For parts of England, Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) represents the biggest change to local government in a generation. First set out in December 2024, it will eventually replace the existing two-tier system of county and district councils with single-tier unitary authorities across the remaining two-tier areas, affecting around a third of England’s population.<\/p>\n
Things are happening now. Surrey is the latest council to move; shadow elections took place in May 2026, with its two new councils going live on 1 April 2027. Most other areas will soon receive a decision on their new footprints, with shadow elections in May 2027 and vesting day for the new authorities on 1 April 2028.<\/p>\n
For the waste and environment teams we work with this isn\u2019t happening in isolation of course. It is layered on top of Simpler Recycling, the Deposit Return Scheme, Digital Waste Tracking and the extension of the Emissions Trading Scheme to the waste sector. But for the councils involved, LGR now seems to be the single biggest consideration shaping decisions about services, resources and technology.<\/p>\n
Our experience with councils in England and Northern Ireland that have already been through reorganisation is that priorities shift across the life of the programme, and that keeping partners and suppliers engaged throughout is central to a successful transition. And in our area of expertise \u2013 technology \u2013 we are seeing three things:<\/p>\n
As authorities begin to consider what combined services might look like, route optimisation becomes their most valuable planning tool. Long before services are actually redesigned, it allows service managers to evaluate different scenarios accurately and understand what resources a combined operation might require. Doing this groundwork early makes the eventual changes far less prone to issues, and more likely to succeed. EasyRoute<\/a>, our market-leading route optimisation software, is built for exactly this kind of scenario analysis.<\/p>\n One of the first visible changes after authorities come together is to the council brand and websites. Waste remains one of the most common service enquiries residents make, so collection information needs to be presented consistently while staying accurate at a local operational level. That is difficult to achieve if the systems behind the service are not connected. Digital resident engagement tools (such as ReCollect<\/a>) help keep that service information robust and reliable and councils need to get these up and running well ahead of day one.<\/p>\n Changes to operational and service management solutions tend to come later \u2013 in many cases years into the process. The question here is whether current solutions have the longevity to stay the course. Many of the councils we speak to are understandably waiting to see how things settle before committing, but the risk is that existing systems begin to show their age just as the demands of reorganisation peak. Modern, easy-to-deploy operational solutions (like SmartCity<\/a>) may be an effective way to futureproof service reliability and efficiency for the time that councils will need it most.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For parts of England, Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) represents the biggest change to local government in a generation. First set out in December 2024, it will eventually replace the existing two-tier system of county and district councils with single-tier unitary authorities across the remaining two-tier areas, affecting around a third of England’s population. Things are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":12740,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-12739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","resourcetype-blog","aud-government","loc-united-kingdom","sol-customer-operations","sol-business-operations","sol-collection-operations"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/routeware.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/routeware.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/routeware.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/routeware.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/routeware.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12739"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/routeware.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12739\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12742,"href":"https:\/\/routeware.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12739\/revisions\/12742"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/routeware.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/routeware.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Communicating with residents<\/h2>\n
Operations and service management<\/h2>\n