Local gov care case management - a perfect storm of cost, coordination and vendor lock-in
Social care is the beating heart of how adults and children across the UK receive essential health and well-being support every day. But without fixing case management tooling — which is widely hindered by an unholy trinity of cost, complexity and vendor lock-in — local authorities could struggle to improve services.
Currently three suppliers dominate the social care case management tooling in the UK, and state intervention is likely to be necessary to break this hold. Encouraging councils to pool their procurement or technical expertise, incentivising re-use and sharing patterns would hopefully open up the market.
Given that the state provides caring services and social care, it should not be controversial for public digital infrastructure to be made public. This blog post will explore how change could be possible.
It will look at:
- The unholy trinity of cost, coordination and vendor lock-in
- Could fostering be a manageable introduction to the bigger social care tooling vendor lock-in problem?
When risk, cost and tech collide
Local government resources are more stretched than they have been in decades. A 2024 report by the Financial Times showed that central government funding for even affluent Hampshire council had dropped by 46 per cent since 2011, while the cost of adult social care had soared to eat up 83 per cent of its budget.
Tight budgets and complex requirements mean that the only way to run a local authority is with a small number of large technology suppliers.
Local councils tend to use Access Mosaic or Liquid Logic, which comply with the Department for Education (DfE) reporting requirements. Both have mature integrations with centralised IT/ERP platforms from third parties like Oracle or SAP. These systems are familiar, procurable, and safe. They are also expensive to run and inflexible.
With little financial headroom to try new things, the majority of service experimentation happens in social care practice, rather than in tech that supports them.
Outliers include Beam.org’s magic notes app, which uses AI to create detailed assessments from audio recordings of social care consultations, freeing up practitioners to get on with the job at hand without the distraction of note-taking. But there is limited or no integration with the overall major case management systems.
This leaves well-meaning leaders striking a balance between experimenting with tooling while running the risk of compliance failures and making reliable choices, but changing nothing of substance.
Councils incrementally improve existing systems rather than attempt more radical approaches to procurement, tool building or technology.
As the the influential systems thinker Donella Meadows wrote in her 1999 essay Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System:
“Putting different hands on the faucets may change the rate at which the faucets turn, but if they’re the same old faucets, plumbed into the same old system, turned according to the same old information, goals and rules, the system isn’t going to change much,”
Breaking free of this stasis takes courage and skill. Digital planning has a wonderful case study and blueprint of how to attempt change. You should read it, it’s fantastic.
Can local authority service provision benefit from central government tooling support?
Local authorities are responsible for providing fostering services—and many are very good at it (we worked with Essex Council’s fostering service in 2023, the year their children’s services received an Ofsted Outstanding rating).
The DfE, the main legislative body responsible for fostering, remains involved. We heard of a national marketing campaign for general awareness-raising, which would sit alongside local campaigns that resonate in a local context. However, the DfE does not appear to be involved in some of the other crunchy national opportunities, like case management tools.
Fostering, for example, is too small a service at each authority level to justify the investment of locally bespoke systems, leaving difficult issues around case management and market provision unresolved.
This must be tackled nationally, with solid commitments from ministers in the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government (MHCLG) alongside the DfE.
We think three things are worth trying together:
Enforcing usability standards and open data standards for technology providers at a local level.
Facilitating new suppliers’ entry into the market. Grant funding experimentation and trial reducing compliance burdens on local authorities using new approaches and tools.
Building tools to disrupt the market. Could a government department or local authority build tools rather than buy them alongside driving standards?
A recent open-source collaboration between the French and German governments is an excellent example of what could happen when the government takes ownership of building infrastructure.
Using the Fostering service as a test to break vendor lock-in
As part of our work with Essex council, we ran a short discovery on what service transformation opportunities there were - we worked with technology, digital and the fostering service team.
Caring for a child is not a linear ‘service journey’ - but nonetheless, the fact remains that the overall digital user experience for foster carers is disjointed and time-consuming, with many forced to use a disparate range of low-quality digital systems and processes. Poor usability places an unnecessary burden on carers, distracting them from their key responsibility of caring.
Employees across the fostering infrastructure are also let down by technology and experience constraints. Examples include:
- Expense claims spread over multiple systems that don’t talk to one another, which means carers can’t easily find out how much they are owed. It also complicates remittance and reporting for the care service.
- Communication between foster carers and fostering employees is not conducted via a centralised system, so processes are more open to inconsistency and can take longer than necessary.
- Learning and development systems are not bespoke to fostering, making it harder for foster carers to have a holistic view of their training options.
The above will likely be the norm rather than the exception in many local authorities. But with sector leaders, designers, technologists and practitioners empowered to make ambitious choices, much more can be achieved — with procurement and commercial teams on board.
What does this have to do with social care?
Social care involves a broad collection of services and technologies working in concert. Technology alone is never the answer. But working to improve digital user experience for both foster carers and employees should inform a wider conversation about a universal social care platform.
The fundamental problem with making service improvement is the need to integrate with a council’s ERP system and social care case management systems. This structural issue is why “a new social care platform” has never materialised.
This preliminary work is essential for achieving an elegant online experience for foster carers; no digital service will succeed without exploring the needs and pains of foster carers and the constraints of the existing systems.
Progress on a functioning, secure, and easy-to-use social care platform will take industry and local authority-wide coordination, which is why a network-based approach such as that demonstrated by LocalGov Drupal, a community of developers, content designers and digital leaders from local councils across the UK using a cooperative model to drive digital transformation, could be beneficial.
The fostering service demonstrates that ambition to improve processes, tooling and the user experience is a way to engage with this technical, commercial and usability problem in a way that balances risk and reward. As a way into a wider sectoral collaboration, it feels both manageable and, most importantly, hopeful.
Learning and being inspired by other projects
It’s worth noting some projects that inspire and guide us in considering how fostering could be a test-case for evolving social care tooling.
LocalGov Drupal has driven digital transformation using a network-based approach.
LocalGov Drupal is a community of developers, content designers and digital leaders from local councils across the UK
Now Foster is a social enterprise that abstracts the recruitement service away from the council. They partner with local authorities who want to recruit more foster carers by improving that service experience.
We are super interested in seeing where they get to and hope they succeed. At the same time we feel that local authorities still need to run and improve their own services and technology. All boats rise.
Now Foster - Our mission is to mainstream foster care so more amazing people will empower and inspire young people in care.
Hackney Council’s Social Care Frontend allows social care practitioners to edit case and resident information; it was part of their wider Social Care System Architecture.
It was a pretty radical attempt to build social care case management from the ground up. It is heartbreaking that the codebase sits dormant.
Hackney Council’s Social Care Front-End git hub account
MHCLG (in their Levelling Up era) has done some great work on thinking about the future council (Paul Maltby and team at the time achieved a lot!).
But we know problems like these span multiple departments, so it needs cooperation (and leadership) from the DHSC.
MHCLG’s Future Council pilot report
So, what shall we do?
As is so brilliantly demonstrated by the Digital Planning work, councils and the wider community need to stop trying to fix this solely with procurement and a one-size-fits-all platform.
Instead they should consider the long term, understanding what’s possible with the systems in place. Councils should identify the most common and most painful user experiences for foster carers, and prototype how to improve those.
This will require a wide range of expertise, including finance, tech architects, tech system support teams, service transformation and service practitioners.
Building easy-to-use tools on top of existing systems using underlying data or APIs would also help drive change. Priorities should include developing a consistent user experience that hides a system architecture’s constraints.
Co-op Shifts clear and simple user experience
Co-op’s Shifts product allows Food store employees to see their hours and holidays. It was effectively a front-end built on top of Co-op’s existing system
The idea of fostering as a relatively low-volume service for local authorities that is not worth the attention needs to be reframed. Instead, councils should view fostering as a prototype for how to trial and de-risk a tech and platform strategy, and for exploring wider applications.
Vendor lock-in is the single most considerable strategic risk
Learning how to diversify options and learn as a whole community is a well-tested way to avoid being held hostage by platforms that don’t meet foster carers’ needs, or the needs of children in care.
Councils could do this by:
- Testing the limits of what can be achieved with existing systems like Power BI and Power Automate in the Microsoft stack, a low-cost, low-effort measure. Those not on the Microsoft stack are likely to already be innovating - power to you.
- Rationalising service journeys in lock-step with rationalising components of the underlying system rather than doing it all in one go.
- Reassessing market options to see if new tooling or components have become available, as well as evaluating tools and components with a team of service, user experience and technology experts to ensure a range of expert opinions are captured.
- Prototyping and testing what a “logged-in state” for (foster) carers needs to do in order to help them complete the most annoying or expensive tasks.
- Working backwards from these into back office services and understanding what’s going on. Councils should then make something that manipulates APIs in the background and hides this complexity from the user.
- Using this incremental approach to learn the limits of the systems currently in place. Once those limits are known, it will be easier to assess value-for-money and other benefits of pursuing different systems.
This can only be achieved at a sectoral level
We find it improbable that any single council or local authority will be in a position to take this work on. This unit cost for each local authority just doesn’t stack up, meaning a collective, sectoral approach will be needed.
Options could include:
- Convening councils that are active in this space and want to try something different, The open digital co-op is a shining example of what is possible.
- Visiting companies, local authorities and public sector bodies that have delivered exemplary user and service-centred technology.
- Explicitly connecting this work to MHCLG’s future council agenda.
- Lobbying MHCLG, DfE and DHSC to expand their Local Digital remit beyond their core policy areas.
- Engaging publicly with academia, the LGA and LOTI on this issue.
At a sectoral level this work creates connections between councils, and a way into a wider “social care platform” conversation which every council is facing but cannot achieve alone. We would love to get involved with this kind of work, so please contact us at hello@ff.studio if you are
Test and learn how to make a national agenda real
There is a clear desire for digital innovation across Government. In January 2025, Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation & Technology, set out the government’s policy for modern digital government alongside a review into the state of digital government.
Pat McFaddon, Secretary of State for the Cabinet Office, has spoken eloquently about “test and learn” as a way of experimenting our way forward.
Enthusiastic support from Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary of the Treasury, demonstrates the issue remains a key priority for Government despite challenging economic circumstances. “This Government is determined that digital transformation of the state and our public services will deliver better outcomes for people, and ensure every pound of taxpayers money is spent well,” Jones said in a March announcement detailing how AI and Digital Projects could save taxpayer money and boost public services.
This was later followed up by a more substantive Performance Review of Digital Spend, which talks of Pathfinder projects in the build up towards the 2027 Spending Review.
The government wants this to happen.
The timing is right to go from these directionally correct ideas into the specifics of building new tools fit for the 21st century. To quote a recent Public Digital townhall of the great and good of the local digital era, we must focus on:
“A blocker that’s almost so big we are not talking about it. Which is, that the software market is broken in local government, and therefore without fixing that, shaping it, or doing something about that, we are not going to be able to achieve any of the things we are talking about, in the room.”
Why bother?
We are confident that the market is not serving the needs of social care services well enough and that industry-level and local authority-level coordination is required to address the problem of 21st century social care tooling.
This work gives local authorities a foothold in that space. They can act as leaders and collaborate closely with other councils attempting to achieve the same goals. A collaborative, generative, whole-system approach could potentially deliver transformative benefits for people in care.
The market alone will not provide the answer. Despite budgetary constraints, local authorities need to step in and take a lead on what future social care provision will look like from a technological and user experience perspective.
Communities are aging, care needs are increasing, care teams are stretched, and council budgets remain constrained. Workarounds only work for so long, and running the same procurement repeatedly will get the same results.
So let’s change. There are ways forward. Social care technology is worth radically committing to. Pessimism is not a plan, but being hopeful, putting people first and building new public infrastructure is a good start.
Post was edited on the 2nd of April 2025 to clarify Now Foster is not an IFA.