted LinkedIn video ad campaigns to attract private-sector tech talent.

Yet the stat that stuns me most (given we’re a very small team) is that we ran 105 events! From online webinars to major conferences, we host these because LOTI is first and foremost a community, and few things are more important than providing a space for colleagues to figure out solutions together. 

All those events generate lots of useful insights. To share these widely, we published 55 articles and added 10 major guides to our library of Resources, including research on The legal implications of humans in the Loop, Procuring for IoT, an AI Information Governance Checklists and our Service Demand Canvas.

Technology

Without security, nothing else follows. LOTI expanded its work to provide boroughs with insights into their suppliers’ cyber-posture, flagging risks with the companies in question. Following November’s cyber attack on three London boroughs, we held sessions with boroughs, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) to identify additional measures we can put in place to further improve mutual aid, incident sharing and resilience during cyber incidents.

Sharing technology best practice is a big part of what LOTI does. With its 33 local authority areas, London has 33 potential testbeds for new ideas, but that only works if lessons are shared across organisations. To that end, we published a new library of DDaT and Innovation case studies drawn from best practice examples from across our members. Given that boroughs buy most of the tech they use, we also established a new community of practice dedicated to unpicking how to buy tech better. Looking to international best practice, we led a study trip to Estonia to learn from the country’s world-class digital governance and data sharing models.

With continued massive interest in AI, LOTI members trialed dozens of new use cases. LOTI hosted knowledge-sharing forums to share those and to explore topics like automated minute-taking, using AI to speed up FOI (Freedom of Information) responses, and how to set up AI ethics boards. Crucially, we completed an Agentic AI Discovery for core council services, which identified an opportunity to create more shared AI components rather than using a different product for every service. 

Data

Up until seven years ago, if all London boroughs wanted to share data with each other, the information governance (IG) process alone would take 2 to 10 years. Today, LOTI’s IG expertise is enabling that to be done in just weeks, supporting secure data sharing on deeply complex topics such as child safeguarding, high-risk offenders, IoT sensor deployments and counter-terror CCTV coordination.

Meanwhile, our practical data projects continue to scale: LOTI led the Data & Insights workstream of the £3.5m London Ending Homelessness Accelerator Programme (EHAP) to improve measures that help prevent rough sleeping. We evaluated damp and mould IoT sensor projects across 12 boroughs and built the sensor data programme for Warmer Homes London (a pan-London organisation that focuses on improving the energy efficiency of Londoners’ homes), helping 21 boroughs and 6 Housing Associations secure £1.3m in funding. We completed a successful four-borough data pilot to auto-enrol ~300 pupils for Free School Meals, which is now expanding across London. And our Electric Vehicle Charge Point Dashboard grew to track over 21,000 points.

Innovation

The “I” in LOTI’s name remains a massive focus for our work. Our flagship digital inclusion service, Get Online London (run in partnership with Good Things Foundation), achieved incredible scale, reaching more than 380,000 Londoners and distributing 25,111 devices and 148,690 SIM cards.

Increasingly, we are leaning into missions-based innovation. For London’s Health Mission (which aims to tackle health inequalities caused by digital exclusion), we partnered with the Royal College of Art to use virtual reality and AI to visualise different futures for London’s health and generate dozens of solution concepts. We also supported the Cabinet Office’s Test, Learn and Grow programme, and will be using our Sandbox Method across six boroughs to test radical solutions to combat Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG).

Where next?

Despite all the amazing work going on across our sector, London boroughs still face enormous pressure to find financially sustainable ways of meeting resident needs. In areas like social care and temporary accommodation, it’s widely accepted that optimising their current service models is no longer enough to meet demand.

Yet creating radical (or what I’ve previously called “Bucket 2”) solutions and interventions is extremely hard at an individual council level. Few have the time, resources or risk appetite to build parallel service models alongside their daily operations. 

That’s why LOTI is now planning its most ambitious initiative to date: to establish a Centre for New Public Services. The aim is to give boroughs a dedicated, shared space to work alongside the public, third and private sectors to design radical new solutions for unsustainable service models. I’ll be writing more on that topic soon!

Thank yous

For now, let me end by saying a huge thank you to LOTI’s incredible local government community, whose energy, ideas and commitment to sharing, learning and innovating together is at the heart of everything we do. Thank you to all our partners who provide the additional skills and capacity we need to deliver on our goals. And thank you to my wonderful team, whose hard work has catalysed everything I’ve laid out above.

Collaboration is hard, but worth it. 

Let’s see what we can do together in the year ahead!