Future Councils

About the Future Councils programme

Future Councils is a DLUHC programme to support local authorities across England to become modern and resilient.

Taking a whole-council approach, the Future Councils programme brings together digital services and cyber security to reform key services within a local authority.

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

  • modern councils are fast and responsive, delivering services that are effective, relevant, clear and accessible
  • resilient councils are resistant to cyber attack and future threats, sustainable, and cost-effective

We aim to address some of the systemic barriers that make it challenging for councils to sustain digital reform and to become modern, resilient organisations.

The pilot phase

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. Read more about the pilot of Future Councils.

We’re really pleased with how well the councils engaged with the pilot, and the feedback we have received from the sector.

The pilot has enabled us to gain valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities for digital transformation in local government. It has also highlighted how many of our council colleagues are dedicated to digital transformation.

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.