GIS and Digital Modernisation
Our previous blog post dove into the Essex Local Government Reorganisation, and the digital delivery challenges that may accompany it. The overall digital delivery of all public sector services is something that the UK Government is keen on addressing, with a number of different policy papers published this year to set out the roadmap for a ‘vision of modern digital government’
The Blueprint for a Modern Digital Government sets out a bold vision of joined-up, transparent, predictive public services. At the same time, the Local Government Association’s State of Digital Government report highlights the daily reality: siloed data, legacy systems, financial strain, and declining public trust. Bridging this gap requires more than incremental IT fixes. It requires a common thread running through every service, every dataset, and every decision. That thread is geography.
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) sit at the crossroads of these two perspectives. Far from being just mapping tools, GIS can operationalise the Blueprint’s ambitions and respond directly to the weaknesses flagged by the LGA. This article explores how geospatial approaches can help councils break silos, build local digital twins, and restore transparency and accountability.
Blueprint Vision and it’s 6 priorities
The Blueprint for a Modern Digital Government lays out six priorities designed to transform how the public sector operates. They call for:
- Join up public services - Citizens should not have to navigate dozens of disconnected systems; the Blueprint calls for services that work seamlessly across organisational boundaries.
- Harness AI for public good - Artificial intelligence and automation must be embedded responsibly to boost productivity, target interventions, and free up staff for frontline work.
- Strengthen Digital infrastructure - Modern, resilient platforms like a National Data Library and common APIs are essential to replace legacy systems and unlock interoperability.
- Elevate leadership - Digital expertise needs to sit at the top table, supported by stronger pipelines of skills and leadership across the whole public sector workforce.
- Fund for outcomes - Moving away from short-term, project-based funding towards outcome-focused, continuous investment is key to sustainable digital transformation.
- Commit to transparency and accountability, public trust depends on services that are open, measurable, and designed to show clearly how decisions are made, and value is delivered.
On the 21st January 2025 the newly formed Government Digital Service now sits within the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and combines the Central Digital and Data Office, the Government Digital Data Service and the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence.
LGA’s State of Digital Government: The Local Reality
One of the sector’s most entrenched challenges is fragmentation. Councils have been forced to run planning, housing, transport, and social care systems in isolation, each with its own databases, standards, and procurement contracts. The LGA warns this results in duplicated effort, inflated costs, and poor data interoperability. Further to this, councils are also facing:
- Legacy lock-in: a handful of vendors dominate, offering inflexible, expensive contracts
- Skills shortages: councils struggle to recruit and retain technical staff, especially GIS professionals.
- Funding pressures: competitive, short-term funding streams favour new projects over maintaining critical systems
- Trust deficit: deprived areas hit hardest by cuts, while residents face opaque and inaccessible processes
These barriers map almost directly to the Blueprint’s priorities. This alignment provides an opportunity: GIS can be positioned not as another technology silo, but as the delivery mechanism that links the two perspectives.
GIS as a Bridge: From Blueprint to Local Delivery
Breaking digital silos:
Breaking digital silo’s does not mean losing the accountability within each sector of local authority services however. GIS creates a shared language of place. By anchoring data to geography, councils can align housing, planning, transport, health, and environmental datasets. Directly delivering on the Blueprint’s first priority: joined-up services.
Web GIS Services are built around the idea of information sharing. Data portals and web GIS hubs can serve as the single source of truth that all the public sector can work from. Curating accurate and up to date information not only saves a huge amount of time (no need for multiple departments to process the same datasets) but also reduces risk – everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet.
With better quality data, products such as Local Digital Twins can be created, where dynamic models of towns and infrastructure can be used in artificial intelligence models to simulate future scenarios. This answers both the Blueprint’s ambition to harness AI and the LGA’s call for more preventative approaches. For example, Nottingham City Council’s 3D planning tool combines conservation, flood, and development data in one interface. It breaks down silos between planning and environmental teams, speeding up decisions while improving citizen understanding.
Digital Twin Technology Drives Nottingham's City Center Renewal, January 28th 2025 -https://www.esri.com/about/newsroom/blog/nottingham-3d-planning-efficiencies
This won’t be without its challenges. The UK has some of the best standards in the world, but data is failing interoperability at the highest levels. As well as this, huge investment must be made into upskilling public sector workers and embedding data fluency into the culture. Centralised guidance will have to focus on bringing standards to a benchmark, and we anticipate that the Government Digital & AI Roadmap published this summer will outline the aims and process for this in further detail.
Strengthening Infrastructure and Skills
GIS adoption supports the Blueprint’s call for stronger infrastructure and talent. Open geospatial standards reduce reliance on legacy vendors, while regional geospatial hubs could pool scarce expertise across authorities, directly addressing the LGA’s concern about workforce gaps. GIS can have a low barrier to entry and extensive training materials are available (see Esri’s ArcGIS Online and Training Portal) to help onboard users.
In 2021-2022, the UK Government’s Pathfinder programme funded 10 councils to create interactive, map-based local plans. By adopting shared geospatial standards, these pilots showed how local authorities can modernise planning while avoiding bespoke, siloed systems.
Transparency and Accountability
Maps are an incredibly powerful communication tool. Public Participatory GIS (PPGIS) makes use of spatial tools to empower and engage communities. By showing data spatially, councils can demonstrate where money is spent, how policies are applied, and who benefits. This supports the Blueprint’s transparency goal while responding to the LGA’s trust deficit.
A great example of this is the Esri Hub created to facilitate consultation on South Ayrshire’s Local Development Plan Three. The council used ArcGIS Hub to map consultation responses, showing communities how their feedback shaped policy. These are practical, place-based tools of accountability.
Conclusion
The Blueprint sets the direction, the LGA diagnoses the obstacles, and GIS provides the bridge. Councils that embed geospatial approaches can move from fragmented, reactive systems to integrated, predictive, and transparent governance.
By placing geography at the heart of digital reform, local government can turn high-level strategy into grounded, citizen-centred action, delivering the Blueprint in every community, one map at a time.
At Rose Tinsley Consulting, we explore how councils can use GIS to translate digital ambitions into practical change. Through our consultancy work and ongoing research, we’re building a space for conversation and collaboration on the future of place-based innovation.
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