Case Study: The Local Investment Programme

Programme Overview

The Local Investment Programme (LIP) 2017/18 was the first wave of NHS Digital's Social Care Digital Innovation Programme, managed by the Local Government Association and evaluated by Traverse and the Bayswater Institute. It funded 19 councils with £50,000 each to develop technology-based initiatives in adult social care. Few projects demonstrated measurable cost savings within the 12-month programme, but the evaluation generated substantial learning about the conditions for and barriers to digital innovation in social care.

Selected Outcomes

Barnet: Assistive technology in supported living for people with learning disabilities. Confirmed savings in 2018/19: £152,666. Projected savings for 2019/20: over £435,000.

Hampshire: Amazon Echo/Alexa trial with 50 service users. 68% felt it helps maintain independence; 48% agreed they could rely less on carers.

Solihull: Mobile technology for mental health professionals — estimated 24 hours per week of approved mental health professional time saved; total saving calculated at £28,380.

Luton and Central Bedfordshire: NHSmail and shared care records for care homes — a further £995,000 obtained from NHS England for roll-out to 100 homes, with anticipated reduction in non-elective admission costs of £1.2 million.

Key Cross-Cutting Findings

Information governance is the dominant structural barrier: DARS approval took up to 15 months in one case. GDPR implementation during May 2018 — during the live pilot period — created a "perfect storm."

The 12-month timescale is consistently too short: cost savings and outcome evidence typically emerge 2–3 years after deployment. LIP generated learning, not proven impact.

Starting small works; starting wide does not. Projects with narrow initial ambitions that built gradually outperformed projects with broad initial scope.

A discovery phase is essential: many projects only discovered post-deployment that the intervention was ill-suited to the application. The successor programme (SCDIP) mandated a discovery phase as a result.

Behaviour change is not automatic: adoption requires trust-building before service users will replace human visits with digital ones. Fear that technology will replace human care must be addressed explicitly in co-design.

Corroboration of the Complexity Challenges

The LIP findings directly corroborate all four Complexity Challenges: Hubris (multiple projects assumed that deploying technology would generate adoption); Sustainability (12-month, £50,000 funding cycles are structurally incompatible with iterative sociotechnical innovation); Collaboration (IG and DARS barriers are a direct product of fragmented cross-organisational information governance); Context (approaches did not transfer between councils without significant adaptation).