Digital health of community and town councils

This project update is from the Chair of the Digital Health Project Board (The Board) and aims to highlight achievements, identify next steps and answer some questions you may have about the progress on the published Digital Health of Community and Town Councils Action plan.

The Board prioritised the development of a series of guides, tailored to the sector’s needs, to be published on a central repository on the One Voice Wales website. The Board agreed that this site would have the greatest reach with community councils. 

The website was launched in March 2025 and available to all town and community councils. 

The guides reflected the priority needs raised by the sector in initial engagement and include:

• how to arrange hybrid meetings
• domain naming, use of emails
• procurement
• websites
• cloud storage
• free on-line digital training
• using social media
• digital security
• digitising service delivery
• using office collaboration tools
• management of council information, data protection

The Board acknowledged that there were 2 priorities:

1. Building up some of the foundational skills across the sector.
2. Sharing examples of digital innovation and skills within the sector.

For foundational skills, 4 training modules have been developed:

• Going Digital.
• Hybrid meetings.
• Council meetings.
• Social media. 

These will be delivered through One Voice Wales and are expected to be available later this year. This is on top of the guides we’ve already published.

To share expertise, One Voice Wales has created a Community of Practice. There are currently around 100 people registered and sessions have been introduced to exchange ideas and practice on topics such as Wi-Fi in community buildings, website providers and digital noticeboards. One Voice Wales expect to maintain and grow this network.

Although the Local Government and Chief Digital Officer’s report highlighted the variability in the sector’s ability to work digitally, it became clear to the Board that community and town councils were not always able to identify the areas that would enable them to work digitally. It also noted a minority of councils which didn’t engage with the value of digital delivery. The board reflected that the action plan needed to be adjusted to incorporate a new action, one which would help councils to realise the importance of digital skills as well as self-assess their own readiness. This would provide a metric of progress and a means for leading cultural change.

The Board decided to create a digital maturity assessment tool with 2 main goals:

• Encourage councils to evaluate and improve their digital practices.
• Establish a baseline of councils' digital maturity across Wales for future measurement.

All sample community and town councils received an assessment template. Once completed, councils received individual reports containing tailored recommendations. These assessments helped councils to understand their current digital capabilities and identify opportunities. 159 councils (22% of the sector) took part in the trial.  

The trial indicated most sample councils (85%) offer multi-location meetings, though some experience challenges with implementation. It identified inefficiencies in individual platform licensing. For example, some councils are paying for both Microsoft and Zoom packages, potentially paying twice for an equivalent service. 

Almost all councils have websites, but only a small portion (20%) use gov.uk, gov.wales or llyw.cymru domains. Social media is used by many for community engagement, primarily through Facebook (74%). However, almost one-third (32%) of councils do not provide email services for staff, resulting in reliance on personal emails for official matters. Equipment provision varies, with almost all (90%) supplying laptops for clerks but very few (10%) for councillors. Additionally, there are concerns regarding support for connectivity issues during meetings.

This trial has shown there have been some improvements since 2023, however, there are still some significant concerns. One Voice Wales will be using future funding, to address the identified weaknesses and remaining recommendations in the action plan. 

The board recognised that not all actions were deliverable within the project’s initial 2-year lifespan. 

The Board prioritised training, guidance documentation and repository as deliverable and impactful actions, as outlined in the key highlights. The development of a repository was linked to a dependency on the new website planned by One Voice Wales. Delays on the website project impacted the repository’s development. 

Due to these challenges, it resulted in some recommendations being de-prioritised for the lifespan of the project and as a result not all the available funds were utilised. The outstanding recommendations will be addressed through future funding highlighted under the next section. 

For the 2025 to 2026 financial year, One Voice Wales has received an un-hypothecated grant award of £400,000. The aim of which is to provide maximum flexibility for One Voice Wales to innovate and be creative on how best to support the sector, including its digital work.

The Local Government and Housing Committee inquiry into the role, governance and accountability of the community and town council sector has also recommended the need for work to be undertaken to encourage local authorities to:

• provide IT support to community and town councils through service level agreements
• share facilities for use by community and town councils to hold hybrid meetings

This work, which overlaps with recommendations from the action plan, will be led by One Voice Wales and the Welsh Local Government Association. The 2 organisations have recently signed a new Memorandum of Understanding setting out how they will work together and with their membership, to promote and support local democracy and public services. One of the areas identified for continued joint working is Community and Town Council digital health.

The board recognises that having put in place support for the fundamental skills, the future strategic priorities will focus on establishing a resilient and secure infrastructure for governing councils, enhancing the skills of clerks and councillors, and promoting cultural change. This will include ongoing support for councils that are disengaged with digital initiatives and ensuring they meet statutory responsibilities.

To address these priorities, One Voice Wales will:

• review how councils are using the guidance, assess their impact and whether further guidance is needed
• test digital maturity assessment with more councils
• review councils’ websites
• finalise the Digital Training modules and offer them to councils
• develop device support guidance
• update the communication strategy and review what councils have done since the work