Future Councils

About Future Councils

From March to November 2023, we worked closely with 8 pilot councils to explore the root causes behind what’s blocking them from significant digital transformation.

The aim of Future Councils was to understand some of the systemic barriers that make it challenging for councils to sustain digital transformation, and to become modern and resilient.

In the Future Councils pilot report, you can read about:

our vision for the pilot
key findings about the shared challenges councils are facing
potential solutions that councils can take now to become modern and resilient

What’s next for Future Councils

Through the pilot we have gained valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities for digital transformation in local government.

While Future Councils will not continue in its current form, we will be taking many learnings forward through our new stewardship approach. By taking a more strategic role as a ‘steward’, we aim to bring the sector together to deliver modern digital services that enhance citizens’ lives.

To hear more about our plans, follow our usual channels:

The Future Councils playbook

The playbook is a collection of some of the tools we used during the pilot that can help you on your own transformation journey.

We are making the tools available to the wider sector to help you:

define how a particular problem manifests at different levels across the council
identify the root cause of a problem
distinguish between service- and product-level problems, and council-wide problems that are agnostic to a particular area
understand where to target interventions and improvements
quantify the cost impact of a particular problem

View the Future Councils playbook

Future Councils timeline

25 October 2022

Applications opened for the pilot of Future Councils and closed on Friday 18 November 2022 at 5:30pm. Read more about the launch of Future Councils in this blog post.

7 and 8 December 2022

We invited the 12 councils with the highest scores to attend a panel interview, to help us better understand their applications and suitability for the pilot.

7 March 2023

We announced that we will be partnering with 8 councils for the pilot of Future Councils.

The 8 pilot councils were each given £750,000 to address three common challenges that were identified by Local Digital through its work and conversations with councils across England. These were:

how to influence the organisation-wide factors (such as internal processes, leadership and governance) that can unblock change
how to make digital and cyber improvements across the whole organisation, rather than just one team or area
how to reform services, including the big, critical services, which are riskier and harder to change

During the pilot, we have worked with the 8 councils to make these changes across their organisation, and understand what further support they need to do this.

25 May 2023

We published the first in a series of regular updates on the progress of the pilot.

30 June 2023

We published the second Future Councils update on the progress of the pilot, including how we restructured the team and what happened in our first whole cohort session.

9 August 2023

We published the third Future Councils update on the progress of the pilot, including what we’re learning about council pain points so far.

7 September 2023

After working closely with the pilot councils to explore the root causes behind what’s blocking them from becoming modern and resilient, we developed 6 problem statements which summarise the systemic challenges councils are facing. Learn more about how we developed the statements in this blog post.

20 October 2023

In September and October, we held three in-person events with councils to validate the problem statements and identify scalable opportunities to help the sector as a whole. You can read more about the events, and what else we’ve been working, in Future Councils Update #4.

November 2023

The pilot phase came to an end. We are now reviewing what’s next for the programme and how Local Digital can best support the sector going forwards.

January 2024

We’ve launched a playbook of tools to help you understand complex problems and their impact within your organisation.

The tools were developed during the Future Councils pilot, where they were used to explore the root causes behind what’s blocking the pilot councils from becoming modern and resilient.

You can now download the tools and start using them to help you on your own transformation journey.

March 2024

We have published a report to share our key findings from the Future Councils pilot. You can also read an overview of the pilot and the report in a blog post on DLUHC Digital.