Future Councils

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.

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.

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.

We published the first in a series of regular updates on the progress of the pilot.

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.

We published the third Future Councils update on the progress of the pilot, including what we’re learning about council pain points so far.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We have published a report to share our key findings from the Future Councils pilot. You can also read an overview of the pilot and the report in a blog post on MHCLG Digital.

While Future Councils will not continue in its current form, we will be taking many learnings forward through our new stewardship approach.