Government crest Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government

Go to Local Digital homepageALPHA

Laying the foundations for the local public services of the future

Cyber Security

The Local Digital Declaration includes a commitment to the continuous improvement of cyber security practice to support the security, resilience and integrity of our digital services and systems.

As part of this, a dedicated Local Digital team is conducting a discovery into how MHCLG can support local authorities to reduce the incidence and impact of cyber attacks and support sustainable cyber health.

Our work

The cyber team wrapped up a cyber security pre-discovery in May 2020, and completed a more in depth discovery phase in July 2020. You can read the full pre-discovery report (PDF) on our website. 

Our main findings from our discovery were that:

  • There are many cyber standards, but no clear baseline.
  • An effective cyber baseline must encompass culture, leadership and ‘cyber first’ processes.
  • Leadership support is vital to embed standards and best practices across the organisation.
  • Leaders need to understand cyber risk to inform their decisions. 
  • Legacy technology is a critical blocker to achieving cyber health. 
  • There is an opportunity for councils to collaborate in order to achieve greater security.

You can read about our findings and next steps in this blog.

We are currently planning for our next Alpha phase of work and will update this page when this begins.

Recent blogs

Follow our progress

We will be sharing regular updates on the MHCLG Digital blog and Twitter (@LDgovUK). You can find our fortnightly sprint notes on the LDCU Medium page.

You can also subscribe to our cyber newsletter to receive monthly updates on our progress, as well as news relevant to those working in and around local government cyber security.

Upcoming events

As part of our commitment to working in the open, we will be hosting virtual Cyber Catchups – in a ‘Show and Tell’ format – every 2 weeks. 

We currently have none planned as Alpha has not begun yet and we will update this page when they are diarised.

If you are working in a national or local government agency and would like to join us, please complete this form to receive login details.

Cyber Catchups: Request joining details

Please be sure to provide your work email address.
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Have your say

We welcome further collaboration and input, so if you would like to share with us any strong evidence to support our research please email it to cyber@localdigital.gov.uk.

Join our user research panel

We would like to speak to people in the following areas regarding cyber security in your local authority:

  • Senior Leadership Team: Executive level – plays a part in the decision making of apportioning budget between departments
  • Service Director or Manager: Responsible for the smooth running and effectiveness of digital or non-digital council services. A decision-maker of their service
  • Procurement staff: Those involved with making decisions around procurement, have responsibility around selection, review, screening and contracting of suppliers.
  • Head of IT/Head of Digital/Chief Digital Officer (CDO): Responsible for the running of either the IT estate or digital services
  • Chief Information Security Officer (CISO): Accountability for the handling and security of data

To take part in an interview and help us support cyber security at local authorities, please complete this short form.