[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.