England's local government shake-up promises to be a massive tech headache

The UK government will replace Surrey County Council and its 11 borough and district councils with two new unitary councils, which will provide most local services to the area's 1.2 million residents. Splitting up Surrey is the first part of a massive reorganization of English local government that looks set to soak up the …

[Pascal Monett]

"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.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "More than 200 existing councils are likely to be abolished"

Uber Mayor?

Is that like Mayor McCheese at McDonalds but at Uber instead?

[Like a badger]

Re: "More than 200 existing councils are likely to be abolished"

"Looks like Birmingham's uber-mayor has some fretting to do."

Methinks you have the wrong end of the stick. There's significant costs of these changes, an little or no benefit to council tax payers. What Starmer's government are doing is moving to abolish district and county councils to make all local government the same "unitary" structure that has achieved such conspicuous success in Birmingham. The changes will make little or no difference to either BCC or the West Mids Combined Authority and their respective mayors. Essentially it's an attempt to abolish Tory dominated county councils by merging them with Labour's urban strongholds and hoping that it'll give Labour more control.

But just like ID cards, it's a welcome diversion to addressing difficult issues like the economy, defence, trade, migration, or the budget deficit.

[SA_Mathieson]

Re: "More than 200 existing councils are likely to be abolished"

Just to confirm that this round of LGR will not include Birmingham City Council, which is already a unitary council under the West Midlands Combined Authority with a mayor. (Some city councils are lower-tier ones under county councils, such as Exeter and Oxford, just to make things confusing.) The government's idea is that everywhere in England will move towards the unitaries and combined authorities structure.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: "More than 200 existing councils are likely to be abolished"

"The government's idea is that everywhere in England will move towards the unitaries and combined authorities structure."

And the consequence will be that areas with relatively little in common will be squashed together so that decisions will be taken by officials with zero local knowledge.

[Phil O'Sophical]

Re: "More than 200 existing councils are likely to be abolished"

<8>decisions will be taken by officials with zero local knowledge.<i/>

Instead of the current situation where they're taken by local officials with an axe to grind and/or a pet project to promote, you mean? Either way, the change won't be for the benefit of the local ratepayers.

[Tron]

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.

[breakfast]

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Painful to implement, but necessary

"It was never clear as a resident which layer of the council was responsible for what"

Not unless you're completely thick, unable, too lazy or uninterested to look it up. Or a combination of them all. It's really not hard to find out who does what. People can't be bothered, and it's the same pitiful apathetic attitude that's going to let this ridiculous scheme go ahead without anyone batting an eyelid. Is it going to reduce your council tax bill in the end. Is it fuck.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Painful to implement, but necessary

"It's really not hard to find out who does what."

Unitary authorities make that much simpler to understand: nobody does anything.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Painful to implement, but necessary

North Yorkshire Council has been a complete disaster on its own terms.

The supposed savings don't exist, it's cost an absolute fortune to do, and the "Local Plans" for several areas have been allowed to expire.

Now multiple developers are trying to build on huge areas of greenbelt and protected land.

The Tory councillors are of course now blaming central Government, despite the fact it's entirely because those same NYC councillors couldn't be arsed to do their jobs and update the Local Plans before they expired.

They finally noticed in April this year, leaving just enough time to update them before the Richmondshire one expires in 2028. Funny that.

[TimMaher]

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This is crap.

Are you sure Borough was Labour? The mighty wikipedia claims it was Conservative from 2011 to abolition in 2021, previously Lib Dem 2007-2011, previously NOC 2003-2007, previously Labour 1993-2003.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northampton_Borough_Council

I'm happy to be corrected if this info is wrong.

That article also links to the shenanigans around a loan of £10M to Northampton Town Football Club, which promptly disappeared, and helped to tip the Council into bankruptcy.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-36342097

A trial did eventually begin in January this year about this, but I've not heard anything about its progress.

[Stephen Wilkinson]

Re: This is crap.

As I'm sure you know given your role on the parish council, garden waste is a non-statutory service hence why the majority of councils charge for it.

Personally I hope that things go well and aren't to painful for my ex-colleagues and friends who still work in local government, unitary has been a threat hanging over the councils since just after I joined my district council 21 years ago.

[Tron]

Re: This is crap.

If you want to know why they went bankrupt, read the Rotten Boroughs section of 'Private Eye'. It covers the stuff local councillors get away with, the huge amounts of public money they lose on crazy projects, the eye-watering pay-offs and the general failure.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This is crap.

3?

I'm in Elmbridge...so was the proposal to create a posh Surrey sandwich? Two shit ones on either side and a posh one in the middle?

Surrey has always puzzled me...to the East you run the risk of being sucked into the Croydon wormhole and all of it's suburbs...and to the West when you reach Guildford and beyond it feels like a different planet where nobody can park straight in a marked bay...Surrey truly is a massive and weird place...

[TimMaher]

Re: Croydon

Actually, that is only a threat if you are inside the M25.

Our part of Tandridge is to the South and is very comfortable.

I describe it as “subrural”, rather than suburban.

However, I do understand your point about the middle bit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This is crap.

"Elmbridge...so was the proposal to create a posh Surrey sandwich?"

Is that some kind of euphemism for the dogging capital of England?

[druck]

Re: This is crap.

I'm in Surrey Heath and we are having to bail out Woking's hideous tower block misadventure.

The same council which wont give their only 1/2 billion pound a year engineering company permission to add a few extra spaces in their massively oversubscribed car park.

[elsergiovolador]

Usual suspects

Usual suspects are already browsing yacht catalogues.

[MarkTheMorose]

LGR? I'm probably not the only one...

...who first thought 'Lazy Game Reviews' when reading that acronym.

[Winkypop]

Re: LGR? I'm probably not the only one...

They’re going to run the whole shebang on his woodgrain 486.

[gryphon]

Costs

No doubt central govt. neglected to include IT integration costs into their careful budgeting that declared costs would be lower overall.

And also no doubt that they will make the wrong staff redundant when they merge them so all the knowledge of how things actually work will slip away and they will be completely surprised when the council's end up with Birmingham style IT cost overruns.

Very similar to the SNP declaring back in 2014 that de-segregating all the UK level governmental stuff and moving it to Scottish control would only cost about £50m.

I think that was about the only definitive cost they gave to cover going independent.

Even back then that would have bought about a quarter of a datacentre.

And they still haven't even managed to move the entirety of the DWP functions that they are allowed to to Social Care Scotland yet.

[ADJB]

The chance to standardise

We have all seen extensive coverage of past software upgrading/ updating failures and one of the questions asked has been “Why can’t we have a nationwide standard software system for councils?”

The answer has always been to blame the of lack of standardisation between councils doing the same jobs. So, being as these are statutory duties based on UK law surely now is the time to introduce such a system as large numbers of what will be ex councils are going to have to change their method of working to be in line with the mothership authorities.

It may take slightly longer but having a UK wide system with all the benefits that brings will, in the long term, have massive savings and escape the clutches of both profit driven software companies and incompetent local political figures protecting archaic working practises and their fiefdoms.

[J.G.Harston]

Re: The chance to standardise

Wonderful, single point of failure for the entire country.

[Goodwin Sands]

Re: The chance to standardise

You seriously suggesting local councils across the country should *not* standardise in case one/some of them screws up and becomes semi-functioning (does a Birmingham for example) then we'll be okay because the rest/most of them will still be functioning? Well I think that makes no sense. If we were talking about say airports, I can see the sense, but we're talking councils!

No, this is a perfect opportunity to get all of them standardised - except it's not going to happen because it's being done in a hurry for underhand political reasons.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dunno where the author gets the idea that Surrey is the first in the current round of pointless local government reorganisations. In the past few years, North Yorkshire has become unitary (replaccing the county council and district councils), Somerset has become unitary (ditto). Cumbria has been split back into Cumberland and Westmoreland.

That's just the ones I know of - I haven't really been paying attention and there might be more.

[Anonymous Coward]

What could *possibly* go wrong?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Cornwall did it first years and years ago

[Glenn Amspaugh]

Which part of Surrey gets the fringe on it?

I'll see myself out

[J.G.Harston]

These mergers and restructures have been going on for some time, yet I've never seen any job adverts for all the extra work that needs doing transfering all the IT stuff.

[an.other_tech]

Chaos ? Nah, just more money spent

This is going to be both an administrative and tech disaster.

It also feels rather than streamlining things, it'll give greater control to fewer, with less accountability.

Databases are relatively easy to build. It's the database reporting that generally bloats it.

Boss Z wants it their way. Director W theirs, Manager Y her's, and the I.T team are stressed out because everyone is saying different things, yet the people that need to use said database daily, are rarely consulted. Yet they are the ones having to waste time inputting on foul flow charts and migrated systems with clanky interfaces.

With the recent AWS outage as an example of eggs in one basket, does anyone else see a potential tech titanic heading towards a data iceberg with all these councils and local authorities being culled and forced into a new entity ?

One thing, if we as a sector came up with a best practices framework, so that users were the primary consulted parties, not the occasional users, would that help us provide a much better system, and one that might last 20 years plus, as some of the legacy systems have exceeded ?

I cite one hospital trust that had a rock solid, green screen, terminal system

The reason it was replaced, it was awful at exporting any data, but just kept working.

Anyone over 40 will likely have similar experiences, with perfectly good software being replaced for worse ones, purely because of the new reporting and analysis demands.

[Dwarf]

Who are they delivering to ?

A good starting point is for the councils to remember what is their purpose, who are their customers are and who they are delivering to.

I've tried to call both my county council and district council recently about a couple of points and neither has a properly functioning web site - where you can actualy find any information that you need, or in the case of the district, actually get through to anyone that has a clue about what is going on.

The completely moronic point is that the music on hold keeps telling you to refer to the web site, where you can get fsck all information, resulting in the need to try the only other option availalbe, a phone call to a person that hasn't got a clue, nor any information.

Any change that re-balances things to a point where they work would be really welcome.

[Tim99]

It worked so well before...

My late father was a senior local government officer who started work for his local council before WW2. Following the Redclife-Maud report and the Conservative's Local Government Act 1972, he came home from work one day and said he was (semi)retiring - He was in his 50s. I asked him why, and how that was going to go? He said that, at that time if there was, say, a query about local planning, the chief surveyor would pick up the phone, and ask to see him. Over afternoon tea and digestive biscuits (they were both officer war veterans, and knew that all important decisions needed to be made over tea and biscuits) they would look at the problem, and come up with a solution. So the total time and cost was a couple of minutes for a phone call, a 15 minute meeting; his secretary's time to make the tea; 4 biscuits, tea leaves, milk and sugar. My father would then write up the meeting and, if necessary, present it to the Council where it would almost certainly "pass on the nod".

After reorganization, he said it would go something like this: A lowly administrator in the planning officer would process the query, write it up, pass it up to their superior, who would then précis and rewrite it in longhand, it would then be typed up, go back to the superior, who would then put it in the internal mail for a senior officer in the planning department, who would perhaps edit it, before it was submitted to the committee; who would then pass it on to the equivalent of my father's department; who would delegate it to "some-one" to action it; it would then be written up again, typed; then back up the department for approval and then back to the planning department. My father reckoned that the 50 "person-minutes" or so that it would have taken before, would probably take several months for a final outcome.

My father said that his RAF war service would count towards his final pension (he may have had to make a personal contribution?). He spent the next 17 years doing a little bit of paid work, and quite a lot unpaid for local charities/clubs/not for profits; and of course, as it was a country area - barter: a quick VAT return for a meat joint, vegetables, and the odd bottle of spirits at Christmas.

Interestingly, when he met ex-colleagues at their Christmas "does" who were still working, they told him, that yes everything was much slower, and the number staff needed had increased dramatically: See the Second meaning of Parkinson's Law: Wikipedia.

[Steve Davies 3]

The usual suspects

will be salivating at the prospect of £5M deals morphing into £50M.

The same thing is happening in Hampshire. My local council is about to be merged with a few others and be based in Basingstoke. Useless for us plebs but a gravy train for the likes of Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, IBM, Crapita etc.

There will NOT be a benefit to us tax payers unless you can call a double digit council tax increase a benefit...

[rg287]

Ah, the promise of cost savings and efficiency improvements.

This was adequately explained 15 years ago.

And Reform still had to learn this the hard way in Kent, because in all honesty they're a bit thick (that's a personal attack on the individual councillors btw, not a sweeping partisan generalisation. And if you think that's unfair... take a look at them. Go on, look upon their works ye Mighty, and despair).

Redrawing the boundaries on local authorities is just fiddling with the deck chairs. We won't see any meaningful improvement until we get strong County/Regional councils akin to those of the 1960s/70s with the funding (or funding powers) powers to match. It was the County Councils who built the motorways - with MoT money and following a general schematic from central government. But Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and Somerset County Councils were the commissioning authorities for their sections of M5. Goodness, if we'd waited for London to build the motorways they'd have run out at Reading.

We've had decades of Conservatives centralising power in Westminster, and apathetic Labour not reversing that. It is long past time County Councils (and equivalent unitary authorities) had tax and commissioning powers on the scale of German Lander (or at the very least, French cities - which is saying something when you understand how centralised French political power is in Paris).

The VT/BRS powers to build trams and bus networks, to run public services on a non-profit basis for public benefit. To build, rather than rent in perpetuity. And for central government to nod sagely and say "yep, we'll fund that. Infrastructure spend always pays back" instead of allowing Treasury to fight every step of the way.

A thousand years this city has stood. Now at the whim of a madman it will fall. And the White Tree the tree of the King will never bloom again. They guard it [still] because they have hope. A faint and fading hope that one day it will flower. That a king will come and this city will be what it once was before it fell into decay. The old wisdom borne out of the West was forsaken. Kings made tombs more splendid than the houses of the living and counted the old names of their descent dearer than the name of their sons. Childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry or in high cold towers asking questions of the stars. And so the people of Gondor fell into ruin. The line of kings failed. The White Tree withered. The rule of Gondor was given over to lesser men.

Tombs more splendid indeed. Remind us of anyone? Navel-gazers and con artists. At some point we must choose politicians with a vision to improve our nation. A big picture view. People who want to build infrastructure - railways, schools, hospitals, sewage plants and power interconnects. For now, we have only lesser men. Caretakers, who quietly manage the decline of our nation with no ambition or vision.