Open Call
Expression of interest: councils tackle environmental and disaster challenges
Overview
Coastal local authorities face growing pressures from environmental change, flood risk, and extreme weather. Collecting accurate data, responding quickly, and keeping teams safe are ongoing challenges.
Through the Innovation Procurement Empowerment Centre (IPEC), Somerset Council is exploring how drone and digital technologies can improve environmental monitoring and disaster response, and we want other coastal councils to get involved.
Why join:
- Share your experiences to shape tested solutions
- Access insights from real-world pilot projects
- Explore collaboration opportunities and future participation
- Learn from peers facing similar challenges
If your council is tackling flood monitoring, emergency response planning, or coastal resilience, we’d love to hear from you.
Innovation challenge
Climate change is intensifying flood and coastal hazards, making traditional inspection and monitoring methods too slow, costly, and resource‑intensive to deliver the timely, high‑quality evidence required for compliance and effective decision‑making
Exploring Drone Technology for Public Service Innovation
Innovation is essential because this is not just a hardware challenge but a data challenge: To unlock the full potential of drone technology, we must integrate drone‑based sensing with advanced analytics and interoperable evidence management. This will enable rapid, safe, and repeatable monitoring, predictive risk modelling, and performance tracking of interventions—capabilities that current processes cannot achieve at the necessary scale or speed.
Drones are proving especially valuable in areas such as:
- Flood risk assessment
- Land and asset surveillance
- Emergency planning
By enabling faster, more accurate data collection and informed decision-making drone innovation is reshaping how local authorities manage risk, respond to crises, and plan for the future.
About IPEC
Why Innovation Procurement is needed
Through the Innovation Procurement Empowerment Centre (IPEC), we’re working with Somerset Council to explore how drone technology and other digital solutions can be procured to enhance data collection and strengthen response capabilities.
We know other councils are facing similar challenges and may benefit from support in adopting innovative procurement approaches. That’s why we’re inviting authorities with aligned priorities to follow this work. By getting involved early, you’ll have the opportunity to:
- Potentially benefit from the solutions developed
- Help shape the challenge
- Share local insights and context
- Raise concerns or barriers around procurement
- Learn from emerging lessons
Interested in joining the conversation?
Do you have a similar innovation challenge? Or want to learn more about how IPEC can help with your Innovation challenge? Express your interest by emailing george.wardell@cp.catapult.org.uk.
Working with IPEC
What Working with IPEC Can Do
Partnering with IPEC gives you access to tools, insights, and support to drive innovation in procurement:
- Develop challenge statements that empower suppliers to innovate and collaborate
- Ensure processes are inclusive and welcoming to SMEs and startups
- Learn from what we’ve achieved so far—and apply it locally
- Join workshops that build agile, forward-thinking procurement practices
- Embed innovation procurement into your policy and strategy
- Leverage the Competitive Flexible Procurement process to your advantage
- Bake in both trialling and scaling within a single procurement journey
Open call opens
Open call closes
Application process
Applications close Friday 5th December
Email IPEC including the following information – Your name, Job title, contact information and name of local authority at george.wardell@cp.catapult.org.uk
