How Bolton and Wigan’s information technology demerger offers LGR-ready insights
Daniel Blows
Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) gives councils a chance to modernise, and achieve sustainable efficiencies, but this introduces significant complexity for ICT. Bolton and Wigan Councils’ 10-year shared ICT partnership with Agilisys, followed by transition to independent digital services, provides valuable lessons for those navigating LGR.
When the partnership ended, councils had to separate deeply integrated infrastructure, services, and teams, similar to the situation facing those delivering LGR: legacy integration, unpicking shared systems, asymmetrical readiness, and ensuring safe and legal service continuity on day-one.
Key challenges
The ICT demerger presented complex, interdependent challenges that required rigorous planning, disciplined governance, and coordinated delivery across participating organisations, these included:
- Shared virtual data centre and network, and 3rd-party contracts, some extending beyond the partnership. Many platforms could not be separated cleanly, and disaster recovery was shared, requiring precise sequencing to prevent service disruption.
- Shared Support Teams: Specialist roles were shared, with some key functions performed by individuals. Following the demerger, neither council could immediately fill all skills gaps, risking continuity, knowledge retention, and operational capacity.
- Asynchronous Readiness and Conflicting Timelines: The councils transitioned to their new services 12-months apart. Legacy systems and teams remained in operation for the second council, while the first transferred its service. Managing costs, resources, and obligations fairly during this staggered process introduced further challenges.
Our approach
New resilient infrastructure was implemented for both councils, dividing and supplementing shared platforms, closing joint arrangements, and deploying new cloud services for each, sequenced to protect frontline services, with:
- Exit planning and dependency mapping: A comprehensive exit plan outlined dependencies, contractual implications, and change sequencing. Joint workshops ensured responsibilities were aligned, with risks, and impacts understood, keeping the programme on track and reducing ambiguity.
- People and skills assessment, allocation to each of the council teams, scheduling and communications plans
- Formalising the separation: The Councils and Agilisys established reciprocal service and inter-authority agreements. Governance was established to define collaboration principles, scope, and governance, ensuring clarity and transparency and preventing reliance on informal negotiation.
- Managing third-party contracts/services: Of the 123 jointly procured third-party contracts, some had terms outlasting the partnership, and others included licensing/consumption commitments that couldn’t be sub-divided. Contract assessments determined novation, early termination, or dual-running approaches to avoid downstream issues by:
- Developing a fair cost-sharing model for services used by one council, maintaining trust and avoiding disputes.
- Creating supplier-specific transition plans, engaging vendors to clarify notice periods, dependencies, and impacts.
Lessons learned
The demerger surfaced key lessons that offer guidance for future LGR programmes:
- Plan and account for the unique constraints and priorities each transition programme will face: early planning, ongoing alignment, communications, and a flexible approach are essential, e.g. separating county council systems to multiple new authorities.
- Capacity for change: Demerging will consume your capacity for change, be flexible to adapt where necessary to change approach.
- Start contract segmentation early: create a playbook, budget for stranded legacy costs, and negotiate to reduce penalties and ongoing commitments.
- Prioritise workforce planning and specialist skill retention: Maintain personnel & skills schedules, communications plan for TUPE of staff.
- Manage shared platforms dependencies: Be open to a fix-forward approach, setting time-bound access rights, define Disaster Recovery roles, and remove legacy components early.
- Use cloud to accelerate separation and reduce dependency risk: Providing a foundation for future digital services.
Outcomes / impact
The Bolton and Wigan demerger:
- Had no unplanned outages, remaining Safe & Legal
- Achieved sovereign, resilient ICT estates for each council
- Enabled future cloud transformation
Structured planning and governance can deliver complex, compliant, secure ICT separations, providing a foundation for future digital transformation in councils going through LGR, ensuring that residents experienced no critical service disruption.
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