Improving building safety through digital transformation with Southwark Council

The Challenge

Following the Grenfell Tower tragedy in 2017, building safety became a national priority. Local authorities were required to undertake detailed assessments of high-rise buildings to identify risks and ensure compliance with new regulations.

For Southwark Council, this meant collecting accurate safety data from the owners of over 1,224 buildings over 18m tall, a process that was traditionally reliant on manual, paper-based systems.

As Jack Ricketts, Principal Planner at Southwark Council, explained:

The existing approach involved printing forms, scanning responses, manually inputting data into spreadsheets, and often chasing building owners for information, a system that was slow, error-prone, and resource-intensive. The risk of non-compliance with central government reporting requirements, especially from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), was a pressing concern.

Background

Southwark Council is one of London’s largest and most diverse boroughs, managing over 36,000 council homes and supporting a population of more than 300,000 residents. The council has long been committed to digital innovation, having already partnered with Unboxed on projects such as the Back-office Planning System (BoPS) and Affordable Housing Monitoring.

The introduction of new legislation, including the Fire Safety Act 2021 and the Building Safety Bill, placed additional responsibilities on local authorities to collect, validate and report data on building materials, risks and remediation. With increasing scrutiny and legal accountability, Southwark recognised the need to transform how this information was gathered and managed.

Our Approach

We kicked off the project with an alignment workshop, bringing together Unboxed and Southwark stakeholders to establish a shared vision, define success criteria and identify the existing pain points in the process. Together, we mapped the end-to-end user journey and prioritised research with the building owners and council teams who interact with the service daily.

From there, we moved into delivery, building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) of the Building Safety Platform over three sprints across six weeks. Working in the open, we hosted regular Show & Tells to share progress and gather feedback from Southwark, MHCLG, the LGA, and other stakeholders. This collaborative, agile way of working allowed us to respond quickly to evolving needs and focus on real outcomes.

We designed and developed a digital version of the External Wall Systems Survey, allowing building owners to submit the necessary data through a clear, accessible interface. The service was built using the GOV.UK Design System and integrated with GOV.UK Notify for automated email and letter notifications. We also explored how data from Ordnance Survey and Companies House could be combined to better identify buildings and their owners, a crucial step in reducing gaps in the dataset.

Critically, the platform was developed with future scaling in mind. It was built in a way that could accommodate additional data requirements, for example, the inclusion of buildings over 11m, and potentially support other services across the council.

What we learnt

Delivering the Building Safety Platform demonstrated how powerful collaborative, agile delivery can be, especially when tackling complex problems. Working closely with Southwark’s multidisciplinary team helped us move quickly and with confidence, ensuring that both technical and user needs were being met at every stage. Reusing existing government services and aligning with established design patterns made it easier to deliver value early, while still creating something robust and future-facing.

We also learned a great deal about the challenges of data collection at this scale. One of the most significant hurdles was identifying reliable contact details for building owners, particularly email addresses, which made engagement difficult. The process of validating and cleansing building address data was equally important, ensuring that it could be trusted, reported on, and fed into systems like MHCLG’s Delta platform without introducing further errors.

These challenges reinforced the importance of designing services with flexibility and scalability at their core. We saw firsthand the benefit of local government sharing knowledge and tools to solve common problems, and the potential for open-source, reusable platforms to drive change not just within one borough, but across the sector.

The outcome

The MVP of the Building Safety Platform provided Southwark with a working digital service that replaced paper-based data collection with a streamlined, automated system. The service made it easier for building owners to provide the necessary safety information, while giving the council more reliable, up-to-date data, reducing human error and administrative burden.

Officers could track engagement and outreach, manage incoming responses, and report to central government with greater accuracy and speed. The platform has already attracted attention from other London boroughs and national organisations who are exploring how they might adopt or build upon the service. For Southwark, it has laid a strong foundation for future enhancements, including bulk data uploads, integrations, and continuous monitoring.

Looking ahead — Future phases

With phase one successfully delivered, Southwark Council and Unboxed have outlined clear priorities for the next stages of development. A key focus is to automate how data is shared with national systems — particularly MHCLG’s Delta platform — which would significantly reduce manual effort and potential errors.

There’s also a growing opportunity to expand the platform’s use beyond Southwark. Other councils are already expressing interest in reusing or adopting the service, and future phases could support a multi-council model — creating consistent, efficient workflows for data collection and compliance.

Maintaining high-quality data will remain critical. Plans include working closely with MHCLG to validate what data is most useful for assessing risk, and exploring whether building safety information should be collected on a more continuous basis, especially as buildings evolve or undergo remediation.

Finally, the team is looking at ways to improve contact with building owners. This could include better automated identification of email addresses and a “Claim Building” feature to allow owners to register their information directly, reducing the need for manual chasing.

By continuing to invest in the platform, Southwark is not only meeting today’s compliance challenges — it’s setting a new standard for building safety in local government.