Summary

• Councils freezing technology investment during local government reorganisation risk carrying existing inefficiencies into new structures.
• Targeted investment in automated resident engagement could help reduce backlogs, protect cash flow, and simplify future integration.
• Authorities that modernise before merger may have stronger evidence, momentum, and influence over the systems adopted by new organisations.

By Gary Haynes, Managing Director at Voicescape

With reorganisation looming, many councils have frozen all spending except what’s needed to reach the new operating model. Gary Haynes, Managing Director at Voicescape, argues this instinct, however understandable, is a massive wasted opportunity.

At times of transformation, the instinct can be to freeze.

We’re seeing it across the sector right now with England’s local government reorganisation (LGR) agenda. Some local authorities have decided they won’t spend money on anything except transitioning to the new operating model. Their entire focus is on how to carry today’s systems and today’s ways of working through to the new structure, untouched.

I understand it. When you’re facing that level of upheaval, you want to limit the variables down to just those you can control. LGR is the biggest structural change the sector has seen in decades, and it’s landing on councils already carrying combined debts of over £122 billion, with confidence in short supply. Indeed, fewer than one in four senior council figures believe LGR will actually improve their finances, and only one in five think the timescales are deliverable.

But here’s the question every council in a ‘keep the lights on’ posture must ask itself — do you really want to spend three years converting broken into still broken?

The hidden cost of transplanting inefficiency

It’s a bold question, but if your systems and processes are inefficient and ineffective today, carrying them intact through reorganisation doesn’t neutralise the problem. It transplants it — and often multiplies it, because you’re now stitching together several authorities’ worth of manual processes, fragmented platforms, and departmental silos into one new organisation.

Let me be clear, I’m not saying every local government system is broken, but most authorities will recognise that one of the reasons behind LGR is because many are and know this problem well.

The same resident might owe council tax, a parking charge, and rent, and be contacted by three disconnected departments who can’t, or believe they can’t, share so much as a phone number. Some councils’ entire model for engaging residents in arrears is still a series of increasingly red letters — none of which are effective for resident engagement outcomes. Merge three or four authorities working this way and you don’t get simplification; you get compounded complexity, at exactly the moment your teams are stretched thinnest and your revenue collection can least afford disruption.

That’s the hidden cost of the freeze. Standing still isn’t neutral, it’s a decision to pay for inefficiency twice — once now, and again when you migrate it.

Modernising pre-merge makes the change easier, not harder

The counterintuitive truth is that adopting a better way of working before transition actually de-risks the transition itself. Cleaner processes are easier to harmonise. Automated engagement keeps cash flow stable and backlogs down while back-office systems are being integrated. Modern platforms designed around what officers actually need are far simpler to consolidate than a tangle of legacy systems that were never meant to talk to each other.

This doesn’t have to require transformational budgets, either. Relatively modest, well-targeted investment in areas like automated resident engagement can drive efficiencies worth many multiples of the spend, savings that fund the transition rather than compete with it.

Winning the bun fight

There’s a harder-nosed reason to invest now, too. When authorities merge, there is an inevitable bun fight over whose systems survive. Nobody is going to migrate everyone onto the worst performing platform in the room. Best-in-class solutions are the solutions that win out, which means the councils that modernise ahead of transition aren’t just running better today; they’re the ones whose ways of working get carried forward, whose teams shape the new organisation, and whose residents experience continuity rather than downgrade.

And this cuts both ways. A council that has spent three years in defensive mode arrives at vesting day with nothing to argue for — no evidence, no momentum, and no seat at the table when the new authority’s operating model is decided.

Change is coming whether councils like it or not. The only real choice is whether you arrive at it with systems worth keeping — and a track record that proves it. The sector has been rightly told this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to cast off long-standing inefficiencies. That window is open now, before transition, not after it.

In this environment, I would argue that the greatest risk isn’t acting and getting something imperfect. It’s freezing, and spending three years faithfully preserving the very problems reorganisation was meant to fix.