Thursday, 25 June, 2026

The worst council website I have ever seen

I’ve been doing this job now for what feels like an awfully long time. As I’ve said before, sometimes I get cranky having to have the same conversations with people about issues I really thought we had all resolved in 2008 or something – but generally, I try to be calm and measured, and – frankly – glad of the work.

But today I came across a council website so gob-smackingly awful, it almost made me want to throw in the towel, and go and do something else with my life. Because if there are genuinely people in this sector, running these critical organisations, who think this drek is acceptable in this day and age, I wonder why I, and all the people who work so hard to make things better, bother in the first place.

I won’t name the council, am not interested in any kind of singling out, and I am quite aware that there are usually reasons for things being the way they are – and I don’t want to make people feel bad. What I do want to do is highlight the fact that local people around the country are being horribly let down by a system that allows organisations that clearly have NO IDEA WHAT THEY ARE DOING to carry on in this way.

Just some of the lowlights:

  • Prominent, utterly irrelevant Google ads at the top of the home page. GOOGLE ADS!!!! 🤮
  • Prominent links to popular services using words that have no relation whatsoever to the thing they are linking to – the worst example being “Public Access” which links to information about planning
  • Linking to a “my account” style thing, which only gives access to a tiny number of quite niche services, and which immediately drops the “my account” branding as soon as you’ve opened it. Am I in the my account thing? Have I ended up somewhere else? I have no idea.
  • Inside said my account portal thing, there’s a menu option called Menu, which when you click on it, does nothing
  • Really basic design flaws, like sections of the site being misaligned, boxes in a grid being different sizes, random fonts, hideous hover effects on links, and so on
  • A whole section dedicated to (even) more services, where again the language used bears little to no relation to the actual things real people might want to actually achieve, and what’s more, is actively confusing to the user.
  • Loads of links throughout the site saying things like “You can find X here.” etc
  • Some pages are just lists of loads of PDFs, full of content that nobody could be bothered to turn into accessible web pages that are actually readable on a phone.

Like I said, I really don’t want to make anyone feel bad. But someone somewhere must think this is ok – and it isn’t. Whose job is it to point this out to them? I feel really bad for the people in the team that has to keep this thing going – because there is no way they can be being supported by the powers that be.

And how can we as a sector support improvement across the board so those left behind in this way can catch up? Because it isn’t like the internet isn’t chock full of guidance on how to avoid disasters like this.

#The worst council website I have ever seen

Stephen Mounsey on standards:

That matters because some constraints are good constraints. They protect the basics. They stop us reinventing things we do not need to reinvent. They make it easier to reuse what already works. They can create pace, not just control. In public services, where accessibility, privacy, reliability and trust really matter, that kind of standardisation is not something we should be scared of. It is often part of how we deliver responsibly at scale.

Standards set you free! Well, not quite.

I was making this more or less exact point earlier today, though. So much energy and time is taken up in local government (in particular) having to convince people over and over again about how things ought to be done. It’s exhausting and one of the reasons why progress across the sector is so slow – and why I am still continuing to have the same conversations I was having 20 years ago…

Having an external standard gives you something to point at, makes things less arguable, gives them a little more solidity. And being able to refer to “the standard” regularly will – over time – lodge it in people’s minds and make it eventually, hopefully, second nature.

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A new book from Public Digital: The Intelligence Era Organisation – Creating the Conditions to Thrive in the Age of AI.

If you are a senior leader responsible for transformation and AI adoption in an established organisation, you’ll undoubtedly recognise the stakes of the current moment: your business is under siege from competitors who are better equipped to deliver for customers. The rapid advancement of AI is deepening that divide, and raising the stakes. Despite that, the reality is sobering: most transformation projects stall, and many organisations fail to extract meaningful value from their AI investments.

Well worth grabbing a copy and there’s a webinar thing you can sign up to as well.

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Something has changed recently with the algorithm on LinkedIn, and I have to say I don’t like it much. Am suddenly getting these posts – mostly written by men of a certain age, who have jobs that have things to do with tax and mortgages – spouting political opinions of the sort I strenuously try to avoid ordinarily. To be clear – I don’t follow these people, and wouldn’t ever choose to. However, they get lots of ‘engagement’ and so I think LinkedIn feels I would benefit from being exposed to them.

Clicking the toggle at the top to show ‘newest’ rather than ‘top’ posts in my feed helps, but it seems to reset every couple of hours.

LinkedIn is a weird place, mostly inhabited by cringelords and desperate sales people, but which has always (for me) rewarded the effort to find the good people and the interesting content, and is one of the few places one can share ideas about niche topics like local government IT without getting too embarrassed about it.

It would be a shame if that effort starts to become too much as a result of some muddle-headed race to the bottom in the name of engagement.

Any ideas on how to reduce the noise gratefully received (is there a “no gammons” button I’m missing? 😉 ) beyond the obvious marking posts with ‘not interested’, which seems to make no difference!

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Wednesday, 24 June, 2026

I really like the framing of digital leadership as a form of gardening in this post:

I think of digital capabilities as the plants that we are trying to grow throughout our organisation’s digital garden, its culture. Sometimes we need to consider whether we’re sowing the right seeds in the first place to grow the capabilities we want in our staff. But other times we might be puzzled when digital capabilities flourish in one part of the organisation but not another. Maybe there are other things we should consider.

Perhaps we’re lacking the right infrastructure? We need to invest in the right equipment to ensure that people’s experience of digital tools is a positive and productive one. If our colleagues’ experience of using digital tools is unreliable then they are unlikely to take root. Or perhaps we’re hoping that simply owning all the right equipment will be enough, but we haven’t invested the time and effort to water the seeds with the training people need to use it confidently.

Proper understanding of digital in the senior leadership tier of local government is one of the biggest things holding the sector back. I wonder if useful metaphors like this might help with explaining it to people in a meaningful way?

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In a conversation this morning it struck me how useful the Local Government Digital Standard might be to those councils going through LGR, trying to get agreement amongst a bunch of different colleagues about priorities, principles, and so on.

The LGDS basically comes as an oven-ready set of quality criteria and ways of doing things that everyone ought to be able to get board with right away. Could save a lot of time and strife!

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Tuesday, 23 June, 2026

The National Audit Office have published a Good practice guide for organisations using AI:

This guide highlights key considerations for audit and risk assurance committees when overseeing the planning, deployment and scaling of artificial intelligence (AI) within public sector organisations.

It draws on NAO findings, the UK Government’s AI Playbook, and lessons from digital transformation programmes across government.

This guidance includes:

  • where AI is used in government
  • areas that organisations need to consider
  • areas of focus and suggested questions to ask
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Another update from the Luton low code team on building out a system for managing complaints and other feedback. Have seen this in action and it is really impressive. More impressive, in fact, than Kev’s joke.

Part of the difficulty is that complaints don’t sit under one neat set of rules. Different services follow different legislation, guidance and oversight, and different types of cases come with different expectations around how they’re handled.

There are also multiple organisations governing how we do this, from the Local Government Ombudsman through to service-specific bodies like Children’s Social Care. This means complaints cannot always follow one simple process.

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Friday, 19 June, 2026

Finally got round to re-hosting localgov.blog onto a beefier slice of cloud. Also reworked how emails get sent out of the various blogs etc for new accounts, password resets and so on, which will make things a bit smoother for users.

SpinupWP made the migration a doddle and WPMailSMTP did the heavy lifting for the email stuff.

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Giles points to a bunch of interesting things, including:

  • Moments – a very bare bones photo sharing thing
  • Lettera – yet another Mac Markdown editor
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The Luton team show you can blog about anything, including the rollout of new printers.

Over the last few months, the DDaT team have been working on the refresh of the council’s fleet of printers with Ricoh being the new printer supplier…

The goals have been to improve functionality and performance using the latest technology to ensure cost-effective printing, reduced maintenance needs and better value for money.

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Thursday, 18 June, 2026

Following my linkage yesterday to the AI innovation in planning, Tom Loosemore weighs in on the unintended consequences:

One worry? Were I to put my mind to the grift, I could easily build a subscription service that would allow anyone to automatically write and send a well-founded and superbly researched objection to any planning application within half a mile of their property…

The end game has to be that the planning rules – or indeed the whole approach to planning – will have to change.

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Wednesday, 17 June, 2026

The BBC reports on Dorset Council testing AI to speed up planning applications:

Artificial intelligence (AI) agents are being trialled in Dorset to help combat planning application delays.

The team of agents is helping Dorset Council planning officers with minor applications by reviewing documents and providing recommendations.

Dorset is one of three councils trialling the tool, developed by AI specialist Faculty on behalf of the government.

James O’Malley has written about it himself:

But if the AI works as intended, councils try the tools out, and the paperwork side of the job is sped up, this could be transformative. It will give overstretched planning officers more time to do the other parts of their jobs – which will reduce the time from an application going in to spades hitting the ground. And that’s not even to mention how much less annoying it will be to be on the other side of the planning process, as your application won’t be left in limbo for quite so long.

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Jo Carter – “Your survey is lying to you: uncovering the pitfalls”:

A survey is a tempting thing. It looks inviting, it’s free to pick up, yet it can do a surprising amount of damage, especially when people don’t realise the risk they’re taking.

Most of the time, a survey is not the answer. And quite often, it’s making your decision-making worse, not better.

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ERP in local government

There is a lot of ERP talk at the moment, particularly in the light of LGR, and so I thought I would ask one of my robot friends to do some research into the state of things at the moment when it comes to finance, HR etc systems in local government.

You can find it here: https://bit.ly/lgerp

The procurement, deployment, and utilisation of Enterprise Resource Planning software in local government is currently at a critical inflection point. The historical era of the heavily customised, multi-year, on-premise monolithic ERP deployment is analytically, technically, and financially indefensible. The overwhelming market dynamics clearly indicate an aggressive, structural pivot toward integrated, multi-tenant cloud SaaS platforms designed to enforce standardised business processes and deliver rapid return on investment.

#ERP in local government

I have officially given up on fighting GoDaddy’s customer support and accepted that, for the time being, my locali.se domain is lost to me 😢

So the Localise website is now – and for the foreseeable future – found at localise.digital.

Will get on with sorting out the email mess shortly. In the meantime, I can be emailed at dave@sensibletech.co.uk as usual.

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Tuesday, 16 June, 2026

Great notes on transformation network building from Matt Wood-Hill:

Tangible products and artefacts helped build traction. Starting out as a product team gave us a big advantage. In order to co-design digital planning products at scale we had to collaborate across organisational boundaries and really work at our team culture, laying solid foundations for the future as things scaled. The products, which at the time were breaking new ground, helped attract the attention of others. They demonstrated that this group of people – predominantly from innovative local government teams – were serious about doing things differently.

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