Integrating Open Referral UK with LocalGov Drupal

Adoption
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Hello, we’re a fellow MHCLG funded project and were involved in the Discovery phase of Open Referral UK. It’s great to see how far you’ve come.

We committed at the time to implement the standard in LocalGov Drupal, and I’m happy to say this work has started. We’re aiming for a MVP in the next couple of weeks, and we expect to return to this work at intervals.

You can follow some of the discussions at Discovery: Open Referral standard · Issue #92 · localgovdrupal/localgov_directories · GitHub

For info, LocalGov Drupal is a collaboration of 12 (currently) UK councils on shared web publishing code. This work will be included in our Directories feature.

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LocalGov Drupal implementation
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Great. Thanks for posting here Will.

It’s good to know that councils using LG Drupal will have an "out-of-the-box’ Open Referral UK compliant API feed - accepting that might be basic at first.

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The YouTube video Opportunities for deploying Open Referral UK with LocalGov Drupal is a recording of a session we had on Thursday 20 November 2025 to explore wider use of Drupal with the Open Referral UK API - particularly within local government.

For those who don’t already know, in the UK we have an open source Local Gov Drupal initiative with, at present, 63 councils in the UK and Ireland using the Drupal CMS.

The source code includes modules for both publishing an Open Referral UK (ORUK) API-compliant feed and for surfacing data from an external ORUK feed in web pages. It supports a POST of services into the database.

Use of these features is minimal at present but we held the session on “Opportunities for deploying Open Referral UK with LocalGov Drupal” to explore people’s interest in using existing features, improving them and possibly developing utilities to help process ORUK data feeds (e.g. for data syndication or for data completeness checking).

If you’re interested in following this up, do post here and we’ll try to connect you with the right people. @willguv who posted the original message in this thread co-ordinates LocalGov Drupal activity.

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This is great. Can we feature a post about it on our blog? I’d be happy to help with that process. @willguv glad to see this popping up again :slight_smile:

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My post could certainly be featured in a blog. There’s not a great deal more to say at present, although we are hoping that the LocalGov Drupal people might soon publish a demo ORUK-compliant API feed before we get a live one.

@bloom let me know if you’d like to chat about what else might go in a blog.

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A summary of what’s discussed in the video, along with links to code and documentation, and a screenshot or two, and that shoudl be sufficient.

You say that use of these features is minimal, but does it exist? If one local gov is using it and we can tell the story, that would be sufficient.

Let me know if you and @willguv and I might circle up on this in December or Jan…

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Excellent and very timely. We are looking at doing exactly this at Essex County Council right now and have had some initial conversations with Will. We are kicking off a project to design and test an end to end solution, including data management components enabling service providers publish/update and data owners to assure.

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