Councils and Devolution – Why it matters

The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill is an act of legislation that has been proposed by the government and passed through the House of Commons. It is currently sat with the House of Lords in the Committee Stage (Stage 3/5), with a final committee meeting taking place on March 5th. Should the bill meet their approval in the coming months it will go back to Parliament for the consideration of any amendments and then be handed off for Royal Assent to make it into law.

The English Devolution white paper proposes a move from two-tier governance between county and district councils to a single-tier, unitary approach under new Strategic Authorities. This would impact almost 20 million people in England who belong to two councils.

The two types of Strategic Authorities proposed are Mayoral Authorities, which already exist, and Foundation Strategic Authorities - non-mayoral combined authorities and combined county authorities, or any local authority designated as a Strategic Authority without a Mayor.

The government states that the proposals are to emulate mayoral devolution; local people handling local affairs because they matter to them. They have a stake in the outcomes, being a local, therefore they will have a better understanding for proposals and adjudication. With more soft power and local growth allocations from the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), they can push local partners to tackle problems and can move obstacles to growth.

The Digital Readiness Check for Government was introduced in January 2024 under the then-Conservative government, highlighting issues with collaboration, expert consultation, and digital knowledge and awareness for employees overall.

These issues haven’t gone away, and impact local authorities just as much as central government. Councils are still using legacy systems in many instances, with a low digital capacity for handling modern software solutions to optimise workflows and improve staff efficiency. This has a knock-on effect for integration and interoperability, with fragmented data or data silos impacting data quality and thus impacting forecasts and decision making in general.

The Local Government Outcomes Framework (LGOF) goes live in April 2026. This seeks to ensure accountability for local authorities but could also impact funding decisions. As per the Local Government Act 1999, “local authorities must legally deliver what is termed ‘Best Value’”, but critics including the Local Government Association worry that the framework is too “top-down” and won’t sufficiently account for deprivation when assessing council performance.

A Local Government Association report from October 2025 titled ‘Local Government Reorganisation: Digital Readiness Support’ explains how the LGA has been using funding from the MHCLG for the past eight years to “champion innovation, build strategic partnerships, and accelerate digital transformation”. Their summary is that devolution provides an opportunity for local councils to establish good digital foundations and implement best practice habits, which should lead to increased productivity and efficiency in the long term and thus benefit the public. The report’s conclusion is for further investment into the cyber, digital, data and technology aspects of the LGR, considering the level of support required for these proposed unitary councils to be digitally ready to cope with devolution. As of the financial year 2025/26, this is a £1.9 million grant. 

Rather unsurprisingly, if you search for information on the proposed devolution for English councils your search results will be from English councils, with district and county authorities explaining both the proposed white paper and reporting their business case responses.

Articles like the one you’re reading, and this one from Civica on local government reorganisation, are important third-party explanations to help people with a broader understanding of what’s happening and what it could mean for the public. 

The UK Government’s proposal is that they pursue devolution to deliver more responsive local services, with quicker decision making and stronger leverage for implementation.

Effective and responsible local leadership should offer people-centred services, with the goal of preventing problems before they occur. For us here at The Access Group, that means digitisation – the onboarding of relevant software solutions to enable integration between council departments, and the digital education for staff to be able to utilise them to their fullest potential.

By implementing modern solutions, local authorities can build trust with their local population. People want their say, they want to be able to interact with their elected officials, and they want to know what’s going on. Digitisation helps optimise workflows and improve workloads for staff, giving them more time to engage with the public, but it also helps provide information quicker and easier for the sake of transparency. That information then allows the public to form better opinions and, hopefully, make fairer requests of their local representatives.

Digitisation also allows local councils to be more effective. A key part of this is cross-service alignment. This, simplified, means an interconnection between adult social care, children and young persons services, technology enabled care (community alarms, remote monitoring, home-based sensors), housing, community support, and many more facets of local governance. With strict budgets and a growing population in England, authorities can no longer afford inefficiency. That’s not just an issue regarding legacy software, but also regards the approach to delivering services. Things have to be big picture now; appraised in a way that accounts for the connection and knock-on effect each service has on another.

The best way to facilitate this is data analytics. Data is everywhere, so capturing it and processing it can further support informed decision-making, which means the local council can see what’s working and what isn’t. With this information they can amend policies and services, but they can also predict local needs and react to the demands of the local community.

At Access, we support local authorities with connected platforms spanning Adults, Children’s Services, Housing, Community Support, TEC and corporate services - enabling truly integrated, place‑based delivery. 

Digitisation cannot be a sweeping acquisition of solutions, however. There needs to be a solid digital foundation – a backbone if you will – that links local council departments and services together.

Digital maturity will come in time as a byproduct of the steady acquisition of software modules and the development of a bespoke system for your authority, so then the key aspects to achieve are:

• Cross-service integration
• Scalable cloud infrastructure
• Organisational change

As Strategic Authorities emerge and service footprints expand, councils need platforms that can operate across multiple geographies and service domains.

At The Access Group, we’re proud to have a solution that’s an enabler for all of the above. Ours is called Access Evo, and its sole purpose is to bridge the gaps between software solutions to ensure there’s a central hub for staff to work from that offers a single version of the truth. This means greater alignment on decision-making and hopefully leads to better outcomes.

Ours is by no means the only viable choice out there, but by onboarding the right solution(s), your local council can modernise public service delivery, making it crucial to research providers and solutions intensively to ensure the right fit for your needs.

This brings us to a conclusion: councils need to think bigger than single services.

The whole point of the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill is to make local government more effective and impactful on local services and provisions. A bigger picture perspective must be the default; acknowledging that everything is connected and has a knock-on effect in different ways on either other services or the public.

The argument is that two-tier authorities are disjointed and less responsive but forced mergers won’t fix things overnight either. Councils need assistance if they are to reorganise into these new Strategic Authorities, and for that devolution to work they need backing to digitise their operations and maximise their efficiencies.

Support is available, but the Local Government Association has an article talking about the state of digital local government. In it they flag concerns about digital transformation projects, and how they’re both highly competitive and tend to reward new initiatives rather than improving existing ones. They also talk about scalable innovation. We mentioned this in our previous segment, but many functions of governance are similar. These could be scaled up and replicated across the country to help reduce costs and encourage uptake.

For devolution to succeed, councils must shift from service‑by‑service improvement to whole‑place digital transformation - spanning Adults, CYP, Housing, TEC, Communities and corporate functions.

Local government can achieve great things through devolution, but without adequate support for digitisation where necessary we will see negligible improvements. Should the bill pass, it must be used as an opportunity to level up local authorities by supporting the workforce and workloads.