Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP) Council: Preparing for local government reorganisation

BCP Council faced significant technology challenges as it prepared for its creation on 1 April 2019. Formed through the merger of Bournemouth Borough Council, Borough of Poole Council, Christchurch District Council, and the integration of selected services from Dorset County Council, the new organisation inherited a complex and fragmented technological landscape. Ensuring operational continuity while navigating this complexity was a major undertaking.

Government approval for the merger was granted in 2018, and a Shadow Authority was established in May of that year to oversee preparations. The immediate priority in the run-up to vesting day was to ensure the council would be safe and legal from day one. Alongside this, leaders maintained a clear longer-term ambition to deliver more responsive and proactive services for residents.

Digital, data and technology were recognised early as key enablers for achieving more sustainable and efficient services suited to a modern, digital‑age council. To manage the inherited complexity, the organisation adopted a new operating model at an early stage to support strategic decision‑making and guide future ways of working.

BCP Council entered vesting day with one overriding mission: be safe, legal and deliver uninterrupted services from day one. That meant keeping services running smoothly for residents while uniting three councils’ operations, systems and staff behind the scenes. To achieve this, the council focused on a set of clear priorities:

• Deliver business‑as‑usual services with no disruption to residents.
• Minimise impact on frontline staff, ensuring they could continue serving communities.
• Maintain strong financial management throughout the transition.
• Communicate clearly and consistently to support staff through the change.
• Stand up secure, reliable IT infrastructure ready for day-one operations.
• Ensure access to vital information, data and systems to keep staff productive.

With limited time and a highly complex people, process, technology and cultural landscape, the council took a pragmatic approach to enable stability on day one:

• Aligning back‑office functions having already created shared services across Bournemouth and Poole – HR, Finance, Legal, Comms & Marketing and IT – making it easier to integrate Christchurch post‑vesting.
• Stabilising IT foundations, including issuing new email accounts, consolidating Microsoft 365 environments and establishing trusted relationships between networks to support seamless communication.
• Auditing and enabling critical business systems to ensure all essential tools remained accessible on day one, supported by a detailed assessment of systems, processes and contracts.

Given the scale and pace, full system consolidation was not feasible before vesting day. BCP Council therefore kept most existing systems running to maintain continuity – accepting that this would create a backlog of technical issues that would need to be addressed at a later time through a structured transformation roadmap.

Some high‑risk systems were non‑negotiable and were prioritised for day‑one implementation, including the Local Land and Property Gazetteer, Electoral Roll, and Parking systems – each essential for compliance and uninterrupted public service delivery

Once vesting day was successfully achieved, the council shifted its focus from stability to ambition, beginning development of a strategic roadmap to drive transformation across its new unitary structure.

Operating model led transformation 

One of the earliest decisions taken was to first pause and focus on defining a new Council-wide operating model and agree organisational design principles which would guide the future structure of the council and ways of working.

To support this process, the council commissioned a strategic implementation partner shortly after vesting day. The operating model – finalised in November 2019 – sets out a direction of travel for the organisation. A core principle of the operating model was ‘to create a highly connected organisation that utilises data, insight, and digital solutions to deliver services, and which aligns with the council goal to foster sustainable, safe and healthy communities.’ 

The target operating model would become the cornerstone of the entire transformation – providing a basis for the structural design of the organisation. It would also influence decision making and investment in new platforms and technologies.

Organisational design

Once the operating model was defined, BCP Council focused on designing a new unified structure for the entire council which would align with the operating model.

This involved creating brand new teams (Centres of Expertise) for Business Support, Programmes and Project Management, Data and Analytics, Marketing and Communications, and Workforce Development, by bringing together similar roles from across the organisation. To facilitate this, a job audit was conducted to identify the existing jobs across the council and match them to more generic job roles and job families – ensuring these skills could be scaled across the whole organisation rather than sitting in siloes in specific business areas.

These new structures were introduced in 2021, ensuring that the council’s vision for how it would operate was reflected in the way its structures were designed.

Evidence led: Business case

With the council operating model defined and new structures in place, BCP Council continued work to develop an evidence-based business case required to fund a cross-organisational transformation programme which would embed these principles across the council.

BCP Council facilitated a council-wide activity analysis to build the case. Activities included reviewing contract data, hosting drop-ins, focus groups and 1:1s and asking staff to log details about their daily activities to form an accurate picture of how activity was distributed across the organisation. Insights from the data revealed significant process fragmentation and role duplication across the three legacy organisations leading to significant inefficiencies and unsustainable spending.

The analysis formed the basis of a business case which projected potential net benefits of up to £36 million per annum (£43.9 million gross benefits) by March 2025, through a one-off investment of £29.5 million. Cost saving measures included the reduction of between 400 and 600 FTE posts and rationalisation of third-party IT spend.

Launch of the transformation programme

Following sign-off of the business case, the first phase of BCP Council’s Transformation Programme kicked off in March 2021.

The council sought to make widescale changes across people, processes and technology, and deliver ambitious savings in line with the business case.

The Transformation Programme consisted of three core themes: 

• where and how we work
• our new organisational design
• supporting our colleagues.

Under the organisational design theme, four interconnected workstreams were initiated, these were:

• Technology rationalisation of the inherited IT estate and the implementation of new, unified enterprise systems and infrastructure.
• Customer experience improvement through the publication of a council wide customer strategy and investment in a new website.
• Data and Insight improvements through a focus on improving data quality and re-engineering core business processes.
• Service Redesign by supporting directorates to apply the organisational principles to services.

Rationalising the technology estate was a foundational task aimed at reducing the backlog of technical issues, whilst also setting the council on a path towards a modern streamlined technical estate which would underpin the delivery of digital services. 

Key activities included:

• Publishing a comprehensive technical strategy to set clear principles and standards.
• Developing an applications rationalisation roadmap, the ‘Enterprise Architecture Repository’
• Investing in new platforms and systems to create a scalable and future ready technology environment.

IT technical strategy

Published in 2022, the BCP IT technical strategy set out two guiding principles for BCP Council’s approach:

• Cloud First: Prioritising cloud-based solutions for scalability and resilience.
• Digital by Default: Promoting digital channels as the main channel for service delivery.

In addition, the strategy outlined the council’s intention to consolidate services around a small number of strategic suppliers, favouring a ‘Microsoft first’ approach. Systems would be hosted on Microsoft Azure, with widespread adoption of Microsoft 365 tools wherever possible.

The council embraced an ‘adopt rather than adapt’ philosophy, changing its processes to fit modern, off-the-shelf solutions rather than customising systems to replicate legacy practices. This would require close collaboration with teams to redesign processes and agree new service delivery models, ensuring the technology estate was ready for scalable, future-proof products.

Applications rationalisation roadmap

BCP Council conducted a TIME (tolerate, invest, migrate, eliminate) analysis of all applications inherited from the three councils to support the development of an applications rationalisation roadmap. 

The following criteria was used to support decision making.

• Tolerate: Applications that have potential for an alternative solution but in the present circumstances must be continued for a specific time limited purpose.
• Invest: Primary applications that provide a range of capability that can absorb smaller duplicated applications, or those that have a specific business purpose that cannot be replicated elsewhere.
• Migrate: Applications that can absorbed into an alternative solution that provides the same capability or delivered by an alternative methodology such as a software-as-a-service (SaaS).
• Eliminate: Applications that can be migrated to an alternative without losing capability or are no longer required as the purpose or capability no longer exists.

Decisions were based on an analysis of the following factors:

• Technical compatibility with infrastructure, operating systems, integrations and delivery methods.
• Functional ability to meet the needs of the new operating model 
• Strategic alignment with BCP Council’s technical strategy and standards.
• Costs of annual licenses, support and operational costs.

This approach had several benefits:

• The exercise surfaced dependencies and archiving needs.
• Early identification of contract end dates and opportunities for renewal or replacement
• An assessment of functionality and its ability to meet service requirements. 
• An assessment of how well it aligns with the cloud first and digital by default principles.
• Engagement with service teams to ensure decisions were collaborative and responsive to functional needs.
• Accelerated development of business cases and investment approvals.

Conducting this analysis enabled the council to provide a quantifiable baseline of the current IT estate, make the case for investments and develop an applications rationalisation roadmap. This enabled it to move from a triplicated IT estate to a position where single instances of applications supported joined up business functions. 

This was not without challenges. Strategically BCP Council aimed to implement short-term renewals and pro-rata contracts to align end dates.   To do this the council had to navigate misaligned contract end dates and contractual commitments, robustly prioritise the roadmap, and manage supplier relationships closely through the period. Doing this enabled BCP Council to coordinate decision-making and move ahead with investment and renewals in new applications and systems.

Investment in technology platforms

In line with the technology strategy, BCP Council sought to implement a single technology platform for the front door and similarly for back office/enabling functions and introduce strong data management platforms to overcome data silos and develop a single view of its residents. It invested in three core technology platforms to facilitate this:

• Data Platform: Microsoft Azure Data Lake & Semarchy Master Data Management (December 2022).
• Enterprise Resource Planning: Microsoft Dynamics Finance & Operations (April 2023).
• CRM: Microsoft Dynamics Citizen Experience (Jan 2024).

In addition, the following investments were made to key line-of-business systems, informed by the contract TIME analysis and through dialogue with service teams.

• Mosaic (Adults & Children’s) – launched in January 2023.
• SkillGate (People & Culture, Learning Management) – launched in April 2023.
• iCaseWork (Legal) – launched in July 2023.
• OurTalent (People & Culture, Recruitment) – launched in October 2023.
• Causeway Alloy (Environment) – launched October 2024.
• Capita (Revenues & Benefits) – launched November 2024.
• NetFM (Beach Huts/Lodges) – launched December 2024.
• MasterGov (Planning) – launched March 2025.
• Housing management system (outstanding) estimated to go live April 2027.

Before taking the decision to invest or migrate systems, effort was carried out to agree team level operating models and service level agreements. 

BCP Council did encounter challenges around data migration and archiving as some systems still needed to be retained and payments made to the vendor to ensure access to data held on those systems. 

In 2021, a digital and customer strategy was published and a crucial aspect of this was improving the citizen experience by redesigning the website to create a single, unified digital presence for residents, visitors, partners and businesses. This was a complex undertaking as it entailed mapping all existing content across the three councils, harmonising the content, and then rebuilding and redesigning the website.

Creating a temporary signposting website and content harmonisation

Given the scale of the undertaking, BCP Council first established a signposting website as a temporary measure intended to provide immediate continuity for residents, visitors, partners and businesses. 

With this in place, the web team concentrated on reviewing and harmonising content from the three authorities. This involved working closely with subject matter experts to consolidate, standardise and update information, ensuring accuracy and consistency across all service areas. The temporary website was built with the capability to host harmonised content as it became available. 

Redesigning and rebuilding the corporate website

Once the content was harmonised, the council was able to audit the website content and start work on a new, purpose built, website to make content easier to access for users and in line with the Government Digital Service and web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG).

The output from this activity was the creation of a new customer focused, responsive, accessible website. The website has successfully achieved a 99 per cent accessibility compliance along with an SEO performance of up to 99 per cent. 

The build and migration took six months to complete and the full rewrite 12 months. Whilst this required significant resource investment, this approach was effective in ensuring that the council was able to minimise disruption to residents whilst laying the groundwork for a website that could better meet the needs of users and align with the council’s principle of one digital front door.

The newly created BCP Council website went live in December 2023, marking a significant milestone.

BCP Council’s operating model envisioned an organisation powered by data and insights. To realise this ambition, the council invested heavily in its data management capabilities, deploying advanced tools and systems while building workforce skills. To test and validate these capabilities and strengthen data quality and governance, the council delivered proof-of-concept projects designed to demonstrate how better insights could drive improved outcomes.

Developing advanced data capabilities

The council invested in Semarchy’s Master Data Management platform and Microsoft Azure Data Lake and established a Data and Analytics Centre of Expertise, consolidating approximately 50 previously devolved technical and analyst roles into a single corporate team.  

The Centre of Expertise comprises four specialist teams:

• data engineering
• data analysis
• business analysis
• GIS and spatial data.

These specialist teams worked closely with service areas to integrate datasets and establish consistent, high-quality data standards, laying the foundation for better insights and decision-making.

BCP Council recognised the importance of equipping the whole workforce with data skills and offers a range of apprenticeships including:

• data fellowships
• data engineering
• artificial intelligence (AI).

Proof of concepts: Supporting families

BCP Council ran a proof-of-concept which focused on supporting families through data driven insights. This was aligned with the national programme led by the Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government (MHCLG, formerly the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, DLUHC), which helps vulnerable families with complex needs through early intervention and multi-agency collaboration.

BCP Council leveraged the Azure Data Lake and Semarchy platforms to automate data pipelines, cleansing and analysis, replacing manual processes. The Data & Analytics and Children’s Services teams developed Power BI dashboards to track outcomes across 34 indicators, enabling them to identify some of the most vulnerable families that they could support with claiming additional financial and benefits support. Through this approach £411,200 in outcome payments were made to vulnerable families and positioned the council to provide proactive support and improve service delivery.

This project enabled the council to create a scalable model for future innovation. Using this model, the council is now in the process of developing a ‘single view of residents’ aimed at improving service delivery through integrated data insights.

Service redesign was viewed as critical for delivering user-centred services and delivering savings. However, BCP Council recognised the complexity of this process as a result of the triplicated estate inherited from LGR, the scale of work that needed to be undertaken to reduce the technical debt, as well as ongoing challenges around market concentration limiting interoperability and joined up services that could support service redesign. 

Therefore, BCP Council first focused on building the internal skills, creating structures and investing in key technologies to support long term and sustainable change. Once these capabilities were in place, BCP Council formally commenced activity in April 2024 to review opportunities to redesign services.

Through a series of coordinated engagement workshops held across all service areas they helped management teams to analyse how their operations currently functioned. This included assessing bottlenecks, pinch points, system dependencies, workforce structures and the tools required to deliver their priorities. These collaborative discussions enabled services to establish a clear baseline of what was working well, what could be improved and what changes were required to meet future needs. From this analysis, each service developed an agreed a set of priorities and a roadmap spanning the short term (0 to12 months), medium term (one to two years) and long term (two plus years). The improvement activities identified were grouped into five core themes: service delivery, people, process, technology and data. 

By investing early in the right capabilities, the council created the capacity to work more closely with service teams, explore user needs in greater depth and develop clear, prioritised roadmaps for improvement which would continue as business as usual beyond the formal closure of the transformation programme in March 2025.

Programme management, governance and leadership

The operating model provided an important compass for the Council, and the transformation programme translated this into intent and action.  To successfully move between strategic intent and operational reality, BCP Council required a powerful engine – effective programme management and governance – to provide clear authority, accountability and strategic direction.

BCP Council's leadership recognised that the ambition to deliver over £40 million in annual savings had to be matched with an equivalent investment in its programme management engine. At its peak, the central programme team comprised 48 Full‑Time Equivalent (FTE) staff, a significant resource commitment that reflected the scale of the task. Not all the FTEs were dedicated solely to transformation‑related activity. This team included crucial full-time roles such as programme managers and change managers to manage both the technical and people-related aspects of the transformation. 

As the programme matured, the council refined how its programme managers were deployed. In the early stages, managers were grouped around thematic pillars, reflecting the programme’s initial structure. Over time, as the organisation became more confident with the operating model, the approach shifted so that each corporate directorate had its own dedicated programme manager. This change brought transformation activity closer to day‑to‑day operational leadership, strengthening oversight of directorate‑level priorities, risks and interdependencies, while giving the Transformation Board a clearer, organisation‑wide picture.

Alongside strong programme management practices, it was important to have leadership and governance baked into the programme to provide a strategic steer and manage risks. This was the role of the Transformation Board who oversaw the programme over the course of its lifecycle. Membership of this board included the entire Corporate Management Board and key service directors, including IT Leads responsible for areas of change. This structure ensured that all decision-makers were in one room, allowing for swift, authoritative and cross-organisational buy-in on complex and challenging issues. 

In addition, to support governance and adoption of new technology, the Infrastructure Board for technical standards and Functional Design Authority was established. Investment cases for new technologies would be submitted to and reviewed by these boards to ensure overall alignment with its technology strategy, business processes and corporate strategies.

This governance model strengthened benefits tracking and reporting across the programme. The original business case estimated savings of £26.7 million to £43.8 million. By January 2025, BCP Council reported £25.7 million of ongoing gross revenue savings delivered by 31 March 2024 and forecast a further £24.5 million by 31 March 2025, against a one-off programme investment of £41.4 million.

The corporate Transformation Programme was the vehicle for delivering foundational changes to technology and data post LGR. However, the council wanted to shift from transformation to embedding an approach of change and continuous improvement and required a new, sustainable structure to manage its ongoing change portfolio beyond the formal closure of the transformation programme. 

The council replaced the Transformation Board with the new Corporate Strategy Delivery Board. This new high-level board has a broader remit to govern delivery of the entire corporate strategy. Instead of one overarching programme, the council launched a portfolio of 11 strategic programmes to manage all ongoing change. This ensures all new change initiatives are directly aligned with the councils’ strategic priorities.

The new Digital Strategy was published in July 2025, and a Data & Innovation Programme (D&I) was launched to help deliver the strategy in two distinct phases:

• Phase 1 (Foundation Building): From April to October 2025, focused on data quality frameworks, governance, employee empowerment and establishing a formal AI governance process. 
• Phase 2 (Investment & Delivery): Began in November 2025, developing the investment case for new capabilities, such as data scientists and AI specialists and making strategic decisions for new AI solutions.

Six years from vesting day the Council has gone through transition to unitary, stabilisation and transformation, to now looking longer term to the future.

BCP Council's journey from three legacy authorities to a single, modern organisation offers practical insights for other councils navigating similar change whether driven by Local Government Reorganisation or broader ambitions. 

By taking the decision to pause and define a new council-wide operating model before any major spending, the council has ensured there was a clear direction, principles and evidence base for the investment needed to support the council’s transformation efforts.

Below are some of the key lessons:

Navigating LGR

• Prioritise getting the foundations right. LGR can be a catalyst for change but attempting to do everything at once risks failure. Focusing initially on ensuring staff could access information and services could continue, created a stable foundation for longer term transformation.
• Be clear on your highest risks. Identify legal, financial and cyber risks early and prioritise consolidating high-risk systems by vesting day. For BCP Council, this meant prioritising the Local Land & Property Gazetteer, Electoral Roll and Parking services.
• Data migration and archiving. It’s important to surface data and system access that will need to be retained from the beginning as this can erode savings in the long term.  Ensure you allocate sufficient time to understand data retention policies and potential data archiving needs and costs.
• Don't forget the small stuff. Collaboration and communication are critical to any organisation. Small things like being able to see each other's calendars or access the same files are essential to enable teams to work effectively. Supporting staff to do their jobs and work together should not be overlooked.

People and Change

• Invest in programme management: By investing in a peak programme management team of 48 FTEs, BCP Council ensured it had the capability to manage the immense complexity of the change.
• Treat change management as a distinct discipline. This requires a separate focus and skillset to traditional programme management and is critical to the adoption of new technologies and ways of working.
• Invest in workforce skills. Staff are the backbone of transformation. Investing in apprenticeships and skills ensures the workforce is equipped to make the best use of new tools and ways of working.

Governance and leadership

• Establish an authoritative programme board. A single board with all key decision-makers present proved critical for driving complex changes forward quickly and effectively through cross-organisational buy-in on challenging issues.

Sustaining change

• Transformation is an ongoing process. A single large-scale programme is effective for foundational change but is not a sustainable long-term model. Councils should plan for a pivot to a permanent model of continuous change and improvement.
• Build foundations before you innovate. BCP Council is now in a place where it is exploring AI adoption and emerging technologies because it had first completed the foundational work of system rationalisation, data platforms and skills development. Strategic patience pays off.

Useful links:

• BCP Council: ICT technical strategy and standards

• BCP Transformation Programme: Completion report

• BCP Transformation Programme: Digital strategy