Local authorities across the UK are under pressure to deliver more with less. Mark Gannon, Director of Client Solutions, Netcall, says that by consolidating systems, automating processes and empowering staff with low-code and AI tools, councils are achieving real savings while improving services.
Across the UK, local government leaders are grappling with some of the most challenging operating environments in recent memory. As funding pressures and demand for core services continue to grow, councils are looking for more innovative ways to address the challenge. While the latest spending review offered some stability including multi-year funding settlements, it also brought sharper scrutiny on how councils drive productivity and deliver measurable value.
Reactive firefighting is no longer enough. Instead, local authority CIOs and digital leaders must harness the right tools and technologies not simply to digitise services but to fundamentally change how costs are managed and value is created.
This isn’t about chasing shiny tech or running pilots that never scale. It’s about pragmatic, measurable transformation that delivers tangible results for overstretched teams and communities alike.
Structural pressure on all fronts
Recent analysis from the UK’s Local Government Association (LGA) predicted that councils in England could face an £8bn funding gap by 2028-29 without adequate government support. At the same time, statutory demand in areas such as social care, temporary housing and special educational needs is rising sharply.
Meanwhile, legacy IT estates and vendors – many designed for a different age – are actively undermining efforts to modernise. Fragmented platforms, duplicated systems and inefficient processes often force councils to spend more time and money maintaining outdated services than gaining any real value from them.
In response, a growing number of local authorities are making strategic bets on flexible, end-to-end solutions that combine low-code, automation and AI tools in one unified platform – enabling smarter service delivery that improves services and saves money.
Newcastle City Council: a platform approach to sustainable savings
Take Newcastle City Council. As the council digitised and improved various services over the years, different departments had introduced new tools and software applications, creating a sprawling digital landscape of more than 100 siloed systems. Maintaining this complexity came at a high price both in terms of licensing costs and operational inefficiency.
By consolidating services onto a single, adaptable platform, the council was able to eliminate many of these costs while empowering non-technical staff to build and adapt digital services in-house using low-code tools. So far, the council has delivered over £1 million in license cost reductions and counting. That’s real cashable savings. And that’s without including additional savings associated with increased productivity and enhanced citizen and employee experience.
For example, the council saw up to a 98% reduction in manual processing time for housing rent verification and enhanced team productivity, allowing them to focus on higher-value strategic work.
This kind of in-house capability also means digital services can be developed and deployed quickly without lengthy procurement cycles or development delays.
That’s more than just a tech refresh. It’s a strategic shift toward building digital capability in-house, giving the council the flexibility to evolve its services as citizen needs and policy priorities change.
South Hams: intelligent automation meets demand spikes
At South Hams District Council, the problem was different but equally acute. With a goal to offer local residents discounted parking rates, the council expected 30,000 applications each year with unpredictable daily volumes ranging from a handful to hundreds. Traditional processing methods were proving unsustainable, creating a risk of service backlogs, citizen dissatisfaction and escalating staffing costs to manage the scheme.
Using intelligent AI-powered document processing, the council digitised the end-to-end permit process, reducing manual workloads and saving around £160,000 each year on avoided agency staffing costs. The process is now automated – making it faster, more consistent and ready to handle demand surges without additional headcount.
This automation delivered an immediate boost: application processing times dropped from an average of 15 minutes to under 30 seconds.
This is a clear example of how automation – when applied thoughtfully – can save money and improve outcomes, especially in councils with small teams and limited budgets.
Tewkesbury: using AI to elevate the citizen experience
Tewkesbury Borough Council is another example of how smaller authorities are successfully applying AI to strengthen frontline services. With increasing demand and a small citizen service team, the council turned to AI-driven virtual assistants and advanced natural language processing to triage incoming queries across its contact centre.
Through a low-code solution, the council can rapidly deploy and customise these tools to reflect local priorities and citizen needs. The AI assistant interprets a wide range of queries and routes them efficiently – resolving them instantly through self-service or escalating to a staff member when human input is needed.
This triage model ensures that routine requests are handled quickly and consistently while staff focus on more complex or sensitive cases requiring empathy and expertise.
Because the triage is integrated with back-office processes and case handling, the end-to-end experience feels seamless for citizens.
The results speak for themselves: a 38% shift to digital channels has reduced reliance on costlier contact methods, average wait times have halved and abandoned calls have dropped by 17%.
More importantly, residents now experience faster responses and smoother interactions – no longer bounced between departments or forced to repeat their issue. For the council, it has meant delivering better service at scale without the cost of expanding headcount.
The low-code foundation also allows the council to iterate and improve the system over time, adapting to new needs without lengthy development cycles. This agile, data-driven approach is helping Tewkesbury provide a modern, accessible and sustainable citizen experience.
Common themes: consolidation, automation, empowerment
What connects these examples is not the technology itself but the way it’s applied and the ambition and vision of the councils using it. Three strategic principles underpin each of these council success stories:
- System consolidation: Reducing the number of digital applications and solutions cuts costs and complexity. A unified platform provides clearer oversight, improves data sharing and simplifies staff training. And it’s also more secure.
- Process automation: From council tax and business rates to social care applications and permit issuance, repetitive tasks are ideal candidates for automation. This not only saves time but also reduces errors and accelerates service delivery.
- In-house capability: Low-code tools give operational teams the power to build and adapt services themselves. This builds digital autonomy, reduces reliance on external suppliers and allows councils to respond more quickly to citizen needs and policy changes.
The broader benefits: from cost savings to citizen experience
While financial savings are critical, the benefits of this approach go far beyond the bottom line. Councils adopting these technologies are also improving service quality, reducing failure demand and increasing staff and citizen satisfaction.
This approach encourages teams to focus on real-world impact – how services perform and how residents experience them – not just internal benchmarks or vanity metrics. In local government, this means tracking not just digital adoption rates or process times but how services are experienced by citizens and staff.
Looking ahead: smarter investment, stronger outcomes
With half of councils (51%) warning they are likely to issue a section 114 notice – a formal declaration by a local authority in the UK indicating that it cannot meet its financial obligations, effectively restricting new spending – in the next five years, the need for action is clear.
But not all cost-saving measures are created equal. Quick fixes can store up long-term problems, especially when they compromise service delivery or damage public trust.
The examples above show that well-targeted investment in technology can deliver savings that are both immediate and sustainable. But they also show that these decisions need to be owned and led at a strategic level – embedding Digital Transformation not just within IT or digital teams but across the entire organisation.
That includes choosing platforms that are open, futureproof and flexible – able to scale across departments and adapt to the ever-changing policy and citizen landscape.
Because smarter spending isn’t about slashing budgets. It’s about making every pound work harder – for staff, for systems and most of all, for the citizens councils serve.
