Future Councils programme identifies transformation challenges

Choosing between high priorities with limited resources, changing organisational culture, and funding innovation have been identified as among the barriers to council transformation in England.

The Local Digital team at the UK’s Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) pinpointed the challenges through the Future Councils pilot, which has been running with eight English local authorities since May. The programme aims to understand the recurring issues faced by councils and address common blockers.

The challenges identified are:

• Defining clear prioritisation across the array of critical services councils have to deliver.
• Making strong cases for investment, and overcoming cultural barriers and risks, both within a service area and across the council.
• Moving from reactivity to proactivity, and efficiently allocating funding to drive innovation while ensuring the needs of residents are consistently met.
• Overcoming siloed approaches to support effective, council-wide collaboration.
• Enabling council-wide digital transformation by closing the gap in skills.
• Incentivising the market to support effective service delivery within an ever-changing landscape.

More councils are now being invited to share their views on whether they face similar challenges and to discuss potential solutions.

“Risk is needed to make changes and innovate. However, it can be difficult to take risks when economic conditions are tough, the technology landscape is fast-evolving, and citizen needs are ever-changing,” the Local Digital team said in a blog post.

“The risk of innovation can come with a high cost, not only financially but operationally and/or reputationally. For example, buying or building a new technology solution could support a council to move away from a legacy supplier. However, there is a risk of finding it doesn’t work or cannot be effectively implemented.”

Validation

The challenges have been summarised as six problem statements.

“The problem statements give a short, clear explanation of a challenge, summing up what the council wants to change,” Local Digital said.

“The next step is to gather feedback on these problem statements from councils beyond the pilot cohort and the wider sector. This will help us to validate the problem statements and identify scalable opportunities to help the sector as a whole.”

Feedback can be provided via roundtables or online.

The councils taking part in the six-month pilot are Broadland and South Norfolk, Cornwall, Dorset, Leicester, Lewisham, Reading, South Tyneside, and Stevenage. They were chosen from 70 applicants and will receive £750,000 each (US$939,000) for their projects.

Maturity assessment

Through the Future Councils pilot, the eight selected councils are evaluating their current digital and cyber maturity and creating an improvement plan. They are also working towards adopting the Cyber Assessment Framework for Local Government.

Each council will identify at least one key service area to transform through migrating away from legacy technology, and create a plan to address their most significant organisational and cultural barriers.

Lewisham Council, for example, is focusing on registrar services.

“People tend to use our registrars at times when they have a lot going on in their lives – births, deaths, marriages – so we want to make sure that their digital experience is as easy as possible,” Councillor Amanda de Ryk, Lewisham Council Member for Finance and Strategy, told Cities Today in March when the pilots were announced.

“We are looking forward to working with Future Councils to deliver this work and share it with our other council colleagues across the country.”