[samwillis]

While I agree, venture outside central government to local authority and you still get a shit show of bad websites and services.

The other day I paid out yearly fee for our garden waste bin collection. The page takes you to an completely un-styled credit card form with no branding and just the price, no details, then the “confirmation” screen is just white page with a single line “payment received”, nothing else not even a redirect. Oh and no confirmation email.

Our local planning site had a bug for six months where when you typed in the search box, focus was lost if you typed to slowly due to the results appearing automatically and steeling focus…

[diordiderot]

It really confuses me. All of "Her Majesty's government's" designs and software are exceptionally well made and freely available.

Why can't counties, boroughs, and councils just copy it and add a dash of styling

[andygh]

Having worked in building local government services there's loads of factors of why this hasn't worked (despite GDS trying desperately to make it so).

Most of it comes down to money - the vast majority of residents that use Council services are older and/or less likely to have access to a computer or smartphone and/or more likely to need support in accessing these services from someone else. We're pretty good at designing services for these people for the web but frankly, they aren't using them.

Some of it is because local government pays poverty wages. Much of the staff I worked with in our IT dept (in a pretty well complimented software development team, it must be said) had been working there 20 years or they are trainees on apprenticeships or fixed-term 1 year contracts. Because of that, there's huge difficulties in adopting agile as a working model, changing technology stacks to ones that the GDS and GOV.UK use is incredibly difficult and recruiting staff that can lead the way on this is an impossibility. Instead, we're relying on outsourcing this to companies like Capita who make some of the worst designed government services I've ever seen.

Finally, Councillor's (our budgetholders at the end of the day) just don't see the material benefit of good digital services for their residents. Faced with a year-on-year cut to the grants they get from central government and the poltiics of raising Council Tax, they see IT staff more as a cost centre than as an area for capital development.

[diordiderot]

Thank you so much for your thorough reply Andy!

Do you think that there's anything an average bloke can do to improve their own local services such as lobbying etc?

[ceeplusplus]

It's expensive to hire even halfway competent developers. Local governments aren't big enough to even have good IT departments, nevermind actual software development.

I do wonder sometimes why stuff like Squarespace isn't used more often. It seems like at least the informational pages could look nice, even if the stuff that requires custom logic looks terrible.

[Nextgrid]

I don't understand why every council should have their own developer. Seems like most municipalities need a standard set of services (the parent mentioned garbage bin collection, but others like council tax payment also come to mind) that can be built once by the UK government and then offered as an SaaS to every council, allowing them to gain economies of scale and freeing up their developers (if any) to work on custom stuff that's too specific to be shared across many municipalities.

[cameronh90]

GDS have arguably started to encroach on local government services with their voter registration service.

However don't underestimate the inclination of people to protect their silos. Even if offered a free service by central government, you'd almost certainly find a lot of local governments choosing to implement their own.

[phatfish]

Councils and other local government organizations are expected to get fleeced by Capita and other "preferred" private outsourcing companies that don't care about anything other than collecting taxpayer money.

Of course it would make complete sense for the gov.uk team to expand and help local government organizations with their online presence. But that won't feather the nest of the right people.

[petepete]

Some do, like Hackney

https://github.com/LBHackney-IT

As others have said, most don't have the budget or inclination.

[steve_gh]

Mine too. The Bath area (BANES) recycling centre booking is all GDS design elements. Looks great, intuitive and works really well.

[Angostura]

The platform simply doesn't seem to be available for local authorities to use. So they have to cobble stuff together themselves with Wordpress, Drupal or whatever they have to hand.

[Veen]

Lack of incentives and resources (i.e. they don't give a shit, and if they did they have something else to spend the money on).