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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.