Is the English Devolution White Paper a digital change moment?

This Monday the UK Government presented its English Devolution White Paper which sets out the Government's plans for the future of local government in England. The White Paper outlines the future funding model for local government, which is in need of reform. In broad brush strokes it commits to a simplified funding landscape for Strategic Authorities with consolidated funding that authorities have more control over¹. This model moves away from the old system of government departments and agencies offering lots of different funding pots for different purposes that required local authorities to spend time writing competitive bids and providing regular reporting.

I'm not interested in debating the merits or demerits of this move, but am interested in the digital response to these changes. By digital response I mean how central government would implement these proposals through a service for local government, part of that service would be digital and that is what I want to get into. In a world of multiple funding pots there was also a plethora of different bid submission and reporting processes that local authorities had to navigate. These could often be split across different government departments using different interfaces and processes that potentially require local authorities to report the same data in multiple places. While there have been efforts to centralise the digital experience with services such as the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government (MHCLG) Funding Service , the landscape still appears very fragmented to local authorities.

The changes proposed in the White Paper clearly aim to address this fractured funding and reporting landscape and this presents a unique digital opportunity for central government to simplify the digital interactions with local government. A first step would be a single digital service for local authorities that would centralise reporting on how they're spending the new consolidated funding from central government. The White Paper alludes, at a high level, to something like this when it explains the proposed accountability and outcomes framework:

The outcomes framework will: - Provide a single, streamlined approach to accountability and reporting to central government.

A single digital service for reporting to central government would certainly be welcome and help ensure a more consistent experience for local government. However, it also poses new challenges for central government. In the old world of multiple funding pots, government departments and fund-offering agencies could stipulate that local authorities would need to provide reporting as part of the funding agreements. This allowed them to dictate what data they wanted from local authorities, which they could use to monitor the delivery progress of funded schemes. But if MHCLG operated a single, unified digital service for local government reporting how do we ensure it captures all the data (and at the right granularity) that other departments and agencies need to operate? And how do we ensure we don't just create a single, incredibly onerous, reporting service for local authorities?

Defining a single reporting framework that encompasses all the data requirements of departments and agencies with a stake in how local government spends their money will be hard. But it is the sort of challenging problem central government should be tackling in a way that properly cuts across departments and asks searching questions about what data is actually needed to measure how spending meets government objectives.

What if instead of thinking about creating a service where local government reports to central government the service offered was one that actually added value for local government users. This requires casting the problem as not how central government can monitor local government progress, but rather how central government could provide a platform that makes it easier for local government users to track their project delivery, spend and outputs. If central government offered a platform for local government project delivery that acted as a local authority's single source of truth it would help local authorities manage their projects more effectively as well as provide data directly back to central government. This platform model is similar to other internet services we interact with as consumers like Strava as a way to monitor our physical activity. We simply put in our activity data and Strava solves the problem of viewing your routes on a map, keeping track of your activities, managing your workout load. All the while Strava is able to collect all of that data and offer the aggregated data as the Strava Metro service for urban planners. Central government could provide a platform that local authorities can use to create, track and complete projects funded through the consolidated funding agreements. This could improve the project management experience
for local authorities as well as aggregate the data for departments to monitor if funded projects are delivering.

Such a platform would be an ambitious task for a department such as MHCLG but could radically redefine how local government interacts with central government. Centralising data about local government projects would give central government the ability to monitor projects more consistently, with everyone using the same platform and reporting on a common data standard. It would help prevent the duplication of reporting that likely occurs in the old system and improve visibility of projects between local and central government. Having a central platform for reporting that is managed by a single department would also free up the work of other departments and agencies to provide more specific services that could be recommended for local government projects which meet certain criteria within the platform, i.e. when a project reaches a certain delivery milestone there could be a recommendation to book a review with another government agency that is required for project sign off.

Overall, the English Devolution White Paper proposes significant changes to local government in England. These changes offer a unique opportunity to develop a single, unified digital service from central government to local government. This digital service has a chance to operate more broadly than merely as a consolidated reporting service with local government and could offer serious value to local government as a platform that supports project delivery. This would help drive a common data standard for projects in local government and allow central government to monitor progress milestones and costs as a consequence of adoption of the platform. Standardising how data flows into central government would not only reduce duplication and the burden of reporting but will also enable supporting departments and agencies to add more value by focusing on providing bespoke services. The English Devolution White Paper should be seen not only as an opportunity to modernise local government but is also an opportunity for central government to modernize its own approach and help facilitate and monitor local government delivery rather than simply marking their homework.

P.S. The crux of the idea here is inspired by many of the things covered in Richard Pope's excellent book Platformland.