England's local government shake-up promises to be a massive tech headache

Surrey to be divided into two new councils in first phase of countrywide reorg

The UK government will replace Surrey County Council and its 11 borough and district councils with two new unitary councils, which will provide most local services to the area's 1.2 million residents.

Splitting up Surrey is the first part of a massive reorganization of English local government that looks set to soak up the sector's technology capacity for years.

Surrey, the first of 21 areas that will undergo local government reorganization (LGR), will move to its new two-council structure on April 1, 2027. The government plans that all other parts of England served by upper-tier county councils and lower-tier borough, city, and district councils, as well as in some cases neighboring unitary councils, will have unitary councils from April 1, 2028.

More than 200 existing councils are likely to be abolished, meaning that local government technologists will have to merge and in some cases split software and technology used to deliver services and operate organizations. Local authorities provide hundreds of services, with many relying on specialized software chosen by each council.

Lower-tier authorities in county areas have some heavy responsibilities. They collect domestic council tax on behalf of all tiers of local government and the police, manage the electoral rolls used for local and national elections, and run planning systems. For each of these, the successor unitary councils will have to take over legacy software, decide which package to standardize on or whether to choose something new, buy or extend a license, then migrate records, all while continuing to maintain services.

In April 2023, as part of a smaller round of LGR that involved three areas, a new unitary Somerset Council replaced a county council and four districts. It inherited four different electoral management systems from the districts, although three were from the same supplier, iDox, and it was able to migrate to its latest offering in time for elections held that May. It also moved to a single financial system on day one, taking advantage of procurement work carried out by the county council.

But when profiled by public sector professional organization Socitm's In Our View magazine earlier this year, Somerset Council had yet to complete the process of moving to a single revenues and benefits system, was still running five legacy planning systems, and had decided to let existing Microsoft licenses come to an end rather than merge them.

In areas that get split into two or more unitaries such as Surrey, successor councils will also have to decide whether to break up county council systems including social care case management and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Alternatively, they can put these systems into shared services, but this can cause problems if the successor councils want to work in different ways.

Some of the new councils, including those in Surrey, will have to deal with fallout from their predecessors' IT problems. In July 2024, Surrey County Council was criticized for underestimating the complexity of replacing its SAP ERP software with Unit4 after the new system went live 18 months late at a cost of £27.9 million, 68 percent above the original budget.

Gloucestershire County Council delayed its move to SAP's cloud software by more than a year with costs more than doubling, and West Sussex County Council used property sales to help fund a move from a 20-year-old SAP system to an Oracle replacement, with costs increasing from £2.6 million to nearly £40 million.

The government justifies the pain of LGR by saying it will speed up planning decisions, improve the running of local public services, and save money.

"With one council in charge in each area, we will see quicker decisions to grow our towns and cities and connect people to opportunity," local government minister Steve Reed told the leaders of Surrey's doomed councils in a letter [PDF] dated October 28.

"It will also help reform local public services. Bringing services like housing, public health, and social care under one roof means one council can see the full picture and spot problems early."

The split is also certain to keep resident tech pros busy for some time. ®