Chelsea Chamberlin, Chief Technology Officer at Roc Technologies, argues that devolution can help the UK local government sector pool talent, cut costs and improve digital public services.

It’s been a difficult few years for local governments across the UK. Birmingham City Council was forced to effectively declare itself bankrupt in 2023, with £300m of funding cuts underway in 2024 in an attempt to rectify the situation. But with funding cuts comes an increased likelihood that local residents fail to benefit from local services or have an insufficient user experience with applications. That strain is compounded by a shortfall of talent in the public sector, particularly in digital skills such as cybersecurity, AI, application development and cloud technologies.

And where shortfalls exist, those who do possess the skills can command high salaries, leaving public sector organisations priced out of the market by private businesses with deep pockets. To address this dual challenge, devolution offers the opportunity to pool resources and talent, leading to greater efficiency and the ability to provide more services with fewer financial resources.

A pooling of resources

Devolution in the public sector is essentially bringing together smaller regional government institutions into a single entity, with resources shared by each individual institution in the group. For example, by centralising IT services in the most digitally advanced area, local governments can provide better service coverage. And by consolidating budgets under one umbrella, they can offer more competitive salaries to specialist staff and drive the creation of improved public services. There are more varied and attractive job opportunities, with greater variety in the types of tasks that employees can take on. It’s essential to unlocking digital transformation opportunities.

We’ve already seen a coming together between universities in recent months. The UK’s very first super-university has recently been formed by Kent and Greenwich, allowing both institutions to tackle economic challenges, as 40% of universities in England are now projected to be in financial deficit. In each of those institution’s digital teams, there are likely to be specific strengths. One may be stronger at networking and foundational infrastructure technologies, the other specialised in application development and cloud services. This allows for a levelling up of talent and capabilities. The Civic University network has also seen universities partner with local governments to develop skills, research and innovation that support local businesses and promote social mobility with access to higher education.

However, integrations can expose weaknesses if IT and cybersecurity standards are not aligned. A combined entity is only as strong as its weakest cyber provision. It may be that there needs to be some initial spending to complete a cyber readiness assessment, giving organisations a clear picture of the combined infrastructure, applications and policies they now have in place. It’s an opportunity to uncover gaps and secure any exposed endpoints as the process moves forward.

Navigating wider challenges

Devolution brings many benefits, but organisations must also consider the wider challenges brought about by such a change. Of course, the priority of public sector organisations is the welfare of their local people, with social care, housing and refuse collections all essential services that must be maintained. Underpinning those services however is an IT estate that powers key applications. The problem is that during many devolution programs, the merging of IT estates can be left to the end as it’s often a complex undertaking. In local government, this is made more complicated by legacy and on-premises equipment that needs to be updated.

The risk of delays when updating the infrastructure across the combined group means that end users and resident services in one area may be slower or provide an inferior experience than that in another region, until the full integration has taken place. The challenge here is the damage in public trust that can then be incurred in regions where residents are not benefitting from instant responses to queries via an AI bot, for example.

It’s therefore critical that an IT-first approach is taken during the devolution process, both to ensure an effective user experience and sustain public confidence. That approach needs to consider exactly why the devolution process is being initiated. Saving money is a great benefit, but it can’t be the only reason for devolution. Leaders need to measure the strategy against a variety of different tangible outcomes, including cyber incident response times, the time taken to action requests from the public and the user experience being offered to citizens. If the benefits of devolution are to be maintained long-term, it’s important to continuously benchmark against these factors.

Stronger public services

Devolution can be a pragmatic route to stronger public services when underpinned by a clear, IT-first strategy. Pooling budgets and talent allows local authorities to offer competitive salaries, standardise security and extend modern digital capabilities across regions that would otherwise struggle to fund them alone.

But rigorous execution is needed to achieve these benefits, including shared cyber baselines, early integration of networks and applications and transparent measures of success. Done well, and devolution can enable the public to not just save money, but deliver consistent, secure and responsive services that residents can truly benefit from.