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, and what remains is narrow, like the Digital Planning Improvement Fund for 2025-26. The LGA's State of Digital Local Government found 48 per cent of councils reporting management skills gaps for digitalisation, and the LGA-MHCLG digital leadership pilot from December 2025 reaches a handful of authorities. Reorganisation under the 2026 Act requires merging line-of-business systems, ERP and data across dozens of abolished districts into new unitaries. The transition has no dedicated fund behind it, shares no common platform, and no body sets standards for it.

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

A successor digital transformation fund and a standing shared service for local government, setting data standards and building reusable open-source components for unitarisation: finance-system migration, data matching and service redesign. MHCLG's Local Digital team with GDS would run it, and philanthropic funders could underwrite the open-source 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 forces dozens of simultaneous system mergers now, the Local Digital Fund is closed, and Birmingham's ERP failure is the base case without shared components.