Interview: GDS Local's Principal Technologist on a common architectural model for local government

In January 2025, GDS published its “blueprint for modern digital government”. The document noted how poor technological coordination between local authorities was compromising Britain’s ambition of becoming a “digital state”, highlighting the need for
common data standards and taxonomies.

Earlier this year, GDS Local took a stride towards addressing this with the publication of the initial version of a “Local Government Architecture Model”. This forms part of its “sourcing  the stack” initiative, which seeks to improve how councils source technology.

The model offers a shared framework to understanding and describing the technology used by local authorities. It is intended as the first step in mapping how the public facing elements of local government technology fit together in layers, from the channels residents use to access services, through shared components such as identity, payments and messaging, and down to the service and corporate systems that underpin them.

Phil Rumens, Principal Technologist for GDS Local, was essential to this project. He
explained how the unit’s work was shaped by actively listening to councils, through
workshops, site visits, webinars, and reviewing publicly available architecture and ICT
strategies.

From this research, the absence of a common language for describing technology kept
surfacing as a significant problem. This was something which councils perceived to
compromise their ability to collaborate and make informed procurement decisions, which in turn hindered their ability to manage shared risks and respond to major changes such as
local government reorganisation.

In responding to this problem, GDS first worked with enterprise and technical architects from councils. This allowed the unit to further examine early ideas, pressure-test assumptions, and ensure that the resulting model would be adapted to real-world council environments.

However, designing a framework suitable for every council came with its own difficulties.

Rumens said: “One of the biggest challenges was balancing simplicity with usefulness.

“If the model became too prescriptive, it would only work for the most mature councils; too high-level, and it wouldn’t support real architectural conversations.

“We had to be very intentional about starting small and iterating.”

Beyond this, adoption is expected to be the most difficult objective to achieve. Rumens
emphasised how they sought to accomplish this not through imposition, but by ensuring that  the model was worthy of being used by councils.

“[We were keen to] avoid the perception that this was about central control or standardisation by mandate. We’ve been very clear that this work is designed to support local decision-making, not replace it”, Rumens said.

He added: “Councils are busy, under pressure, and at very different levels of architectural
maturity.

“So our focus is on making the model genuinely useful: supporting examples, tooling, and community discussion so it earns its place in day-to-day work.”

In the near future, it is hoped that councils will use the framework to explain their technology more clearly, to collaborate with other councils, and to ensure better alignment between their needs and the products being built by government and the market.

GDS plans to continue developing the model by defining terms related to services, functions,  and data in areas such as planning and development working with MHCLG, and children’s social care working with DfE. It also intends to explore what alternative platforms and tools could make it easier for councils to map and maintain their own architectures.

Rumens explained how the work forms part of GDS Local's broader strategy to facilitate greater reuse of common digital components and improve data sharing across local
government.

He said: “Ultimately this is about improving the experience of public services users by
facilitating the introduction of technology that enables more consistent, joined-up local
public services across organisations, so people don’t have to repeat the same information or navigate different systems for related needs.”