Local Digital Cyber

Improving cyber health and resilience in local government

The DLUHC Local Digital team is working to reduce the incidence and impact of cyber attacks, and support sustainable cyber risk management. This is part of our commitment to the continuous improvement of cyber security practice.

On this page you can read about our current cyber programmes as well as past work.

How we’re supporting the sector

Cyber Assessment Framework for Local Government

DLUHC is supporting councils in England to build their cyber resilience and meet the aims and objectives of the Government Cyber Security Strategy.

DLUHC will be introducing the Cyber Assessment Framework (CAF) for Local Government from 2024 to provide a clear cyber security standard for the sector.

You can learn more about how we’re developing the CAF and what this will mean for councils on the CAF for Local Government webpage.

Cyber Support

Since 2020, the Cyber Support programme has provided £19.9 million in funding to support local authorities to address serious cyber security vulnerabilities. Ninety percent of councils have now fully implemented offline backups of their critical data, and the remaining 10% have work in progress to achieve this by May 2024.

The support the councils received included:

  • bespoke technical remediation plans agreed with each council in the cohort
  • ensuring councils have effective backups in place – significantly reducing potential disruption in the event of ransomware attack
  • regular network scanning to track progress and identify emerging vulnerabilities

While the cyber support programme is coming to an end, we’ll continue to work through the remediation plans with the councils that are already enrolled and focus on how we can support all councils through the Cyber Assessment Framework.

Defend as One

The cyber threat to the local government sector is very real, present, and continuing to evolve. In response to this, we are accelerating plans to support the sector to ‘Defend as One’ – harnessing the value of sharing cyber security data, expertise and capabilities across the sector. We will share more on our plans in due course.

Cyber timeline

2020

In May 2020, we completed a pre-discovery and then a discovery to investigate how DLUHC might support local authorities to reduce the incidence and impact of cyber attacks, and support sustainable cyber health.

A cyber health framework was identified as one of the main areas of opportunity to progress into an alpha project, to support council staff to navigate numerous and sometimes overlapping standards. Read about the key findings and recommendations from the discovery.

2021

We completed two alpha projects to support local authorities to reduce the incidence and impact of cyber attacks, and support sustainable cyber health:

  • the Cyber Health project explored the development of a tool and framework to support local authorities to achieve a recommended level of cyber health. Read about the Cyber Health alpha project
  • the Cyber Support project provided expertise and support to identify issues and gaps in local authority cyber security. The team provided guidance, tools and good practice, and helped councils to develop a roadmap for cyber enhancement. Read more about the Cyber Support alpha project

In the Autumn 2021 Budget, Local Digital was awarded £37.8 million of additional funding to tackle cyber security challenges facing councils and invest in local authority cyber resilience, protecting vital services and data.

2022

The introduction of the Government Cyber Security Strategy in 2022 changed the team’s direction towards the NCSC’s Cyber Assessment Framework (CAF).

In 2022 we conducted a pilot with 10 councils in England to explore how the NCSC’s Cyber Assessment Framework (CAF) could be used to help assess and manage cyber risks across the sector. You can read more about the pilot in the CAF for Local Government pilot report.

2023

From May 2023 to February 2024 we carried out further testing of the CAF through the Future Councils pilot. This included testing documentation, guidance and templates to guide councils through a CAF assessment.

2024

In February we kicked off an alpha project to develop the CAF service and conduct further testing with a cohort of 20 councils. Updates on the project will be shared on the CAF for Local Government webpage.

Follow our progress

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