No successor to the Local Digital Fund and no shared digital infrastructure for reorganising councils

MHCLG has confirmed there are no plans for further Local Digital Fund rounds; what remains is narrow (e.g. the Digital Planning Improvement Fund 2025/26). The LGA's State of Digital Local Government found 48% of councils report management skills gaps for digitalisation, and the LGA/MHCLG 'Learn, Adapt, Lead' digital leadership pilot (December 2025) reaches only a handful of authorities (GMCA, Somerset, East Sussex). Meanwhile reorganisation under the 2026 Act requires merging line-of-business systems, ERP and data across dozens of abolished districts into new unitaries (one of the largest forced IT consolidations ever attempted in the UK public sector), with no dedicated fund, no shared platform and no standards body for the transition.

The savings cases justifying reorganisation assume systems consolidation councils lack capacity to deliver. Without shared components and funded capability, the sector risks repeating Birmingham's Oracle ERP failure across dozens of new unitaries simultaneously, at precisely the moment finance teams are weakest.

A successor digital transformation fund plus a standing shared service, a 'GDS for local government', setting data standards and building reusable open-source components for unitarisation (finance systems migration, data matching, service redesign). Sponsors: MHCLG Local Digital team with GDS; philanthropic funders could underwrite open-source common components.

// Build now: First artefact: philanthropy-underwritten open-source unitarisation components and standards (LocalGov-Drupal-style); successor fund and standing service are the state end-state.

Reorganisation is forcing dozens of simultaneous system mergers now with the Local Digital Fund killed and no shared platform, risking Birmingham's ERP failure replicated at scale.