Two councils becoming one. Two IT estates. One government deadline. Services can’t stop.
Two sets of contracts. Two identity systems. Two data centres, two service desks, two ways of doing everything. A government deadline that won’t move. Staff who are anxious. Residents who expect services to continue without interruption.
Bolton/Wigan demerger
12-month transition
council IT
reorganising now
The clock is already running.
21 county areas are reorganising. The councils that start discovery earliest will have the smoothest transitions.
April 2027
Surrey and other first-wave unitaries go live. Technology decisions being made now.
April 2028
Essex, Hampshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, and further areas. Discovery should be underway by late 2026.
~20M residents
Every merging council faces the same IT challenge: two of everything, one deadline, services that cannot stop.
A merger is also a rare opportunity.
Most councils never get a clean reason to consolidate. LGR changes that. A well-managed merger is a chance to replace once instead of twice and build modern infrastructure from the start. Don’t just merge. Modernise.
How we can help
We’ve built a playbook for council IT mergers — not a theory, but a tested sequence drawn from the teams who’ve actually done this work. 123 contracts separated, zero outages, and the lessons baked into structured engagements you can start today.
LGR transition engagements
11 scoped engagements covering every major workstream: identity consolidation, M365 tenant merge, Azure migration, security posture, backup, DevOps, and document migration. Each has a defined scope, timeline, and indicative price — so you can plan procurement now, not after vesting day.
Browse LGR engagementsManaged services for the merged estate
After the transition, someone needs to run it. We manage the full IT estate for councils including Bolton, Wigan, Sefton, and Reading — service desk, infrastructure, cloud, security, and end-user compute. The same teams who manage the merger can manage what comes after.
Explore managed servicesBolton & Wigan ICT demerger
The closest proof in the market for what you’re about to go through.
The situation
Two councils separating a shared ICT service. 123 contracts to unpick. Staff to TUPE. Services that couldn’t stop.
What we did
Managed the entire transition — contracts, identity, infrastructure, staff transfer. 12-month staggered migration, not a big bang.
The result
Zero unplanned outages. Two sovereign councils, fully separated, independently documented by techUK.
Tell us which councils are merging, where you are in the process, and what’s keeping you up at night. We’ll tell you what we’ve learned from doing this before.
Or email us directly: info@agilisys.co.uk