According to Managed Service Provider, Annodata, the Government needs to be doing more to share digital services across the 351 local authorities and councils in England, despite service agreements already being set up.

Local authorities in England have so far set up over 400 shared service agreements, with efficiency savings of £462million. With each local authority and council having its own website, email systems, social care systems, education systems and more, IT duplication is a key issue.

Central government IT services are already shared through the Government Digital Service (GDS), but this type of system does not exist in a formal sense for local government.

Rod Tonna-Barthet, Annodata’s CEO said, “Local government remains under enormous pressure with stretched budgets but with such a large amount of duplication in technology provision, there is clearly scope to reduce costs and improve efficiency.”

With a hybrid cloud service available to local governments, authorities and councils will be able to access shared resources and aim to cut down on duplicate resources, such as individual websites.

Rod added, “We are seeing great strides being made in the local government sector on the adoption of shared services, but they are still not going far enough. Some councils may be reluctant to spend money on the IT infrastructure needed for such a move, but the fact is that those councils that share services effectively stand to make significant gains in the long run.”