Thursday, 16 July, 2026

The Government has announced the shape of the latest batch of new unitary councils across the county:

  • Gloucestershire: 7 councils being reorganised into 1 unitary. This will unite the Gloucester-Cheltenham growth corridor and Golden Valley cyber cluster under one council, with reorganisation expected to deliver savings by reducing duplication across services and leadership.
  • Derby and Derbyshire: 10 councils being reorganised into 2 unitaries. This will let Derby expand in all directions while reflecting the county’s distinct north/south geographies and creating two strong partners in the East Midlands Combined County Authority.
  • Warwickshire: 6 councils being reorganised into 2 unitaries. This will allow each new council to focus on the specific needs of its communities, tackling health inequalities in the north and improving access to services for older and rural residents in the south.
  • Worcestershire: 7 councils being reorganised into 2 unitaries. This will reflect the county’s different economies and identities in the north and south, balancing scale with staying connected to communities.
  • Oxfordshire: 6 councils being reorganised into 3 unitaries. This will address Oxford’s housing constraints, better reflect the city’s economic geography, and ensure Oxford has its own seat at the table when regional powers and funding are agreed with government.
  • Hertfordshire: 11 councils being reorganised into 4 unitaries. This will reflect the county’s distinct economic areas, keeping public services organised around where people live, work and travel.
  • Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland: 10 councils being reorganised into 2 unitaries. This will expand Leicester’s boundary to reflect how the city actually functions, unlocking around 30,000 homes and 67 hectares of employment land, and creating a stronger platform for future devolution.
  • Nottingham and Nottinghamshire: 9 councils being reorganised into 2 unitaries. This will bring most of Nottingham’s urban area under one council, supporting the Mayoral authority’s growth ambitions and creating a more balanced urban-rural mix.
  • East Sussex and Brighton and Hove: 7 councils being reorganised into 2 unitaries with boundary modifications. This will expand Brighton and Hove’s planning footprint and tax base to tackle housing unaffordability and support growth across connected communities.
  • Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent: 10 councils being reorganised into 2 unitaries. This will support Stoke’s growth opportunities across a natural north/south split, minimising service disruption and achieving strong financial sustainability.
  • Lancashire, Blackburn with Darwen and Blackpool: 15 councils being reorganised into 4 unitaries. This will reflect Lancashire’s diverse urban, rural and coastal communities, aligned with existing economic areas and transport links, with a clear structure for future devolution.
  • Kent and Medway: 14 councils being reorganised into 4 unitaries. This will align councils with housing markets and local need, support the whole area’s growth, and maintain locally responsive services while strengthening local voices through neighbourhood committees.
  • Devon, Plymouth and Torbay: 11 councils being reorganised into 4 unitaries. This will align boundaries with economic geography to unlock housing and infrastructure growth, supporting Plymouth’s defence sector and Exeter’s expansion as key urban engines.
  • Lincolnshire, North Lincolnshire and North East Lincolnshire: 10 councils being reorganised into 4 unitaries. This will give Lincoln the space to grow while striking the best balance between urban and rural service delivery and securing Lincoln a distinct voice in devolution.
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Macrows is a desktop Airtable clone for the Mac. It’s nice!

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Tuesday, 14 July, 2026

An open working masterclass from Cumberland Council:

Running a show and tell? ✅
Recording it so others can watch it? ✅
Publishing it on your intranet? ✅
The area of the intranet that anyone on the web can access? ✅

Brilliant stuff!

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WhatCable is a simple, free Mac app to tell you wha the USB-C cable is that you have plugged in. Can it carry data? How much wattage is it capable of?

WhatCable explains cable speed, charging limits, e-marker data, and connected devices in plain English. Name a cable and it tracks how the cable actually performs over time, so you can spot the one that has started misbehaving. No more guessing why a cable charges slow or refuses to drive your display.

Super helpful.

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Monday, 13 July, 2026

LOTI is 7 years old and Eddie rightly celebrates, and also teases about the future:

That’s why LOTI is now planning its most ambitious initiative to date: to establish a Centre for New Public Services. The aim is to give boroughs a dedicated, shared space to work alongside the public, third and private sectors to design radical new solutions for unsustainable service models. I’ll be writing more on that topic soon!

LOTI is a sophisticated set-up and it wouldn’t be simple to recreate it in other areas. But starting something like LOTI would be very simple: hire a room, invite some people, have a chat. This happens in other parts of the country other than London – the north-west, particularly – but there’s no reason at all why every region can’t have – at the very least – a online and face to face collaboration network. You never know where it might lead.

Just needs someone to book that room and send those invites!

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Cathy Dutton – The portal trap:

When portals are treated as containers they fail. You can’t cover up the complexity, and attempting to do so just adds another layer of abstraction and frustration.

If portals are instead built as a coordinating or experience layer, deliberately designed to give an outside-in view of an organisation, they can bridge the gap until wider structural changes are made. They can also provide insight and evidence to help us structure around services in future.

Really good stuff.

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The Service Standard and the Local Government Digital Standard

A few people have asked if the work on the existing Service Standard affects the Local Government Digital Standard. Yes and no!

First up, read the post. It’s good and it looks like the Service Standard is going into some interesting places:

We are reimagining the Service Standard as part of a broader shift from a static, assessment-led model to a living system that supports the whole life cycle of a service.

This represents an important step in improving how we design and deliver public services. By bringing together strong standards, sector collaboration and practical implementation, it sets a clear direction for how we can make services simpler, more consistent and more effective for people and businesses.

(Weirdly the blog post doesn’t include an actual link to the Service Standard, which seems a tad perverse to me. Have littered this post with links to make up for it 😀)

I’ve spoken to some of the team working on this, after they saw me bleating about the LGDS in various corners of the internet. They were lovely, and very supportive of what I (and Luton!) were trying to do.

The hope from that team is, I think, that the revised Service Standard will work better for local authorities. I hope it does to! For me though it does not remove the need for the LGDS, which acts as a set of ‘training wheels’ or stabilisers for councils wanting to get to grips with the Service Standard and use it to improve their digital work.

That need for a ramp to help councils won’t go away, I don’t think, and so there is space for both to exist. Really importantly – the LGDS is based on the Service Standard and embodies much of what the Service Standard aims to promote. It just does so in a more accessible way for less digitally (and service design-y) mature organisations.

So it’s quite likely that if the Service Standard gets a major update, the LGDS will too, so it stays true to the North Star. But if you are a council thinking about adopting the LGDS for your work, please do so with confidence. It might be that at some point you graduate to the Service Standard proper, or you stick with the level the LGDS offers. It’s cool either way. But in following the LGDS you won’t be deviating from the path the Service Standard sets now, or in the future.

#The Service Standard and the Local Government Digital Standard

Friday, 10 July, 2026

Have been using Dropover this week, and it’s great. A Mac app that pops up a little shelf for you to drop whatever you are currently dragging onto, so you can then find the place you want to permanently drop it.

The thing that makes it better than Yoink, which does a similar thing and which I have been using up to now, is how you active the shelf – just by wiggling the mouse a bit. The shelf then appears right where your pointer is.

With Yoink, I had to drag whatever I was moving over the left hand side of the screen to activate the shelf, which frequently was a pain in the neck.

This feels like something that really ought to be a part of the core OS – like clipboard management, for instance – but there we are.

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Thursday, 9 July, 2026

Laura points to this post on how to build a community calendar, and there’s some interesting stuff in there. I wonder if some of it would be useful for the ORUK crowd?

But the choice of technology quickly becomes secondary compared to the real challenge ahead: How do you make people aware of the calendar? And how do you solve the chicken-and-egg problem? Without events, there are no users, and without users, nobody sees a reason to publish their events on your platform.

It’s published on the blog of an open source project called LAUTI, which I have never heard of – and I must admit it wasn’t immediately clear to me what a ‘community calendar’ is, or at least not entirely. Turns out LAUTI is an open source Eventbrite alternative – with a fair few differences, I’m sure.

It’s a nice idea though, and it reminds me of a thing about online community building that I perhaps often forget, which is that communities can focus on any kind of interaction – it doesn’t have to be a conversation. It could be links, or uploaded photos, or videos, or in this case events, linked to a theme or a place around which the community can form and develop.

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As if by magic, the mighty Will has also posted on improving local government software today, and I heartily recommend you taking a few minutes out to read what he has to say.

Rather than cover every possible market shaping tactic, this blog post shares what I think is the most likely and fruitful path for public sector policy makers to take over the next few years. Regular readers will know that I think better collaboration fixes most things, so there’s a lot of that here.

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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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