2024 London Chief Digital Officer Playback
As we look back on 2024, London’s continuing digital and smart city transformation has touched nearly every aspect of city life. From expanding mobile coverage across the Underground network to launching Europe’s largest digital inclusion programme, our efforts have focused on making technology work better for all Londoners.
This year marked significant progress in four key areas that shape how our city thinks about and uses technology:
- Digital connectivity to keep London moving and working
- Innovation collaboration to solve real-world challenges for Londoners and those who serve them
- Data capabilities to help us make smarter decisions
- Initiatives to build public trust in the use of city data
Digital Connectivity
In an increasingly connected world, Londoners rely on fast, reliable internet and mobile coverage to work, learn and stay in touch with family and friends. From the morning commute on the Tube to accessing vital services from home, digital connectivity has become as essential as electricity or water for modern city life. Since 2017, City Hall’s role has been to promote effective partnerships to drive investment and opportunity for further growth.
Connected London
Our Connected London programme has seen remarkable success supporting private investment in London’s connectivity, with full fibre access for homes and businesses growing from just 4% in 2017 to 71% today (in total 89% of properties can now receive gigabit speeds), leading all of England. Since 2017, private investment has topped £1.5bn and thousands of km of fibre has been laid under London’s streets and using Tube tunnels.
We’re particularly proud of our progress in mobile connectivity — achieving 80% coverage of the Tube network by year’s end, with a programme for 4G & 5G on the entire London Underground, London Overground and Elizabeth line in 2026. The completion of 4G mobile coverage on the Elizabeth line ahead of the festive season marked a major milestone towards this.
Connected Networks
We’ve made significant strides in upgrading our city’s connected networks. The TfL-Boldyn partnership is using the below-ground network to power better mobile coverage above ground, with more to come. We’ve also used the same network to substantially upgrade London’s CCTV network, enhancing our city’s community safety with 300+ modern cameras and deliver gigabit connectivity to public buildings, libraries, youth clubs, hostels and other buildings identified by our boroughs.
Working with the London Office of Technology and Innovation (LOTI) at London Councils, we’re currently delivering a ‘scaled pilot’ of hundreds of damp & mould sensors across 20 boroughs.
This unprecedented collaboration builds on the InnOvate programme delivered by the South London Partnership and establishes a framework covering use cases, procurement, ethics, know-how and practitioners, which will be invaluable for the delivery of smart city-adjacent challenges such as the GLA/London Councils thinking around retrofit/NetZero delivery at scale.
As this report from the West London Alliance shows: with the right partnerships, the potential of connected networks to tackle environmental issues, improve public safety and support growth are immense.
Digital Switchover
One of our most pressing challenges has been managing the digital switchover from copper-based PSTN telephone systems. As London’s Chief Digital Officer, together with the Local Government Association (LGA), I’ve had to raise critical concerns about the implications for local government services. In January, we briefed the Financial Times about the estimated costs upwards of £31m for London boroughs, and risks affecting hundreds of thousands of telecare users and those who live in social housing.
Although initially rebuffed, our concerns about the chaotic delivery of what was seen by the then government as a hands-off, ‘industry-led’ transition was (quietly) postponed until January 2027. The change of government has seen a different perspective, with new Minister Sir Chris Bryant introducing new requirements on telecommunications companies — supplemented with a roll-call of CEOs agreeing to it at the Tech UK Summit he chaired in November.
Innovation Collaboration
When London’s public services work together and partner with innovative businesses, it creates better solutions for everyday challenges facing Londoners. Whether it’s tackling housing issues like damp and mould or making services more efficient, a more structured approach to collaboration helps the city solve problems more effectively whilst making the most of public resources.
LOTI’s Growing Impact
2024 saw even closer working between LOTI and City Hall, making good the founding promise in 2019 to improve collaboration across the city. LOTI’s impressive scope of work sets out the sheer range of work and is recommended viewing for all those interested in building city-regional capabilities.
In January, we published our evaluation of LOTI, which evidenced substantial improvements in innovation collaboration across London. LOTI has proven particularly effective in:
- Digital leadership and knowledge-sharing
- Innovative joint projects, such as the damp and mould sensor deployment
- Work on Generative AI, including Copilot deployment assessment and work with partners such as Beam
- The Pan-London Data Sharing Agreements project, enhancing collaboration and saving boroughs hundreds of thousands in costs
LOTI’s work at the cutting edge includes the Local Authority Sandbox, the first of its kind in the UK — a physical, dedicated, and collaborative space where LOTI boroughs and their partners can experiment with the latest innovation methods to solve complex challenges in adult social care.
Open Innovation
City Hall’s Open Innovation Hub brings problems the public sector is trying to solve closer to markets and innovators. Since 2018, the Mayor has launched 28 open calls and invested £3m to help 135 innovators prototype, test and scale their ideas. A total of £125m of investment has subsequently been raised by challenge alumni.
This year’s open innovation challenge winners were announced in October, focusing on improving innovation in skills delivery. Future scoping work is being undertaken to extend open innovation calls to specifically support the Mayor’s ambitions on decarbonisation, biodiversity and flood risks.
SHIFT at the Olympic Park
We’re partnering with SHIFT to showcase the Olympic Park as London’s test-bed for climate innovation. As an innovation district, SHIFT has:
- Supported 45 innovation trials on the Park
- Built a membership of 190 cross-sector organisations
- Launched a ‘Digital Frontiers’ Roadmap
- Delivered the Future Industries Demonstrator programme, supporting 215 London-based SMEs in climate and health tech
National and International Engagement
London continues to work closely with innovation colleagues across the UK, primarily through the LGA’s Cyber and Digital Committee and meet-ups such as LocalGovCamp. We maintain strong connections with Liverpool and Manchester in particular on issues such as joining-up city data, 5G, digital switchover and digital transformation.
The July UK General Election has seen a real shift in attention and exciting leadership vision around digital between central and local government — and the new Digital Centre for Government. How the centre can support local and regional transformation is now an open issue to develop, in contrast to the last decade.
Nationally and internationally, we represented London and the UK at:
- UN AI for Good Summit in Geneva (May)
- Bloomberg CityLab in Mexico City (October)
- Barcelona Smart Cities Expo (November)
- Liverpool AI Summit (November)
City Data
Good data helps London make better decisions that affect everyone’s daily lives. The Mayor’s Manifesto in May set out ambitions for city data, now considered by the GLA as core infrastructure, alongside transport and other utilities.
The Data for London Library
London’s new city data platform, the Data for London Library, will launch in the new year. This will substantially upgrade and replace the existing London Datastore, making it easier for people to find the datasets they need to create new insights or data services (see below). In pure numbers the new Library will connected nearly 10k datasets by the time of its launch, up from around 2k with the current platform.
The Library is augmented by a wider Data for London (DfL) programme, the Mayor’s Data for London Board and works closely with London’s boroughs via LOTI to reform data-sharing practices, build community and develop ethics and standards. This work now chimes loudly with the objectives of the new government both with its proposed National Data Library and the strong emphasis on data in the Devolution White Paper.
City Data Services
We’ve made significant progress with our data services which underpin our objectives around growth, new housing and inclusion:
- Planning Datahub: UK’s only regional live feed of planning application data
- LAND4LDN: a new data service focusing on sites where we can build new housing in London
- High Streets Data Service: Monitoring the economic health of London’s 600 high streets
- EV Charging Dashboard to support the strategic deployment of charging points (vs charge-point deserts)
- Rough Sleeping Insights Tool — bringing together homelessness data from City Hall, London’s 32 boroughs and providers in one place, for the first time
All of these new services represent a shift away from traditional ‘snapshot-in-time’ analyses informing decision-making to live feeds, enabling real-time or near-real time views of growth or exclusion — and form the basis for further innovation and partnerships.
We do this in the context of a flourishing data ecosystem where our partners also make gains. In October TfL’s partnership with GoogleMaps to update their navigation algorithm improve safe cycling routes in London (with the capability available globally) was recognised at the Seoul Smart City Awards. The London Care Record creates a secure view of health and care information, allowing professionals across London to access important details when needed. In one month alone this year, the record was viewed 2.5 million times by over 100,000 health professionals.
Public Trust
Get Online London
Get Online London, London’s first citywide digital inclusion service, has helped over 75k households access refurbished devices, free mobile connectivity, and digital skills training. This award-winning service, funded by the Mayor, represents the largest single city digital inclusion service in Europe and was recognised at the Barcelona Smart City Expo.
London Privacy Register launched
To improve the transparency of smart city deployments, London became the first city in the UK to publish its data protection impact assessments as open data on the London Datastore — in a dataset known as the London Privacy Register.
London Data Week Success
July brought us London Data Week 2024, our second such annual event: a vibrant celebration of city data innovation in partnership with the Alan Turing Institute. The week featured over 30 events across the city, from smart city walk-shops to coding workshops, bringing together more than 50 organisations. This demonstrated London’s commitment to ethical data use and innovation for public benefit.
Looking Ahead
Looking ahead to 2025, London continues to strengthen its position as a global leader in innovation and inclusion. With the imminent launch of the Data for London Library, ongoing expansion of connectivity across our city, and deepening partnerships across the public and private sectors, we remain committed to harnessing technology to improve the lives of all Londoners. As we face new challenges and opportunities in our smarter city journey, we will continue to prioritise inclusion, innovation and collaboration while ensuring no one is left behind in our increasingly connected city.
