What Kind of Council Are You Creating?

Local Government Reorganisation is creating one of the biggest opportunities for structural change the sector has seen in decades.

In July, Government confirmed decisions that will see 134 existing councils streamlined into 38 unitary authorities. The ambition is clear: reduce duplication, simplify services and create stronger foundations for devolution.

But there is a risk.

If reorganisation becomes primarily an exercise in combining organisational structures, transferring employees, rationalising estates and choosing between overlapping technology contracts, councils could spend enormous amounts of time and money creating larger versions of the organisations they already have.

That would be a huge opportunity missed.

Local Government Reorganisation should become Local Government Reinvention.

Because underneath the immediate transition planning sits a much more important question:

If you were designing a local authority today, with the technology, data and AI now available, would you design it anything like the organisations being brought together?

In many cases, the answer is probably no.

It is easy to understand why consolidation becomes the immediate priority.

New unitary authorities are bringing together councils with different systems, contracts, processes, datasets, operating models and levels of digital maturity. All of that has to happen while services continue to operate and residents continue to receive support.

So the obvious questions quickly rise to the top.

Which finance system stays? Which CRM becomes the corporate platform? Which planning system should be retained? Which website becomes the front door? Which version of a process becomes the new standard?

Those questions matter. But they should not necessarily be the first ones.

Before deciding which existing system or process survives, councils have an opportunity to ask whether it should survive at all.

Many public sector processes were designed years ago around paper forms, PDFs, email inboxes, spreadsheets and systems that do not communicate properly with each other. Officers compensate by rekeying information, manually validating applications and moving information between disconnected systems.

Those processes do not necessarily need migrating into the new authority.

Some need redesigning out of existence.

It helps to separate three questions:

• Consolidation: Which system or process do we keep?
• Transformation: What is the best way to deliver this service?
• Reinvention: If we were starting today, how should this service actually work?

Local Government Reorganisation is one of the rare moments when councils have permission to ask all three.

Residents do not organise their lives around council departments.

Someone moving home is unlikely to think separately about revenues and benefits, waste, electoral services, housing and parking. They are simply moving house.

A business owner does not necessarily know which department owns licensing, planning, environmental health or business rates. They have an outcome they are trying to achieve.

Yet much of the public sector digital estate still expects people to understand how the organisation is structured before they can find the right service.

New authorities have an opportunity to change that.

Rather than designing services around departments, they can start with life events, needs and outcomes.

A resident should be able to tell their council:

“I’m moving into the area next month.”

“My mother can no longer manage safely at home.”

“I’ve just opened a business.”

From there, the service should understand what that person is trying to achieve, identify the relevant processes, collect information once where possible and coordinate what happens behind the scenes.

Digital provides the interface. Data provides the context. Automation and AI can increasingly provide the intelligence needed to join the experience together.

That is a very different model from simply putting existing departmental forms online.

And new unitary authorities are in a particularly strong position to build it because they are already redesigning structures, services and technology.

None of this works without good information.

AI cannot compensate for fragmented data.

If the information needed to deliver a service is scattered across documents, PDFs, inboxes, spreadsheets and disconnected departmental systems, there is a limit to how intelligent or automated that service can become.

That makes data one of the most important foundations of reorganisation.

The ambition should go beyond successfully moving information from one system to another.

New authorities should use this moment to understand what information they hold, where it originates, who owns it, how accurate it is, how it can be safely shared and how different services use it.

They also need to consider how that information can support better decisions and responsibly enable automation and AI.

Done properly, data stops being something that simply sits inside individual applications.

It becomes infrastructure for the authority.

And that foundation will determine how far councils can realistically go with AI in the years ahead.

There is already plenty of AI experimentation happening across local government.

But reorganisation creates a different question.

Instead of asking “How can we add AI to the council we already have?”, new authorities can ask “Where should AI belong in the operating model we are creating?”

For officers, AI could help summarise long documents and case histories, extract information from correspondence, validate applications, identify missing information, surface relevant policy and guidance, triage requests and highlight the cases that genuinely require human attention.

The citizen experience can change too.

Instead of searching through hundreds of web pages or trying to work out which form belongs to which department, residents could increasingly interact with services that understand what they are trying to achieve and guide them through the right journey.

The purpose is not to remove people from local public services.

It is to remove unnecessary work from the people delivering them.

Less time searching, copying, rekeying, validating and chasing. More time for judgement, expertise, complex decisions and empathy.

There is an important trap to avoid.

Digital transformation is not taking an inefficient process and putting it online. AI transformation is not taking that same process and asking a model to complete parts of it faster.

If the process itself is broken, technology simply creates a faster broken process.

Reorganisation gives councils the opportunity to question inherited processes before they become embedded in the new authority.

Why is this information being requested? Does the council already hold it? Why does an officer need to review this stage manually? Could straightforward decisions happen automatically? Which exceptions genuinely require professional judgement? Why is information being copied between systems?

Every inherited process should be considered a candidate for redesign.

If three merging councils each bring an inefficient version of the same process and the new authority simply chooses one as the corporate standard, that is consolidation.

It is not transformation.

The technology decisions made during reorganisation will shape new authorities long after the transition programme has finished.

That is why digital, data, technology and cyber need to be considered from the outset.

But the goal should not simply be a future application architecture. It should be a future digital operating model.

What should the resident experience look like? What should an officer’s working environment look like? What information should flow automatically? Where should automation sit? Where does AI genuinely add value, and where does it not? Where must a human remain accountable?

Councils also need to consider which capabilities should be shared across the whole authority, how easily services can adapt when legislation or expectations change, and how security, accessibility, transparency and responsible AI use can be built in from day one.

Those questions should shape the technology architecture.

The inherited systems of predecessor councils should not determine what the new organisation is allowed to become.

This is not only a challenge for councils.

It changes what technology partners need to bring to the table.

The job cannot simply be to sell a newly formed authority another system. Partners should be helping councils simplify, integrate and redesign services, combining technical expertise with a genuine understanding of the problem being solved.

That means open technology that can operate as part of a wider ecosystem rather than becoming another disconnected silo.

It also requires honesty about where AI and automation genuinely improve an outcome, rather than adding AI simply because the market expects to see it.

The strongest reorganisation programmes will be built through genuine partnership between authorities, their people and their technology providers.

None of this removes the immediate pressures councils face.

Employees need certainty. Services need to keep running. Data needs to move securely. Systems need to remain available. Budgets need to be controlled. Residents cannot wake up on vesting day to discover that something they rely on no longer works.

Transition has to be managed safely.

But continuity cannot become the ceiling of the ambition.

Once a new authority is established, decisions quickly become embedded. Temporary integrations become permanent. Contracts are renewed. Processes become accepted as simply the way the new council works.

The opportunity for fundamental change can disappear remarkably quickly.

That is why transformation needs to happen alongside transition, not wait until afterwards.

The question should not just be:

How do we successfully create the new council?

It should be:

What kind of council do we actually want to create?

One built around inherited departments, systems and processes?

Or one built around residents, connected information, intelligent automation and empowered employees?

Local Government Reorganisation gives new authorities a rare chance to do something genuinely different.

We should not use twenty-first century technology to carefully rebuild twentieth-century ways of working.

This is the opportunity to move from reorganisation to reinvention, creating the foundations for local public services that are genuinely digital, connected, data-driven and ready for what comes next.