UK Autumn Budget 2026: 5 things local government leaders in England should consider now

The Budget makes some big changes to how local government is funded. The government wants local and regional government in England to keep 100% of business rates income before the end of the decade, with individual councils keeping at least 70%. 

It won't happen overnight. Mayoral Strategic Authorities go first, with a 20% share from April 2027. There are also new Good Growth Funds for Mayoral and Strategic Authorities, including £285 million of transitional funding in 2027–28, replacing the patchwork of competitive bidding pots councils have had to chase. 

Keeping more of your own income sounds like good news, and in many ways it is. But it also means more risk sits with you. Income will rise and fall with the local economy, business rate appeals and collection rates. To stay on top of that, finance leaders need a clear, up-to-date view of what's coming in, what's already committed, where costs are heading and which investments matter most. 

That's hard to do in spreadsheets, especially when several things are changing at once. Leaders need a clear view of income, committed spending, future costs and investment priorities and the ability to model future scenarios and plan for better outcomes. 

The question to ask: Can your finance team model scenarios and explain their implications before decisions need to be made? 

2. Treat local government reorganisation as an opportunity to redesign 

It's easy to think of Local Government Reorganisation as a big admin exercise: combining council tax registers, lining up committee cycles and bringing staff terms and conditions into line. All of that matters, of course. But if LGR is only about merging what's already there, it's a missed chance. Moments like this don't come round often, and it's a rare opportunity to step back and rethink how the new authority could work. 

When councils come together as a single unitary authority, each one brings its own systems, its own chart of accounts and its own particular ways of doing things. Councils going through LGR have usually taken one of three routes. 

The first is to extend an existing platform, taking one district or borough system and scaling it up across the new authority. The second is to adopt the largest platform, usually the county council's system, and bring everyone else onto it. The third is to start afresh with a modern Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) environment, designed around how the new unitary authority actually needs to work from day one. 

Whichever route you're leaning towards, it helps to let the technology follow your decisions rather than lead them. Start with the operating model. How will services be commissioned? How will community hubs work? How will teams across different departments work together? Once those answers are clearer, you have a blueprint, and the technology can be shaped around it. 

The question to ask: Are you designing the authority you want to become, or simply combining the systems you already have? 

3. Connect financial and operational information 

Good decisions depend on understanding how finances, people and services affect one another. Yet this information often sits in separate systems, which makes it hard for leaders to build a complete picture of performance. Finance operates within the general ledger, HR maintains employee records in a separate database, and operational directorates track service delivery across isolated line-of-business applications. 

When financial data is disconnected from workforce plans, service activity and operational costs, it becomes harder to spot emerging pressures or understand what a change will mean. During LGR, this lack of visibility is magnified across multiple legacy entities. 

This is also where AI is starting to help in very practical ways. Modern cloud platforms can spot unusual entries in the ledger, flag duplicate invoices and give an early view of month-end outturns based on what's happening right now. When leaders can see the operational and financial picture side by side, it becomes much easier to get ahead of pressures instead of reacting after the fact. 

The question to ask: Can your leadership team see the financial and operational picture it needs in one place, or does it have to piece it together from multiple sources? 

4. Reduce complexity so people can focus on public services 

The Budget's Fiscal Devolution Roadmap should make growth funding simpler, swapping a tangle of separate pots for fewer, longer-term streams. That's welcome. But walk into most council offices and the day-to-day admin is still far more complicated than it needs to be. 

Staff end up typing the same data into several systems, doing reconciliations by hand, chasing purchase order approvals through long email chains and pulling statutory returns together manually. It eats into capacity and, understandably, it wears people down. 

Local authorities must standardise core processes and automate routine operational tasks. Standardising procure-to-pay, record-to-report, and hire-to-retire workflows eliminates redundant handoffs. Within modern back-office environments, SaaS ERP now handles this with ease, intelligent process automation manages high-volume administrative tasks, such as smart invoice matching and automated routing of expense claims. 

There's a people side to this too. Councils are facing real recruitment and demographic pressures. Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that only 4.6% of the local government workforce in England and Wales is under 25, while 67% are aged between 40 and 60. Research from the Local Government Chronicle also found that 28% of staff aged 18–34 plan to leave the sector within four years. 

With pressures like that, every hour your teams spend on manual admin really counts. Taking some of that load off means officers can put more of their time and experience into supporting communities, managing complex cases and delivering the programmes that matter. Standardising and documenting processes and automating routine tasks can make a real difference here. A good place to start is working out where time is being lost, what needs to change and how you'll know it's getting better. 

The question to ask: Which administrative tasks could be made simpler so your people have more time for services and communities? 

5. Make technology decisions with the long term in mind 

With a Budget to respond to, a vesting date that won't move and finances under strain, it's natural to feel the pull to act quickly. A quick patch here, a bolt-on integration there, or simply lifting and shifting old systems and data into a new home can get you past the next deadline. The trouble is that decisions made only to fix today's problem often leave you with new limits a few years down the line. 

It helps to look for a platform that supports the way you want to work, gives decision-makers better information and makes it easier to adapt as responsibilities and priorities shift. Picking the technology is only part of the job, though. The programmes that go well tend to be the ones where governance, good data and thoughtful change management get just as much attention. It works best when the Section 151 Officer and the Transformation Director share the vision, and when bringing colleagues along starts well before anyone touches the systems. 

Underneath it all, what councils really need is a foundation that's secure, modular and able to grow with them. A scalable cloud platform gives a new unitary authority room to reshape how it works over time. It can take on shared services and grow into complex areas like children's services and social care, without the cost and disruption of starting again. 

The question to ask: Will your technology choices help the authority operate more effectively over the next decade, or simply resolve the next deadline? 

Building resilience beyond the Budget 

The Budget is a useful moment for local government leaders to revisit their priorities. But long-term resilience will depend on how well authorities turn policy, funding and organisational change into better decisions and more sustainable ways of working. 

The goal isn't transformation for its own sake. As an organisation that stewards public funds, manages its resources responsibly, supports its people and keeps delivering the services its communities depend on, structural reorganisation and fiscal devolution present an opportunity to build an organisations that is resilient, agile, and community-focused. 

Unit4 ERP is designed specifically for public sector complexity and service-centric organisations. Unlike horizontal systems that require extensive bespoke engineering to ‘fit’ public sector needs, Unit4 delivers a cloud-native architecture built around a single data model and multi-service operations - Finance, HR, and procurement share one architectural source of truth, removing integration costs between core corporate functions and establishing clean data governance - making your transformation safe and legal before vesting day. 

Collaboration between authorities is a proven mechanism for improving resilience and driving efficiencies. While historical shared-service initiatives were often undermined by prohibitive software integration costs, Unit4’s modern cloud ERP enables seamless multi-entity administration, centralised or shared service centres, and collaborative regional operating models. 

As your council prepares for the financial and structural changes ahead, do you have the visibility and flexibility to make the right decisions with confidence?