Safe and legal is the floor: technology's real role in LGR

Fil Kamps, Technology Strategist – Local Government at Microsoft #LPSInnovation2026

The deadline that shapes everything

Over 200 councils across 21 areas are merging into new unitary authorities. Every LGR programme is now organised around one unforgiving test: be safe and legal on vesting day. That test is necessary — and it is also the single biggest risk to the outcome. A programme optimised entirely around a legal deadline will deliver a larger version of what already exists, and will spend the transformation budget doing it.

Parity is not progress

The instinctive response to a merger is convergence. Three payroll systems become one. Four case management systems become one. Much of that work is genuinely unavoidable. But convergence onto the incumbent products of the largest predecessor council is not transformation — it is inheritance at scale. A new authority that reaches vesting day having achieved parity on a legacy estate, with a depleted digital team and no money left, has used a once-in-a-generation opportunity to stand still.

Technology's real job: decoupling the two deadlines

The most valuable thing technology can do in LGR is separate the Day 1 legal deadline from the Day 2 transformation ambition, so that neither holds the other hostage.

Integration layers, API-first design, a common data platform and shared identity allow a new council to present one coherent front door to residents without having first rationalised every back-office system. Continuity gets delivered by the layer above; rationalisation then happens on a timeline driven by value rather than by statute. That is a very different programme from a mass migration — cheaper, less brittle, and far easier to stop and correct.

Two decisions that will outlast the programme

Most LGR technology choices are reversible. A few are not, and deserve disproportionate scrutiny:

Data foundations. Master data, records management, lineage and retention rules set during transition determine whether the new authority can answer basic questions about its residents in 2032. Retrofitting this later costs multiples of getting it right now.
Identity and access. A new legal entity means new accounts, roles and joiners-movers-leavers processes for thousands of staff, delivered at speed. Get it wrong and you inherit a decade of overprovisioned access and an enlarged attack surface at precisely the moment the organisation is least able to defend it.

The constraint nobody budgets for

Digital and technology teams are being asked to deliver the most complex programme of their careers while going through their own restructure, often without knowing whether their role exists on the other side. Retention is a delivery risk, not an HR footnote. The foundations for Day 1 are as much about capacity and continuity of knowledge as they are about architecture.

What this asks of industry

Councils in reorganisation do not primarily need more products. They need optionality, honest sequencing advice — including being told when not to buy something — and solutions that can be reused rather than rebuilt in all 21 areas independently. Suppliers who add capacity and transfer capability, rather than substituting for it, will be the ones invited back.

The measure that matters

Almost every new authority will be safe and legal on Day 1. The real question is whether, three years on, residents can demonstrably do more, more easily, than they could before. That outcome is being decided now — in decisions that look purely technical, and are not.

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