Thursday, 9 July, 2026

How software standards could drive local government digital improvement

There’s ongoing talk about one of the things holding back digital in local government being the lack of quality in the software market, and there is work ongoing at MHCLG, Local GDS, and – I think – the LGA to look at ways to address this.

I’m still of the opinion that I shared last year:

… that the local gov software market isn’t necessarily broken – it’s probably doing what it is supposed to do, i.e. behaving like a market. The issues are symptoms of wider problems, largely lack of capability and capacity on the buy side.

Councils rarely have enough of the people with the right skills and the time to effectively procure systems and then robustly manage contracts – it’s totally lop-sided, resource wise. Inevitably the last sets of requirements is rolled out, updated in places, and then software very similar to what was previously used is bought.

There’s no incentives for the market to produce anything better, so why would it? It’s a market. The market is the scorpion and the council is the frog.

While I would argue that a more structural change is needed to create capacity and capability across the DDaT board of skills, including procurement and contract management, I do think there are less dramatic changes that could take place that would improve matters.

One is adapting existing, mature open source products to replace the commercials ones that aren’t currently up to snuff. We might call this the LocalGovDrupal approach, because that is basically what it is. It takes a lot of the risk out of trying to write new software from scratch.

But the one I think could have the most immediate impact would be for software standards to be set and (most importantly) audited for commercial off the shelf software in local government.

How could this work?

  • For the major software verticals in councils – housing, social care, planning, revenues and benefits, etc etc – groups of experts get together to decide upon a standard for that type of software. I would imagine a lot of this would be the same across all software, so maybe there’s a general standard and then specific stuff for each particular system. That would save time, and make things a bit more, well, standard.
  • Councils are encouraged (perhaps backed up with threats of violence) to make adherence to the standard a make or break part of their procurement exercises (one of the “must have” requirements).
  • Most importantly, a team at Local GDS or MHCLG actively audits any software that is marketed to local government to ensure it meets both the general and any specific additional for the service vertical. This would be the only thing that a supplier can use to evidence their adherence to a purchasing council.

Because this incentivises the market to deliver what councils want, as it creates an environment where councils can’t carry on buying the same old stuff even though they don’t like it, it ought to help shift the dial – without government or councils having to become software developers themselves.

Now, I am sure something like this couldn’t happen overnight – would legislation be needed? I have no idea – and there would have to be some kind of grace period so councils aren’t left being unable to buy anything, but that kind of stuff can be worked out. After all, government is quite good at setting standards generally, and making markets adhere to them, whether it is food safety, or labelling cigarettes, or whatever else.

#How software standards could drive local government digital improvement

Steve Messer – Is testing and learning a methodology or a core skill?:

Experimentation and adaption is only mentioned in the Agile and Lean section, and only in the context of ways of working. But testing & learning is a mindset you need to embed – it influences how we think about outcomes, what value is, how user insights inform both of those, and more.

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Tuesday, 7 July, 2026

New resource on the digital LGR playbook – Priorities at each phase of reorganisation:

This resource sets out common phases councils that have been through LGR have experienced. It is not a mandated timeline and does not replace the wider LGR programme structure. It provides advisory, evidence-based guidance to help you assess where you are, what you should prioritise and what may be too early.

It’s a much bigger piece of content that those we have published before, and there is some really useful stuff in there. I encourage you to take a look!

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My work at Luton is done

I’m just finishing up my work with Luton Council. It’s been a great experience, and I feel I’ve learned a load along the way, whilst really helping catalyse the shift there to a modern digital service.

I worked for between 2 and 3 days a week over a period of around 18 months. In the early days a lot of that time was spent supporting Atika directly, attending lots of meetings, and being an ally that she knew would always have her back as she navigated some tricky waters.

Over time, as that side of things settled down, and her new management team took shape, I was able to step back and focus on getting some projects done.

Atika says:

Dave has been an absolute godsend for me personally whilst at Luton. Having someone with Dave’s breadth of experience in other councils to be a sounding board for me when I stepped into the new role, and working together to overcome the challenges was priceless. Dave worked well with my wider management team and the rest of the organisation to truly showcase digital ways of working. It’s safe to say without Dave’s input, we would not be the highly regarded DDaT service at Luton we are today.

The big things I delivered for Luton were:

  • Doing the bulk of the work developing a new strategic digital framework (a strategy in all but name), which i am genuinely pretty proud of and which got some great feedback from senior stakeholders at the Council
  • Supporting to create a new target operating model and practical governance and processes to deliver against this framework
  • Jump-started the moribund project to replace the tired old Sharepoint website with a new LocalGovDrupal based one. This project had been hanging around for over 5 years – with a bit of energy, some inspired recruitment and procurement, we got the new site out in not much more than 6 months.
  • Established the Digital Luton blog and a culture of sharing and openness, including support a team member to become the blog product owner
  • Helped build a change champions network to support the cultural shift from IT to digital, backed with a programme of bitesize learning sessions introducing key digital concepts like user centred service design, agile delivery, and the importance of being data-informed
  • Developed the Local Government Digital Standard and lined up some projects to apply it to within Luton, and got Atika’s permission (wasn’t difficult, to be fair) to open it up to other councils. This will set the barometer for the long term, ensuring that only the best digital work will be considered good enough for Luton.

There’s a whole load of other, smaller stuff of course, but those are the big ones.

If this sounds like the sorts of things you could do with some help with, please let me know! It doesn’t have to be for as many days, or for as long as this particularly assignment – am happy to fit into whatever constraints you may have. Well, within reason.

#My work at Luton is done

Monday, 6 July, 2026

Tom Loosemore – Prompt injection and the perils of leaving it to AI to handle AI:

A petition filed to a Brazilian labour court contained hidden instructions for any AI used by the court to contest the petition only superficially, and to not challenge the documents. This prompt was hard to spot by humans as it was written in white text on a white background, and placed right at the top of the petition.

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Tinydot looks like a fun little service. A Mac app sits on your computer watching a folder. Anything you put into that folder appears on your Tinydot site, as if by magic! Markdown files, photos, etc all work.

No idea what I personally might use it for, but it is a neat idea.

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Matt Billingsley from Content Design London – What 6 FOI requests reveal about government campaign websites:

Departments treated these websites as communications products rather than services, which meant they did not need to meet GOV.UK’s Service Standard.

The MoJ said that modernising.justice.gov.uk “is a public communications product which sets out government policy, rather than a transactional public service.”

This is one reason why, when putting the LGDS together, I avoided the word “service”. Not because I don’t think it’s useful – it clearly is – but that I feel it can be used to claim that a standard doesn’t apply, when it obviously could.

This research seems to back up that view.

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Friday, 26 June, 2026

Am off work next week and planning to take a proper break. Back on 6th July – see you on the other side!

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Thursday, 25 June, 2026

The worst council website I have ever seen

I’ve been doing this job now for what feels like an awfully long time. As I’ve said before, sometimes I get cranky having to have the same conversations with people about issues I really thought we had all resolved in 2008 or something – but generally, I try to be calm and measured, and – frankly – glad of the work.

But today I came across a council website so gob-smackingly awful, it almost made me want to throw in the towel, and go and do something else with my life. Because if there are genuinely people in this sector, running these critical organisations, who think this drek is acceptable in this day and age, I wonder why I, and all the people who work so hard to make things better, bother in the first place.

I won’t name the council, am not interested in any kind of singling out, and I am quite aware that there are usually reasons for things being the way they are – and I don’t want to make people feel bad. What I do want to do is highlight the fact that local people around the country are being horribly let down by a system that allows organisations that clearly have NO IDEA WHAT THEY ARE DOING to carry on in this way.

Just some of the lowlights:

  • Prominent, utterly irrelevant Google ads at the top of the home page. GOOGLE ADS!!!! 🤮
  • Prominent links to popular services using words that have no relation whatsoever to the thing they are linking to – the worst example being “Public Access” which links to information about planning
  • Linking to a “my account” style thing, which only gives access to a tiny number of quite niche services, and which immediately drops the “my account” branding as soon as you’ve opened it. Am I in the my account thing? Have I ended up somewhere else? I have no idea.
  • Inside said my account portal thing, there’s a menu option called Menu, which when you click on it, does nothing
  • Really basic design flaws, like sections of the site being misaligned, boxes in a grid being different sizes, random fonts, hideous hover effects on links, and so on
  • A whole section dedicated to (even) more services, where again the language used bears little to no relation to the actual things real people might want to actually achieve, and what’s more, is actively confusing to the user.
  • Loads of links throughout the site saying things like “You can find X here.” etc
  • Some pages are just lists of loads of PDFs, full of content that nobody could be bothered to turn into accessible web pages that are actually readable on a phone.

Like I said, I really don’t want to make anyone feel bad. But someone somewhere must think this is ok – and it isn’t. Whose job is it to point this out to them? I feel really bad for the people in the team that has to keep this thing going – because there is no way they can be being supported by the powers that be.

And how can we as a sector support improvement across the board so those left behind in this way can catch up? Because it isn’t like the internet isn’t chock full of guidance on how to avoid disasters like this.

#The worst council website I have ever seen

Stephen Mounsey on standards:

That matters because some constraints are good constraints. They protect the basics. They stop us reinventing things we do not need to reinvent. They make it easier to reuse what already works. They can create pace, not just control. In public services, where accessibility, privacy, reliability and trust really matter, that kind of standardisation is not something we should be scared of. It is often part of how we deliver responsibly at scale.

Standards set you free! Well, not quite.

I was making this more or less exact point earlier today, though. So much energy and time is taken up in local government (in particular) having to convince people over and over again about how things ought to be done. It’s exhausting and one of the reasons why progress across the sector is so slow – and why I am still continuing to have the same conversations I was having 20 years ago…

Having an external standard gives you something to point at, makes things less arguable, gives them a little more solidity. And being able to refer to “the standard” regularly will – over time – lodge it in people’s minds and make it eventually, hopefully, second nature.

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A new book from Public Digital: The Intelligence Era Organisation – Creating the Conditions to Thrive in the Age of AI.

If you are a senior leader responsible for transformation and AI adoption in an established organisation, you’ll undoubtedly recognise the stakes of the current moment: your business is under siege from competitors who are better equipped to deliver for customers. The rapid advancement of AI is deepening that divide, and raising the stakes. Despite that, the reality is sobering: most transformation projects stall, and many organisations fail to extract meaningful value from their AI investments.

Well worth grabbing a copy and there’s a webinar thing you can sign up to as well.

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Something has changed recently with the algorithm on LinkedIn, and I have to say I don’t like it much. Am suddenly getting these posts – mostly written by men of a certain age, who have jobs that have things to do with tax and mortgages – spouting political opinions of the sort I strenuously try to avoid ordinarily. To be clear – I don’t follow these people, and wouldn’t ever choose to. However, they get lots of ‘engagement’ and so I think LinkedIn feels I would benefit from being exposed to them.

Clicking the toggle at the top to show ‘newest’ rather than ‘top’ posts in my feed helps, but it seems to reset every couple of hours.

LinkedIn is a weird place, mostly inhabited by cringelords and desperate sales people, but which has always (for me) rewarded the effort to find the good people and the interesting content, and is one of the few places one can share ideas about niche topics like local government IT without getting too embarrassed about it.

It would be a shame if that effort starts to become too much as a result of some muddle-headed race to the bottom in the name of engagement.

Any ideas on how to reduce the noise gratefully received (is there a “no gammons” button I’m missing? 😉 ) beyond the obvious marking posts with ‘not interested’, which seems to make no difference!

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Wednesday, 24 June, 2026

I really like the framing of digital leadership as a form of gardening in this post:

I think of digital capabilities as the plants that we are trying to grow throughout our organisation’s digital garden, its culture. Sometimes we need to consider whether we’re sowing the right seeds in the first place to grow the capabilities we want in our staff. But other times we might be puzzled when digital capabilities flourish in one part of the organisation but not another. Maybe there are other things we should consider.

Perhaps we’re lacking the right infrastructure? We need to invest in the right equipment to ensure that people’s experience of digital tools is a positive and productive one. If our colleagues’ experience of using digital tools is unreliable then they are unlikely to take root. Or perhaps we’re hoping that simply owning all the right equipment will be enough, but we haven’t invested the time and effort to water the seeds with the training people need to use it confidently.

Proper understanding of digital in the senior leadership tier of local government is one of the biggest things holding the sector back. I wonder if useful metaphors like this might help with explaining it to people in a meaningful way?

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In a conversation this morning it struck me how useful the Local Government Digital Standard might be to those councils going through LGR, trying to get agreement amongst a bunch of different colleagues about priorities, principles, and so on.

The LGDS basically comes as an oven-ready set of quality criteria and ways of doing things that everyone ought to be able to get board with right away. Could save a lot of time and strife!

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Tuesday, 23 June, 2026

The National Audit Office have published a Good practice guide for organisations using AI:

This guide highlights key considerations for audit and risk assurance committees when overseeing the planning, deployment and scaling of artificial intelligence (AI) within public sector organisations.

It draws on NAO findings, the UK Government’s AI Playbook, and lessons from digital transformation programmes across government.

This guidance includes:

  • where AI is used in government
  • areas that organisations need to consider
  • areas of focus and suggested questions to ask
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Another update from the Luton low code team on building out a system for managing complaints and other feedback. Have seen this in action and it is really impressive. More impressive, in fact, than Kev’s joke.

Part of the difficulty is that complaints don’t sit under one neat set of rules. Different services follow different legislation, guidance and oversight, and different types of cases come with different expectations around how they’re handled.

There are also multiple organisations governing how we do this, from the Local Government Ombudsman through to service-specific bodies like Children’s Social Care. This means complaints cannot always follow one simple process.

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Friday, 19 June, 2026

Finally got round to re-hosting localgov.blog onto a beefier slice of cloud. Also reworked how emails get sent out of the various blogs etc for new accounts, password resets and so on, which will make things a bit smoother for users.

SpinupWP made the migration a doddle and WPMailSMTP did the heavy lifting for the email stuff.

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Giles points to a bunch of interesting things, including:

  • Moments – a very bare bones photo sharing thing
  • Lettera – yet another Mac Markdown editor
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The Luton team show you can blog about anything, including the rollout of new printers.

Over the last few months, the DDaT team have been working on the refresh of the council’s fleet of printers with Ricoh being the new printer supplier…

The goals have been to improve functionality and performance using the latest technology to ensure cost-effective printing, reduced maintenance needs and better value for money.

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