This post was written in August 2026 prior to the government’s decision to pause LGR, but the points made remain relevant for councils navigating upcoming changes to both their internal and external environment.
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With more decisions on Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) announced, councils across the UK are going to need to navigate some complex adjustments of responsibilities as they assume different structures.
Even for those not directly affected by LGR, any change taking place in neighbouring boroughs could have an impact, such as boundary changes making it harder for members of the public to know who’s responsible for an issue.
At SocietyWorks, we’ve been helping councils through various structural transitions with our technology for over 20 years, and have already been supporting some of our clients through changes associated with LGR.
Take a look at some of the ways we’ve been doing this…
Keeping the front-end simple and consistent
While LGR is a big topic among the public sector, nearly two thirds of the public are not engaged with what is happening. Regardless of how much change is afoot, members of the public will still want to do things like check when their bin is being collected, submit an application for a skip licence or tell the council about a pothole — quickly, easily and without confusion.
During Northamptonshire County Council’s unitary transition into North Northamptonshire Council and West Northamptonshire Council, we helped to keep the reporting of local street and highway defects simple. We did this by running a combined service capable of triaging between the two new councils until each was ready to launch their own instance of the service, each of which is still capable of ensuring reports go to the right place across the county and beyond its borders.
Absorbing and redistributing responsibilities
Where reorganisation involves redistributing responsibilities, it’s essential to keep data flows smooth to reinforce trust and prevent failure demand.
Take the work we completed with Buckinghamshire Council following its transition to unitary status which made it possible to automatically triage reports to its town and parish councils and gave them the ability to respond to users to keep the feedback loop closed. This enabled residents to see continuity in service delivery even when governance changed.
Our new FixMyStreet for Parish & Town Councils offering builds on this work, giving the smallest of councils the ability to define which types of street issue they are responsible for, and then receive email notifications when local residents report issues in those categories via FixMyStreet.
Meanwhile, for other authorities needing to change the types of reports they receive or alter the services they offer, our flexible solutions are designed to accommodate this — whether it’s as simple as adding new categories for public realm fault reporting or as intensive as incorporating whole new waste services into the council’s remit.
Bridging gaps and smoothing switchovers
The interoperability of our solutions ensures that our council clients can make whatever changes are required behind the scenes, enabling you to restructure without disrupting the citizen-facing side of the process.
This is something we helped the Royal Borough of Kingston Upon Thames and the London Borough of Sutton with while they navigated a full in-cab system switchover. Using their respective instances of our front-end WasteWorks portal, users could still check bin days, report issues and manage their waste needs just like before. This meant that while internal integrations and workflows evolved, the public interface stayed consistent and predictable.
A considered approach to change
LGR represents a moment of real change for councils and, critically, the people they serve. While this scale of change won’t be without its challenges, where councils make use of technology that can accommodate individual needs, disruption can be kept to a minimum.
We know how to support councils to achieve sustainable digital transitions that create impactful transformation in public service delivery. If you would like some help navigating LGR through citizen-centred technology, get in touch with us and we’ll do our best to help.
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Image: Nicolas Postiglioni on Pexels