Future Councils

Introduction

The Future Councils programme will support local authorities across England to become modern and resilient.

We are delighted to be partnering with 8 councils for the pilot of Future Councils, which will kick off in March 2023. Find out which councils have been selected and what they will be working on.

About Future Councils

Our vision for Future Councils is to create the conditions for modern, resilient councils.

Councils involved in the Future Councils pilot will be given £750k each to address the three common challenges Local Digital has identified through its work and conversations with councils across England. These are:

  • 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

Through the pilot, we will work with the 8 councils to make these changes across their organisation, and understand what further support they need to do this. If successful, our goal will be to create replicable pathways that other councils might follow.

Councils that are part of Future Councils will be expected to share learning openly. Any replicable pathways and reusable artefacts will be made freely available to enable other councils in the sector to apply in their own setting.

We are piloting Future Councils with a small cohort of councils to test and iterate our approach. We plan to offer further opportunities for local authorities to join Future Councils later in 2023.

To follow the progress of the pilot and find out about opportunities to partner with us beyond the pilot phase, subscribe to the Local Digital newsletter.

Follow the progress of Future Councils

For the latest updates on Future Councils, sign up for our Local Digital newsletter or follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.  

If you have access to Slack, we also encourage you to join the #dluhc-future-councils channel in the LocalGovDigital workspace.

We’ll continue to update this web page with more information about Future Councils as it progresses.

Timeline

25 October 2022

Applications opened for the pilot of Future Councils. Read more about the launch of Future Councils in this blog post.

2 November 2022

We held a dedicated Q&A on the #dluhc-future-councils Slack channel in the LocalGovDigital workspace on Wednesday 2 November.

18 November 2022

Applications closed Friday 18 November 2022 at 5:30pm.

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