By Tim Pitts, Triple Value Impact
For the last few years, I’ve been banging the drum about digital foundations. We talked about moving to the cloud, consolidating onto M365, rationalisation of the application estate etc etc, not because it’s trendy, but because it’s the only way to strip out the “noise” and cost of legacy ICT and to truly leverage your data across the whole council. In 2024 and 2025, many will have cleared those decks, but as we enter 2026, the goalposts have shifted.
The era of “digital transformation” as a set of standalone projects focused on putting automated transactions online, service by service, is over. It’s no longer about whether your residents can pay for a parking permit on their phone; it’s about whether you knew they needed that service before they even logged on. 2026 is the year local government must transition from being reactive processors to pre-emptive enablers. And that means automated, operationalised insights and decisions – not just building more and more dashboards in your BI team.
As Jens Gemmel advocates, the successful council of 2026 is a “Living Council” (prevention-first mindset, AI-native integration and human connection). We have moved past the “Pilot” phase, and if your teams are still “piloting” basic automation in 2026, you aren’t transforming; you’re stalling. We are now in the Industrialisation phase where the latest Agentic AI capabilities can automate the “plumbing” (e.g. SPD checks, repair scheduling, planning application reviews, financial assessments and so on) so our human talent can focus on the high-value, in person, human-centric work.
So where do we see the key themes for 2026:
1. From “Dashboards” to “Decision Engines”
In 2024, we got better at seeing our data. In 2025, we got better at connecting it and recognising its potential. In 2026, the “mega leap” is using that data to automate much of the decision itself. As an example, we shouldn’t just be looking at a map of potholes; the system should be automatically scheduling the repair, optimising the route for the crew, and updating the resident in real-time without a single human intervention, and moving from reactive maintenance to planned maintenance. If your digital strategy still requires an officer to “verify” basic data as part of the decision-making process, you aren’t compressing time to value – you’re just adding a digital layer to old-fashioned bureaucracy. The most ambitious councils are now looking at using Agentic AI — systems that don’t just answer questions but execute multi-step workflows based on automated information analysis.
2. Hyper-Personalisation: The “Amazonification” of all services
We’ve talked about data-driven insights for a decade, but 2026 is where the rubber meets the road, in particular in Adult Social Care and Children’s Services whereby connecting data totally transforms the response to a very personalised one. By leveraging “Golden Records” (single views of the citizen connecting multiple data sets including sensor data), councils are finally moving toward predictive and pre-emptive interventions which are significantly lower cost and deliver considerably better outcomes. Imagine a system that flags a high risk of a fall or a UTI for an elderly resident based on sensor data, triggering a pre-emptive home visit, or better still the family intervening instead of the council and taking the service user to the GP’s, before a hospital admission occurs and the consequential step up in care needs with associated additional costs is totally avoided. This is the “mega leap” I’ve been talking about. It’s about using data to delete demand before it hits your budget.
Using the “Digital Blueprint” approach, councils are able to review opportunities to leverage the latest AI, predictive data and advanced digital marketing techniques — from SEND transport and Foster Care, to Adult Domiciliary Care and support for those with LD, to aged debt, to automated decision making on AP — and by applying hyper-personalization combining multiple data sets and services, e.g. combining contact around debt with eligibility for DWP benefits the pressure off the individual and the whole system. We are seeing “Predictive Prevention” where AI agents monitor care data to flag risks before they become crisis points. We are moving from a “one-size-fits-all” service to one that understands the individual resident’s journey collecting and interpreting data from the front door all the way through to personal care.
3. Sector leverage: The “Build” vs “Buy” dilemma
With budgets continually strained, and hiring and then holding on to the best technical talent becoming an art-form in itself, we are increasingly seeing councils working collaboratively to build where gaps exist in the market working cross-council e.g. “Local Government Collaboration and Innovation Copilot Sub Group”, or with super organisations such as GDS Local who provide the “Local Government Tech Stack” which provide standardised building blocks so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, and LOTI who have developed a really strong set of tools and assets. However, there are alot of very strong targeted solutions in the market which leverage specially trained LLMs (large language models) or specific capabilities like advanced data driven digital marketing that can never be matched by internal teams as they provide access to a huge amount of private sector capabilities which should not be ignored. They often provide much quicker ’time to value’ answers enabling councils to spin up a new service in weeks, not months / years – it is a false economy to think everything can be built in-house. The most successful authorities in 2026 will be those that blend both approaches.
4. Cyber Resilience as a Frontline Duty
If 2025 taught us anything, it’s that “responding” to a breach is too late. Cyber security is no longer an IT issue; it’s a frontline service issue. In 2026, we are seeing councils treat cyber resilience as a core part of their “Social Value” proposition – if your systems go down, the most vulnerable people in your community suffer. In 2026, cyber resilience is being built into the very fabric of service design. It’s no longer an IT box to tick; it’s a prerequisite. We are seeing a shift toward “zero-trust” architectures as a standard, ensuring that even as we open up our data for better insights, we are hardening our defenses at every touchpoint as the world gets more and more uncertain. We’re also seeing a shift toward “Automated Self-Healing” networks and devices. The trend is moving away from “defending the perimeter” toward “assumed breach” recovery speeds. If you can’t recover your core services in hours, not weeks, you are failing your community. And if you haven’t researched AI driven security monitoring, detection and intervention your homework is not finished.
Part of this cyber resilience is ensuring the organisation is safe and ready to harness the power of AI, with a clear, and well thought through AI strategy to safeguard the organisation from potential harm. This should cover everything from ensuring that a human is always in the loop with any use of AI, to ensuring bias mitigation, to data ethics and GDPR, to the basics around privacy-first infrastructure so personal data is never uploaded to e.g. free versions of ChatGPT, Gemini etc etc. After all, over 60%of cyber breaches come from within (usually unwittingly via phishing attacks etc).
It is also really important not to forget the ‘AI’ fear – it is scary to many people (if not most) and will be perceived as a threat to jobs – while clearly it could (and will in some circumstances) release staff, it should, more importantly, result in freeing up time to spend on the front line enabling staff to focus on the most important part of the job as well as getting rid of backlogs. This is particularly visible in the UK with the latest data showing that private sector has released more of the workforce as a % than any other country in Europe.
5. The M&A opportunity
Lastly Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) – this is the “clean slate” many have been waiting for, with decisions on future structures due from Central Government in the next few weeks. For the new unitaries formed through LGR, 2026 is the year of the dividend – while it will be a brutal and difficult process, it offers a rare gift: the opportunity to kill legacy debt and adopt modern ways of working and technologies as new teams form in one move. The temptation will be to think about the very practical aspects of merging, but that would mean losing a once in a lifetime opportunity to make that mega leap. It has been fascinating speaking to most of the authorities that have in recent years gone through the LGR process, with one theme coming through from every single one ‘I wish we had started earlier’ . We have consolidated these learnings, combined with our teams very practical experience of merging ICT functions and the wider Digital Blueprint into an “LGR Digital & ICT Implementation Blueprint”. This takes into account the MHCLG list of preparatory activities, and provides a templatised LGR Implementation Blueprint that is tailored to your local context, and maps out every activity, dependency, decision and deliverable. It will align councils in an LGR region to a common play book, and tell you what you should be doing now, even before the final government decisions are made on LGR council proposals.
So where does the Digital Blueprint fit into this, and where are councils finding the most value?
With well over 20% of unitaries and counties having used the Digital Blueprint model so far as a tool to enable the whole council to explore digital together and identify the high-impact methods to modernise services, either to take out cost (largely external, not staff) or increase revenues we are seeing a number of clear trends in highest priority areas of value. What has also been amazing to see as part of this process is a clear shift in thinking, where digital is no longer perceived as a cost centre, but a revenue and savings engine that is critical to the future delivery of services as financial pressures pile up and demand continues to grow. We are also starting to see ’tech savvy’ leaders promoted to the top table, like the brilliant Matthew Wallbridge at the London Borough of Hillingdon which is a super call – in the private sector you would be out of business without someone with this acumen at the top table, and in my view, Local Authorities should be no different.
So as we enter 2026, we’ve analysed the data from across all our client Digital Blueprints, and it’s telling an interesting story. While the opportunities for Foster Care, School Transport optimisation and the various ASC opportunities lead on “strategic impact” (the qualitative highest rated scores), the hard cash ROI is being driven by high-volume, high-frequency operational wins. I was surprised at the results, although I suspect this due to residual nervousness of the potential of technology to make a direct impact in the social care setting – I genuinely believe the opportunities are the biggest in these services which we will start to see this year as we start to support a number of clients to operationalise these capabilities.
So what are the top 5:
No 1: Video Repairs: By industrialising “Remote Triage” for housing repairs and utilising virtual reality, councils are killing the “no-access” visit and the “wrong tools for the job” waste. In 2026, all repairs starts with a 60-second video call. It’s a massive financial win that residents actually love because a good proportion of their repairs can be dealt with on the first call, and where a visit is required, the engineer comes equipped with all the right parts. The London Borough of Enfield have recently gone live with this opportunity and are already reaping the rewards.
No 2: EVCP – Electric Vehicle Charging Points: as many councils have the mindset of commercialising assets, councils are leveraging their physical infrastructure using digital platforms to turn EV infrastructure into a high-margin revenue stream – with returns of up to 10p per kWh with no investment or management costs, this is a no-brainer opportunity way to balance the books and support the community to green.
No 3: SPD – Single Person Discount: by using automated data matching to cross-reference council tax records with clever matching of internal and external data, councils are recovering hundreds of thousands in “lost” revenue.
No 4: ASC TEC in Dom Care: this is about “deleting demand” and freeing up social worker time through use of generative AI and data intelligence to deliver much more personalised and human centric delivery models reducing the need for Dom Care provision, and the days of spending 3+ days a week writing up notes or checking in every couple of weeks are a thing of the past – I truly believe that the technological capabilities that are coming on stream will be as impactful in the sector as the car was to travel. We believe that as teams get more comfortable with the digital capabilities and particular the power of TEC, predictive data and generative AI and it becomes the norm, the savings potential will multiply and bear the brunt of the relentless demand pressures we are seeing across the country.
No 5: Foster Care Recruitment leveraging advanced digital marketing: this is the highest scoring opportunity (4.639) and the most frequently selected opportunity because it is all about beating the private sector (the IFA’s) at their own game and can unlock millions in fees. Moving just a few children from agency placements to in-house foster care can save a council hundreds of thousands of pounds annually while improving stability for the child.
If any of this resonates and you are interested in having a look at the Digital Blueprint opportunities and the estimate net value of each for your council (calculated using RA and statutory return data), or would like a discussion on the LGR ICT & Digital Implementation Blueprint, please email me tim.pitts@triplevalueimpact.com and I would be delighted to arrange a call to run through in more detail.
