THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Smarter spending not just cutting: How UK local government CIOs use low-code and AI to drive sustainable savings
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.
Structural pressure on all fronts
Recent analysis from the UK’ s Local Government Association( LGA) predicted that councils in England could face an £ 8 billion 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platforms, duplicated systems and inefficient processes often force councils to spend more time and money maintaining outdated services than gaining any real value from them.
Mark Gannon, Director of Client Solutions, Netcall
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.
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
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