England's next wave of local government reorganisation (LGR) is usually narrated through deals, maps, and timelines: new unitaries, inaugural mayors and streamlined processes. Beneath that sits a more fragile question: can we feasibly integrate the digital systems that will enable new strategic authorities to function from day one and beyond?
Connected Devolution, a new report from Localis commissioned, by TecnhologyOne, takes an unglamorous but in-depth view of this. We argue that the decisive variables for LGR are not only vision, platforms, and planning, but capacity, contracts, and equity. Put plainly: Who is available to do the work? Who wins and who loses from integration choices? And whether procurement resets, or reinforces, a market that already holds too much leverage over councils. Three specific points from the report deserve wider airing.
Digital devolution on a 2 per cent workforce
The first uncomfortable finding is that capacity, not technology, is the binding constraint on LGR digital integration. Across local government, only a tiny share of staff sit in digital, data, or adjacent roles with relevant skills; low single digits as a percentage of headcount.
Yet the sector is being asked to deliver ‘once-in-a-generation' reform while still living with austerity-era staffing losses, recruitment and retention gaps in technical posts, and overreliance on suppliers.
This reframes risk. When integration programmes overrun or under-deliver, the easy explanation is legacy systems or insufficient capital. But the deeper problem is a shortage of in-house digital, data, and commercial capability to plan a multi-year portfolio, challenge suppliers, and lead socio-technical reform rather than simply buying replacements.
If central government is serious about LGR as a route to productivity and resilience, skills and shared capacity must be treated as critical infrastructure. That means revenue funding to build permanent digital teams, professionalising digital and data roles with parity to finance and legal, and incentivising sub-regional and regional collaboration as a precondition for long-term, holistic integration. Without this, LGR risks becoming a stress test of already stretched authorities.
The real test isn't channel shift, it's parity of outcomes
The second key argument cuts against digital saviourism. The report shows that rebadging access channels without changing underlying service processes rarely produces durable improvements. LGR-driven integration should therefore be judged on public value, not digital uptake alone.
The benefits framework I put forward is three-dimensional:
• Transactional productivity; this is cost per transaction, processing time, error rates;
• Allocative efficiency; this is whether integration enables better coordination, prevention, and targeting; and
• Distributional and democratic value; who benefits or is burden, and how legitimate new arrangements are perceived to be.
Against this, headline ‘channel shift' figures look thin. Around one in four UK adults still has very low digital capability, and affordability, literacy, and language barriers cluster geographically and socio-economically. Therefore, a 70-80% online uptake rate can be misleading if the remainder are pushed into slower, more precarious routes to service.
The core claim follows: parity of outcomes, not front-end digitisation for its own sake, is the test of legitimate integration. A reorganised authority that can demonstrate comparable dignity, quality, and speed for residents who cannot or will not engage online is building political sustainability. One that quietly degrades non-digital routes under the pretence of efficiency is not.
LGR is a rare chance to rewrite the social contract with digital suppliers
The third critical point sits within the report's commercial analysis but has system-wide implications. The local government technology is highly concentrated, overly bespoke, and tilted towards the whims of suppliers.
LGR creates two trajectories. On one, reorganisation becomes a consolidation bonanza; multiple contracts are folded into larger, longer deals with the same vendors on the same terms, just scaled up. Legacy risk is tidied rather than reduced, interoperability stays contingent on bespoke work, and authorities emerge with less room to manoeuvre. This is a ‘no-change state', where inefficiencies are inherited and amplified.
On the other, LGR is a market reset moment. Authorities anticipate reorganisation and use aggregated demand to insist on interface-first, ‘configuration over customisation' arrangements with open standards, rehearsed exit plans, contractual rights to extract data in usable formats, step-in schedules, and guaranteed portability and IP rights. Moreover, AI integration should be governed through these same clause-level controls and oversight as any other high-risk systems.
Crucially, the commercial task is not just to buy systems but to steward a multi-year portfolio that shrinks legacy risk and preserves future choice. If contracts and interfaces are right early, LGR can open conditions for the next decade of local innovation. If not, local government risks a modernised version of today's brittle dependencies; inefficient and vulnerable.
Taken together, these three points offer a window into talking about ‘digital devolution' as a sustainable, long-term project; the people, parity and market structure that will determine whether reorganisation yields resilient governance for decades to come.
Callin McLinden is senior researcher, Localis
The full Connected Devolution report and accompanying recommendations is available on the Localis website.
