England's local government shake-up promises to be a massive tech headache
- Reference: 1761902111
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/10/31/england_local_government_shakeup/
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Splitting up Surrey is the first part of a massive reorganization of English local government that looks set to soak up the sector's technology capacity for years.
Surrey, the first of 21 areas that will undergo local government reorganization (LGR), will move to its new two-council structure on April 1, 2027. The government plans that all other parts of England served by upper-tier county councils and lower-tier borough, city, and district councils, as well as in some cases neighboring unitary councils, will have unitary councils from April 1, 2028.
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More than 200 existing councils are likely to be abolished, meaning that local government technologists will have to merge and in some cases split software and technology used to deliver services and operate organizations. Local authorities provide hundreds of services, with many relying on specialized software chosen by each council.
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Lower-tier authorities in county areas have some heavy responsibilities. They collect domestic council tax on behalf of all tiers of local government and the police, manage the electoral rolls used for local and national elections, and run planning systems. For each of these, the successor unitary councils will have to take over legacy software, decide which package to standardize on or whether to choose something new, buy or extend a license, then migrate records, all while continuing to maintain services.
In April 2023, as part of a smaller round of LGR that involved three areas, a new unitary Somerset Council replaced a county council and four districts. It inherited four different electoral management systems from the districts, although three were from the same supplier, iDox, and it was able to migrate to its latest offering in time for elections held that May. It also moved to a single financial system on day one, taking advantage of procurement work carried out by the county council.
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But when profiled by public sector professional organization Socitm's [5]In Our View magazine earlier this year, Somerset Council had yet to complete the process of moving to a single revenues and benefits system, was still running five legacy planning systems, and had decided to let existing Microsoft licenses come to an end rather than merge them.
[6]Europe's largest city council delays fix to disastrous Oracle system once more
[7]Cold comfort to teachers who got paid late, but ERP software rollout had 'unrealistic' timeline
[8]UK authority struggles to RISE with SAP, throws another £9M at project
[9]UK council selling the farm (and the fire station) to fund ballooning Oracle project
In areas that get split into two or more unitaries such as Surrey, successor councils will also have to decide whether to break up county council systems including social care case management and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Alternatively, they can put these systems into shared services, but this can cause problems if the successor councils want to work in different ways.
Some of the new councils, including those in Surrey, will have to deal with fallout from their predecessors' IT problems. In July 2024, [10]Surrey County Council was criticized for underestimating the complexity of replacing its SAP ERP software with Unit4 after the new system went live 18 months late at a cost of £27.9 million, 68 percent above the original budget.
[11]Gloucestershire County Council delayed its move to SAP's cloud software by more than a year with costs more than doubling, and [12]West Sussex County Council used property sales to help fund a move from a 20-year-old SAP system to an Oracle replacement, with costs increasing from £2.6 million to nearly £40 million.
The government justifies the pain of LGR by saying it will speed up planning decisions, improve the running of local public services, and save money.
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"With one council in charge in each area, we will see quicker decisions to grow our towns and cities and connect people to opportunity," local government minister Steve Reed told the leaders of Surrey's doomed councils in a [14]letter [PDF] dated October 28.
"It will also help reform local public services. Bringing services like housing, public health, and social care under one roof means one council can see the full picture and spot problems early."
The split is also certain to keep resident tech pros busy for some time. ®
Get our [15]Tech Resources
[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/publicsector&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aQSWyWYIAFxNL3WXkgc5gAAAAZM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/publicsector&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aQSWyWYIAFxNL3WXkgc5gAAAAZM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
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[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/publicsector&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aQSWyWYIAFxNL3WXkgc5gAAAAZM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://socitm.net/resource-hub/updates/in-our-view-issue-43/#toc-main-feature-a-survivors-guide-to-lgr
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/24/uk_mega_council_delays_fix/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/16/18_months_late_and_68pc/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/21/gloucestershire_rise_with_sap/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/27/west_sussex_oracle_assets/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/16/18_months_late_and_68pc/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/21/gloucestershire_rise_with_sap/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/27/west_sussex_oracle_assets/
[13] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/publicsector&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aQSWyWYIAFxNL3WXkgc5gAAAAZM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[14] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6900953eafec1781f779947a/surrey-lgr-secretary-of-state-letter-to-surrey-leaders.pdf
[15] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: "More than 200 existing councils are likely to be abolished"
Uber Mayor?
Is that like Mayor McCheese at McDonalds but at Uber instead?
Lower your expectations.
Local government here will always be crap due to a lack of both cash and competence. No reform will ever improve it, even if it superficially appears to be sensible. It will just cost tonnes of money and risk services. This is just a forced tech upgrade to W11 etc, as otherwise, they would avoid it, and the cost/AI aspects of it.
Painful to implement, but necessary
Although it will definitely create some challenges (presumably all the legal agreements will be with different bodies, too) this feels like a wise decision. It was never clear as a resident which layer of the council was responsible for what and there must have been a degree of friction in constantly having to communicate between borough and county levels.
Unitary authorities are so much easier to understand.
This is crap.
We asked for the merge to generate three unitary councils but were overridden by central govt.
At least we are not paying for Woking.
Angry of Tandridge.
Re: This is crap.
They have owned up to Woking in advance. When Somerset was combined, it immediately declared a financial emergency, and risks going bankrupt next year. Oddly, this state of affairs had not been mentioned when the five district councils were talking about the merger. When Northamptonshire went bust in 2021, it was combined into a new Northants unitary authority to use the other councils' funds to pay the bills too.
It would be nice it, when talking about all these new unitary authorities, they admitted who was bankrupt, who caused them to go bankrupt, and why the other councils should bail them out. But that would require being honest with the electorate, wouldn't it.
Re: This is crap.
West Northants Unitary:
Made up of:
South Northants District (Rural, Conservative, nice war chest to deal with unforeseen incidents)
Daventry District (Rural, Conservative, nice war chest to deal with unforeseen incidents)
Northampton Borough (Town, Labour, essentially bankrupt for years)
All the money pooled into the new West Northants Unitary to pay off Borough's debts.
Old Borough is getting the Lions share of the money, with services all reduced in the old Districts (in my village the only thing paid for by the Unitary is the Waste Collection, we even have to pay for our own grass cutting, etc. Individual households have to pay extra to get garden waste bins for instance.)
And of course, the lies about it all saving money.
I have been shifted from one of the lowest Council Tax areas (Daventry, which still had a war chest because of careful management) towards one of the highest to match the values in the old Borough (which was bankrupt because of very bad management).
When I was Chairman of my Parish Council I had good communications with Daventry District. When the Unitary took over I had to write code to scrape their website to find out what decisions they had made that week, and often we would find out retrospectively about changes when things (like planning meetings/objections) didn't work the same way.
"More than 200 existing councils are likely to be abolished"
Oooh.
Looks like Birmingham's uber-mayor has some fretting to do.
About bloody time, too.