Modernising Council Information Management

Introduction

In a 2025 survey by the Local Government Association, 71% of responding local authorities identified legacy systems as a barrier to developing their data capabilities. Meanwhile, 75% said poor data quality was a challenge. These findings highlight a practical issue for councils: having information is not enough if the systems used to store, organise and retrieve it make that information difficult to use.

As councils continue to modernise their digital services, information management deserves attention alongside the technology itself. Council records need to be organised, searchable and accessible to the people who are authorised to use them. This includes residents seeking public information, elected representatives reviewing council business and officers working with internal records.

Understanding the Landscape

Council information accumulates across many activities, from public meetings and committee decisions to policy documents, reports and historical records. Over time, managing this information can become difficult, particularly when records sit across different systems or are stored in ways that make retrieval slow and inconsistent.
The challenge becomes more complex when a digital platform serves several councils or different groups of users. Public records may be available to everyone, while committee papers or restricted documents must remain accessible only to authorised people. A modern platform therefore needs to make information easier to retrieve without losing control over who can access it.

CIL Perspective

Modernising council information management requires more than moving existing documents into a digital environment. Councils need to consider how records are organised, how users find them and how access rules are applied throughout the process.

A useful digital platform should reduce the effort required to locate relevant information while preserving the distinctions between public, internal and restricted records. It should also account for the different responsibilities of residents, elected members, committee participants and council staff.

These requirements need to be considered when the platform is designed. If information access rules are added as an afterthought, they can become harder to maintain as records, users and responsibilities change.

CIL Solution

For the Democratic Website Governance Platform, CIL developed an information retrieval capability designed to help users find relevant council records through natural-language questions.

1. Organising records for retrieval: CIL implemented a retrieval process using Amazon Bedrock and Amazon S3, with metadata attached to records to identify the relevant council and access category. This helps the platform retrieve information according to defined organisational and access boundaries.

2. Applying access rules to each request: The solution checks the user’s council and permissions before retrieving information. Public users, elected members and committee participants can have different levels of access, and retrieval is restricted to records permitted for that user.

3. Reducing manual information handling: By allowing stakeholders to ask questions in natural language, the platform aims to reduce the time spent manually searching and indexing records.

These measures show how information management, access control and retrieval can be addressed together when building digital services for local government. The reported results relate to this implementation and should not be treated as a guarantee of the same outcomes in every council environment.

Conclusion

Modernising council information management means making records easier to find and use without weakening access controls. When organisation, retrieval and permissions are addressed together, councils can reduce manual work and make their digital platforms more useful to residents, elected representatives and staff.