The government should support innovation in towns where trials would be too costly and risky for local authorities to run on their own, and where government involvement can accelerate progress substantially. This should be delivered via a local innovation fund and should include:

• partnering with towns to run innovation pilots for new communication technologies, including 5G use cases
• supporting experimentation and early rollout for innovations in on demand bus services.

Government should ensure that lessons from trials are transparently and proactively shared.