DCMS Short-term Lets Discovery and Alpha - Introduction
DCMS and Made Tech teams have come together to work on a new service that will enable owners or agents of properties in England used for paid short-term lets (STL) to register their property or properties.
This registration scheme was legislated in the Levelling-Up and Regeneration Act 2023, following a government call for evidence in 2022 and a subsequent consultation on a registration scheme for short-term lets in England in 2023.
The scheme’s aim is to capture invaluable data on short-term lets - to help DCMS and other stakeholders understand the size and shape of the short-term lets market in England, to guide future local and national policy development; and to help local authorities identify and manage issues relating to short-term let properties in their area.
It also aims to support government objectives on the UK visitor economy, to boost England’s reputation and attract more international visitors by giving visible assurance we have a high-quality, safe guest accommodation offer; and to improve consistency and coherence in the framework of health and safety regulations, levelling the playing field in the guest accommodation sector.
It will be a national (England only) and mandatory requirement once secondary legislation is laid.
From July to October 2023, the DCMS Short-Term Tourist Accommodation policy team worked on a Pre-Discovery with the DDaT Product & Experience team to start to understand:
- what users’ needs are around a short-term let registration scheme
- how a digital register should be designed
- the complexity, time and costs of delivering a digital register
Following that work, the Made Tech team have been brought in to support the DCMS teams with further Discovery and Alpha work, to:
- understand more about our users’ needs and what they’re trying to achieve; including those user groups not covered in the Pre-Discovery
- learn about existing registration schemes in other countries, to inform the design of the scheme
- explore and test potential register designs and assumptions about the scheme with users
- explore and test how the service might be designed and administered, including interactions with relevant stakeholders
- understand any constraints we would face in how the service is designed or run - for example because of technology or legislation
The problem statement we are working towards solving is:
Because of a lack of reliable insight around short-term lets in England, they could be viewed as a possible risk to visitor safety, and the cohesion of communities, housing supply and affordability in some areas. Without reliable insight, there is a risk that the sector will continue to face challenges of fairness, sustainability, and consistency in meeting existing guest accommodation standards across England.
How we work
We have been working using agile methodologies, including Scrum and Kanban methods. For instance, we have been using a kanban board (Trello) to track, manage and progress work, as well as utilising fortnightly sprints to time-box tasks and prioritise deliverables based on the findings from activities in previous sprints. We have ensured that we work in the open by providing visibility of progress to stakeholders, including via weeknotes, fortnightly Showcases and engaging with wider stakeholders.
We have been working as a strong blended team, with a mixture of policy and digital leads and have encouraged continuous learning and feedback throughout. This has been demonstrated through our use of retrospectives, managing actions and being able to reprioritise work based on team capacity.
Our assumptions
Following an initial two-week Discovery period, we identified assumptions around the scheme, and prioritised these into our 25 riskiest assumptions to focus our exploration and testing during the Alpha phase.
We grouped these into the following themes:
- Service ownership and operation
- Short-term let Operators and Management Companies
- Booking platforms
- Local Authorities
- Technical exploration
- Compliance
- Impact of the Service
Further details on our assumptions can be found in our Assumptions section.
Our approach
See our delivery timeline here
