Can AI give your council time to pick up the phone?
Small councils say they can’t afford to go digital. Shared open-source code and AI could change that, but only if the time they save goes back to residents rather than being cut.
Reviewed, edited and approved by Editor-in-chief Daniel Sköld · Updated 25 October 2026
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You ring the council about a missed bin, an overgrown footpath or your mother’s care assessment. You get hold music, then a menu, then a suggestion that you “visit our website”. You visit the website. It sends you back to the phone number. It’s very well-mannered and gets you nowhere.
Somewhere behind all that, a council officer is retyping the same details into three systems that don’t talk to each other. AI and shared software are now being sold as the cure. The pitch is less clicking and more caring. It’s a lovely line. The question for anyone who pays council tax is whether the time saved ends up with residents or just disappears in the next budget round.
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Why are small councils so far behind on digital?
English local government is a patchwork, and the smallest pieces are very small indeed. There are more than 10,000 parish and town councils. Many are run by a part-time clerk with a laptop, a spreadsheet and enormous patience. Above them, in two-tier areas, district councils handle planning, housing, bins and council tax collection, and the county council does social care, roads and schools. Each of these bodies has historically bought, built or bodged its own technology.
That’s where the money goes. A big unitary council can afford a digital team. A district council with a few hundred staff usually can’t, so it buys off-the-shelf systems from a handful of suppliers. Then it pays the licence fees every year and finds it can’t leave. The tech industry calls this “vendor lock-in”. Most people would call it being stuck with a gym membership you can’t cancel.
The rest of the UK is set up differently. Scotland has 32 unitary councils, and its community councils speak for residents but don’t run services. Wales has 22 principal councils plus town and community councils. Northern Ireland’s 11 councils have narrower powers, because Stormont departments run things like roads and social care. Whether your council is big or small, the basic problem is the same: lots of organisations doing the same paperwork, each paying separately to do it.
What does open source actually change for councils?
The most useful example isn’t AI. It’s a council website platform called LocalGov Drupal. It started when public sector accessibility rules began requiring websites to meet the WCAG 2.1 AA standard. Plenty of council sites failed, and each council faced the bill for fixing its own. A group of councils decided to build one platform together and share the code.
It’s free, open source and owned by the public sector. A feature paid for by one council is available to every other council at no cost. The government’s Local Digital programme helped fund its beta phase from 2021, when 11 councils signed up to the shared codebase. The project’s own figures now show 77 council sites and 87 microsites running on it. Users range from the London Borough of Waltham Forest to Essex County Council and Newport City Council in Wales. The OECD’s public sector innovation observatory has held it up as an example for other countries.
That changes the sums for small councils. It doesn’t need to employ developers. It needs someone who can write clearly and keep the pages up to date, which plenty of councils still struggle with. The same logic applies to AI. If one council builds a tool that sorts planning queries or drafts letters to residents, and shares it openly, the 20th council to use it pays almost nothing. The obstacle isn’t really cost. It’s whether councils trust each other enough to share.
Technology doesn’t save time. It moves time, and someone has to decide where it goes.
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Will AI in councils mean more face-to-face help for residents?
This is where it gets awkward. The case for AI in councils is real. Several English councils have trialled AI note-taking tools for social workers. These record and summarise a visit so the worker doesn’t spend the evening typing it up. Whitehall has also been building its own AI tools for civil servants, including software for summarising meeting minutes and analysing responses to public consultations. It has published an AI Playbook setting out how public bodies should use the technology safely. The Local Government Association has published guidance for councils covering similar ground.
Social work makes the case well. Ask any social worker how much of their week goes on recording rather than visiting, and the answer is usually depressing. If software can give them back a few hours, those hours could go to the visit that actually matters. That might be an elderly man living alone, a carer close to breaking point, or a family that needs someone to turn up rather than send a form.
But councils are under serious financial pressure, and freed-up hours can be counted in two ways. They can go back into front-line contact, or they can be counted as savings and cut. The second is far easier to put in a budget report. There’s also the matter of reorganisation. The government’s English Devolution White Paper, published in December 2024, set out plans to replace two-tier county and district councils with larger unitary authorities. Mergers bring a natural temptation to treat efficiency as the whole point.
None of this is a reason to oppose the technology. A council that refuses AI on principle will still have exhausted staff typing notes at 9pm. It’s a reason to watch what happens to the time.
How can you tell if your council is getting it right?
You don’t need a degree in data science. Ask the questions you’d ask of any big purchase at work. What problem is this solving? How will we know it’s working? What happens to the hours it saves? A council that can answer the last one clearly, in public, has probably thought it through.
Watch the phone line too. Good digitisation should make the easy things easy, like paying for a parking permit, reporting a pothole or checking a bin day. That should leave people free to deal with the hard stuff on the phone or in person. If your council has made the website better and the phone line worse, it has moved the effort onto you, not saved it.
Finally, check where the data goes. Social care notes, housing records and benefit details are sensitive. Under UK GDPR, councils remain responsible for how any AI tool handles personal data, and you’re entitled to ask. A council that uses shared, open tools is at least in a position to show its workings.
In short
Shared open-source platforms such as LocalGov Drupal have already shown that even small councils can afford decent digital services if they pool the cost instead of each paying separately. AI tools could free real hours from paperwork, especially in social care. Whether that turns into more face-to-face help or simply fewer staff is a choice each council makes, so it’s worth asking your councillors which one they’re making.
Andy Irwin writes about the way we live now for men 45 and over: work, relationships, mental health, getting older, and the trends and debates that land on men in the middle of life. With the facts, a dry sense of humour, and no lectures.
One of Midcent's writers. Spotted something? Write to andy@midcent.uk.
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