Reorganisation, reuse, and the case for a county-wide platform

By Munish Goswami, Founder & Director, VAAMG Consulting Limited #LPSInnovation

Local Government Reorganisation gives councils licence to change. What they do with that licence — rebuild bespoke, authority by authority, or share a single platform — will decide whether reorganisation pays for itself.

The expensive instinct

Every council entering LGR is confronting the same inventory: duplicate case management systems, incompatible finance platforms, HR and payroll data that has never lived in one place. The instinct under pressure is to answer this authority by authority — each newly merged council procuring and building its own version of the same solution. That isn't reinvention. It's duplication with better PR, and it's exactly the cost reuse is meant to avoid.

Central government has already proven the alternative

This isn't hypothetical. The Home Office's Metis programme, launched in 2017, replaced the department's legacy ERP with a single Oracle Cloud platform for finance, HR and CRM — built from the start as a multi-tenant service designed to bring other public bodies on as clients rather than serve one department alone. DBS moved onto it, and the College of Policing followed. One platform, one data model, more than 35,000 users, more than one organisation.

Synergy goes further. It's a DWP-led cluster bringing the Ministry of Justice, DEFRA and the Home Office onto a single Oracle Fusion Cloud operating model for HR, finance and procurement — around 250,000 civil servants under one common design. Four accounting officers signed up to one Senior Responsible Owner and one delivery model, because four departments each running their own version of the same platform wasn't worth the duplication.

The read-across to a county is direct. A group of councils facing identical back-office and citizen-service problems are in the position DWP, MoJ, DEFRA and the Home Office were in before Synergy — several organisations solving the same problem separately. Nothing about Whitehall's constitutional status made the model work; a shared platform, a lead sponsoring authority, and one data and governance design are just as portable to a county as they were across departments. If four departments with genuinely different statutory purposes can share HR, finance and procurement, a group of neighbouring councils delivering near-identical services can too.

What reuse actually requires

Metis and Synergy didn't happen by goodwill alone. Both required a lead sponsor willing to carry accountability on others' behalf, a common data model agreed before onboarding rather than negotiated after, and suppliers willing to build for reuse rather than lock-in. A county-wide platform needs the same three things: one authority prepared to sponsor it, governance settled before the first council joins rather than retrofitted once three have, and commercial terms that treat a second and third council joining as the point of the platform, not a change request.

Get that foundation right and the payoff compounds — money not spent rebuilding the same integration three times is money available for the AI and citizen-experience ambitions councils actually want. Get it wrong, and a shared platform just propagates whichever council's data discipline was weakest across all of them, faster.

The choice in front of councils

LGR will pass. What each council does with the reset it offers won't. Metis and Synergy show the shared-platform model works at national scale, with harder coordination problems than most counties will ever face. The councils that borrow that discipline now will have the headroom to build what comes next. The rest will spend reorganisation rebuilding what already existed, just with a new logo on it.

References:

https://www.ukauthority.com/articles/home-office-signs-new-metis-programme-deal-with-oracle/

https://www.government-transformation.com/innovation/home-office-moves-hr-services-to-the-cloud

https://www.techuk.org/what-we-deliver/events/industry-briefing-the-home-office-metis-portfolio.html - References taken by attending the briefing

https://www.oracle.com/uk/news/announcement/four-major-uk-government-departments-select-oracle-cloud-to-transform-corporate-services-2024-10-21/

https://www.ukauthority.com/articles/dwp-signs-ibm-and-oracle-for-synergy-systems-integration/

https://erp.today/uk-public-sector-turns-big-red-in-redmond-with-microsoft-and-oracle/

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