The South London Partnership (SLP) has teamed up with innovation agency Digital Catapult on the InnOvaTe Project, an initiative exploring the use of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to address community challenges and deliver sustainable economic growth.

4th October 2019 

The project will see SLP – a collaboration of five London boroughs (Croydon, Kingston upon Thames, Merton, Richmond upon Thames and Sutton) – work with Digital Catapult to develop IoT solutions that address relevant use cases for citizens and local businesses and to improve service provision, with the ultimate aim of delivering a multi-purpose IoT platform.

Sutton Council has been selected to lead the project on behalf of all other South London Partnership boroughs.

The project aims to support business retention and sustainable economic growth, while assessing pilot’s potential to deliver significant savings to further borough councils.

Commenting on the project, Alex Gluhak, Head of Technology IoT at Digital Catapult, said:

“We’re incredibly excited to be supporting the South London Partnership on this groundbreaking and market-leading initiative. By integrating connected technologies into our community spaces and built environment, we can gain a far clearer picture of how these are being used. Equipped with this data-insight, councils will be in a far better position to make decisions on a whole range of issues.”

Councillor Ruth Dombey, Leader of Sutton Council, highlighted the potential for using air quality and location data to support public health initiatives, and investigating the potential of smart street lighting systems and traffic lights.

Digital Catapult will act as advisory and assurance partner to support Sutton in their stakeholder engagement to develop a programme of activities as well as supporting the delivery of this activity as required. This begins with a series of five targeted innovation workshops to engage businesses, the local community and internal stakeholders within each of the SLP councils. The workshops will take place in September and November 2019 in respective boroughs and are free to attend by SLP stakeholder groups.

SLP was awarded £4 million for the InnOvaTe project by the Strategic Investment Pot (SIP) as part of the London Councils Business Rates Retention scheme, administered by the City of London Corporation.

The learnings from the InnOvaTe project will be used to inform possible future adoption of this new technology at a much larger scale.

Media enquiries: pressoffice@sutton.gov.uk

To find out more about Digital Catapult, please visit: www.digicatapult.org.uk / @DigiCatapult