In its ‘Levelling Up White Paper’ the government has set out its mission to extend, deepen and simplify devolution across England. The goals are to address long-standing regional inequality, realign national and local budgets and improve public services for all constituents at a local level. However, if powers are given to authorities without the infrastructure and capabilities to deliver and without the funding necessary to administer new responsibilities, then citizens could suffer. During the period 2011 – 2021 funding from the government to support Local Authorities fell by over 50%. This fall has corresponded with an increased demand for many key services such as social care, as the social and demographic landscape evolves.
To offset these funding cuts, Local Authorities have turned to their residents to fund services by increasing council tax and raising more by charging for certain services. However even with local people shouldering the increased share of the costs of services, resource available to provide services have fallen by 26% in the last ten years.
One of the biggest changes signalled in the government’s Levelling Up White Paper is an effort to spur Local Authorities to reform their procurement practices. By working closer with organisations within their communities, procurement teams would be able to “give more weight to bids that create jobs for communities, build back better from the pandemic and support the transition to net zero”. The white paper explains that a switch of emphasis to those ‘social value’ factors would mean “that buyers will not consider price alone but look at how public sector contracts can support local communities and disadvantaged groups”.
Highlighting an example of how that mutually beneficial ethos is already bearing fruit, the document cites the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games. A key aspiration behind the Games is to award two-thirds of its supplier contracts to firms based in the West Midlands. Discussions are taking place around reusing the tech required for the games to the benefit of the local community in Birmingham, leaving the city in a better position.
More than ever, Local Authorities need to understand the social and economic needs of their communities. In 2022, social value won’t just sit alongside the environmental agenda, it will define the transition to a net zero economy. It is crucial to catalyse the economy for fair and sustainable growth. Within this, it is important to support the rise of the digital economy by helping the UK meet its carbon reduction targets and deliver Net Zero.
The government is underlining its commitment to a sustainable future, with government funding is available to support Local Authorities in finding innovative ways of increasing local charge point coverage and upskilling their workforces to ensure these plans are implemented effectively. The transition to zero emission vehicles (ZEVs) will help the UK to meet our climate change targets, improve air quality in our towns and cities and support economic growth. It will also put us at the forefront of the electric vehicle (EV) revolution with many vehicles built in the UK. In 2020, the then Prime Minister announced that we will end the sale of new petrol and diesel cars and vans by 2030, with all new cars and vans being fully zero emission at the tailpipe from 2035. Local leadership in this transition to ZEVs is crucial.
The future of the Local Government sector is clear — more digitally enabled, data-driven and community focused than ever before. The transformation journey unfolding is about breaking down traditional government silos and becoming more connected, organisation and community-wide, to put the customer at the very centre of everything a modern Local Government organisation does. Infrastructure assets are under ever-increasing pressure. In the UK, climate change continues to take its toll in terms of flooding, storms and longer heatwaves. In response to these pressures, Local Authorities need to implement maintenance strategies that protect infrastructure assets.
Given the likelihood of ongoing budget cuts, effective asset management will be required to identify and target the most critical, vulnerable assets with available funds. Utilising Internet of Things (IoT) technologies will provide Local Authorities a way of monitoring infrastructure assets to identify and remediate faults and issues, faster. Local Authorities have taken their first steps into the world of IoT by adding sensors to street lighting, focusing on energy saving. This has helped them reduce carbon emissions, become more sustainable and cut costs. Over time, the authorities have added different types of sensors around motion, light, air quality and noise pollution to measure performance against sustainability targets.
Utilising the data built by IoT technologies and combining it with other disparate data sources, will enable Authorities to tap into the immense power of analytics and data-based business insights which will play a critical role in reshaping Local Government for a new era. Government data is typically held today across an often bewildering array of sources, databases, systems and departments. This lack of insight will hinder Local Authorities from developing and executing the customer-focused strategies needed to drive real benefit to their constituents.
Like so many trends, the digital transformation of Local Government processes has accelerated since the pandemic began to encompass remote working, cloud-first strategies and many other technologydependent areas. Today, councils are better positioned to adopt an integrated digital data approach and reap the rewards through real-time data insights, automation and AI.
The COVID-19 pandemic caused major disruption to both our physical and digital worlds. With many Local Authority employees forced into dispersed and virtual settings, we have seen the swift adoption of remote systems and networks to enable collaborative working and more agile processes. However, this rapid transition has exposed a range of security vulnerabilities from securing remote access to targeted phishing campaigns, giving cyber criminals the opportunity to exploit the uncertainty and cause chaos.
Over the past year, the sophistication of threats has quickly increased, evolving to harness techniques that make attacks harder to spot and breaching even the most resilient systems. The complex and unique nature of these attacks make them especially disruptive to the operations of local authorities, causing millions of pounds of damage, inconveniencing local residents and putting their data at risk.
Local Authorities need to rapidly close the risk to their operations from legacy IT systems. By transitioning to cloud-based systems, Local Authorities will enable rapid, secure and cost effective scaling of services where security vulnerabilities can be patched immediately at data centres, minimising resource costs and downtime.
At a time when government has never been more vulnerable to cyber-attacks and their impact on services and finances it is more important than ever that systems are updated with the latest security protections.