FAITH: Building Trust Between Citizens, Local Authorities and Contractors

Faith is often described as being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. In this project we aim to develop innovative trusted digital services that will enable citizens, local authorities and contractors to have the faith in each other and the systems they use in order to work in partnership to maintain the UK's transport infrastructure more efficiently. At present maintaining the UK's transport infrastructure is an opaque process with potential distrust between the stakeholders. For example, members of the public can report defects on the roads but there is rarely any way for them to monitor the progress of repairs and road users are often left wondering what repairs are being carried out and why. Local authorities often feel the need to visit reported defects before logging them as faults and then to revisit the defects after they have been repaired to check on the work. This lack of transparency of the process and the desire to continually inspect work has major cost implications - we believe the project can deliver substantial savings to Local Authorities and contractors. The project includes a multidisciplinary team of social scientists, ICT specialists and end-users to explore the use of digital technologies to support trust between citizens, local authorities and contractors. In particular we will combine recent advances in pervasive computing with new trust models based on those found in social networking scenarios to deliver an innovative set of trusted digital services to facilitate more effective delivery of contracted services to Local Authorities and the general public.

The Faith project aims to develop innovative trusted services to enable citizens, local authorities and contractors to work in partnership to more efficiently maintain the UKs transport infrastructure. Such maintainance is an expensive and complex process and a critical factor for local authorities in managing their respective highways maintenance operations, keeping them within budget and achieving their KPIs is the absolute confidence they need to have in the stakeholders involved in the maintainance process and the data they share. These stakeholders include members of the public, the authorities themselves and the contracrtors and sub-contractors who perform the work while the data includes that sent to the councils from central government (budget holders), data to and from highways maintenance sub-contractors, and data to and from the general public. The veracity of this data is crucial to the issuance and subsequent effective and efficient management of works orders by the local authorities and the highways maintenance subcontractors. It also impacts on the quality of feedback given to the general public on completion, or otherwise, of the works in question, whether this is for potholes or larger highways maintenance projects. Such feedback is becoming ever more crucial with the Big Society concept that is being promoted by the Government at local authority level. There is an inherent trust element that the general public need to have in order to get involved in Big Society and take part in local authority initiatives. Should there exist a lack of confidence between the local authorities and the general public in the local authority's ability to complete work, there is an erosion of confidence in the local authorities to delivery other local authority services. The consortium will develop a cost effective, easy to use, embedded and robust, innovative new software system that combines mobile and pervasive technologies with new trust models and that is designed to enable stakeholders to build up a degree of faith and trust in the actions of each other in order to have more confidence in data produced and to enable more lightweight checking processes to be employed. It is anticipated that by using the Faith system, subsequent management accuracy and efficiency created by trust in the data and activities of stakeholders will enable the council and their various partners in the highways maintenance process to generate significant operational cost savings and efficiencies and a detailed Sales Forecast and ROI model have been produced that illustrate the timeframe and cost implications of delivering the new system. Market research carried out has shown that no competition exists in this market sector and that the potential impact on the industry is significant. This is particularly true because of the significant shortfall in the road structural budget and impending budget cuts set against an average percentage increase of 40 % in the number of visual highway defects in England over the past ten years demonstrates the scale of the problem now facing the highways maintenance departments of local authorities and their associated sub-contractors. Radical change in the way that highways maintaince is conducted is inevitable and this presents a significant opportunity for the project as trust will be a key element in determining the sector's ability to undertake this change. If the project is successful in generalising Faith beyond the highways maintenance domain then the potential beneficiaries would include all those involved in commissioning work on behalf of the general public. This would offer considerable benefits for society as a whole with potential significant cost savings and lower levels of public anxiety with respect to service provision - changes that would benefit the entire UK. See Appendix A of the TSB proposal for more details.