This template council motion comes from Pendle Liberal Democrats.
This Council notes that:
- Nearly every service this Council delivers, from council tax and benefits to planning and waste, now runs on software and remote computing (“the cloud”, which means renting space on someone else’s computers) supplied by a small number of very large overseas companies, including Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle.
- In July 2025 the UK’s competition regulator, the CMA, concluded this market is not working well. UK organisations spent £10.5 billion on cloud services in 2024; two companies hold up to 40 percent of the market each; fewer than 1 percent of customers manage to switch supplier in a year; and customers are charged simply to move their own data out. In May 2026 the CMA opened a further investigation into Microsoft’s hold over everyday workplace software, including Windows, Word, Excel and Teams.
- World events are making this concentration riskier. The Bank of England warned in October 2025 that markets stretched by speculative investment in artificial intelligence could correct sharply. That same month a single Amazon cloud failure knocked services offline around the world for most of a day. Renewed conflict involving Iran has disrupted energy and shipping and heightened the threat of state-backed cyber attack. The United States, where these suppliers are headquartered and regulated, faces continuing unrest and instability; and in 2025 the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor lost access to his Microsoft email account under American sanctions, a reminder that critical services can be withdrawn for reasons that have nothing to do with the customer.
- Proven alternatives exist. Open source software is software anyone may inspect, use and improve, free of licence fees, with paid professional support available; it already runs GOV.UK and much of the internet. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein reported in December 2025 that nearly 80 percent of desks across its ministries now run the open source office suite LibreOffice, already saving more than 15 million euros in licence costs. Denmark’s digital ministry began the same move in 2025.
- British councils and the civil service are already building together. More than 60 councils share LocalGov Drupal, an open source council website platform funded by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and run co-operatively by councils, cutting website rebuild costs by 30 to 50 percent. In November 2025 the Government launched GDS Local to work with that Ministry and the Local Government Association on shared digital infrastructure for councils. Government guidance has required departments to “be open and use open source” for years, and an open format has been the official standard for government documents since 2014. Civil service blogs identify the main barrier to wider adoption as confidence, not capability.
- A decision on [INSERT REGION NAME]’s reorganisation is expected within months. The new unitary council, will have to merge a dozen or so different council IT estates whatever happens, and once Structural Changes Orders are made, new contracts over £100,000 whole-life cost will need the successor council’s consent. [AMEND ACCORDINGLY IF YOU DO NOT HAVE LOCAL GOVERNMENT RE-ORGANISATION OR IF YOUR REORGANISATION IS AT AN ADVANCED STAGE]
This Council believes that:
- Relying on a handful of distant suppliers for the systems behind local services is a strategic risk, to be managed prudently like any other risk to service continuity and cost. This is a question of stewardship, not ideology.
- Bigger does not automatically mean safer. A United States government review found in 2024 that a “cascade of avoidable errors” at Microsoft allowed a foreign state to read official email, and National Cyber Security Centre guidance treats security as a matter of how technology is managed, not the size of the seller.
- [AREA NAME] should neither rush a migration during reorganisation nor act as a lone flagship. Our contribution is careful groundwork: map our dependencies, prove small things work, build confidence, and hand the new council well-evidenced options on a plate.
This Council therefore resolves to:
- Sign the Local Digital Declaration, committing the Council to open standards and reusable public technology.
- Request that the Executive, produce within six months a Digital Dependency and Resilience Register covering every significant system: its supplier, hosting, licence cost, renewal date, exit cost and lock-in risk, with open source alternatives noted where they exist.
- Require new and renewed digital contracts to specify open document and data standards, the right to export our own data at no charge, and break clauses aligned to reorganisation, with no new commitment deepening supplier lock-in beyond vesting day without explicit member approval.
- Identify with up to two low-risk, confidence-building open source pilots, such as Libre Office, with costs, benefits and training needs reported to members before any adoption.
- Engage GDS Local, the Local Digital team, the Local Government Association, Socitm and the LocalGov Drupal co-operative, and draw lessons from Schleswig-Holstein, Denmark and Germany’s openDesk programme, reporting findings to scrutiny.
- Write to the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government and to the Lancashire reorganisation programme, proposing digital resilience and open source readiness as a design principle for the new authority, and present the register, pilot results and a costed roadmap to the shadow authority before vesting day, as a ready-made foundation for lower running costs and stronger resilience.