For years, councils across Australia have operated under the same expectation — to solve a growing list of challenges with fewer resources, tighter budgets, and shrinking workforces. At first, that pressure felt manageable. Councils adapted and field crews worked harder to keep services moving. The phrase “doing more with less” has become so familiar to local government that it almost sounds inevitable.
But according to Andrew Wiltshire, Area Director from Totalmobile Australia, the evidence coming out of the UK tells a different story. The UK adopted the same principle and the results were stark.
“For the last fifteen years, councils everywhere have been told the answer is to do more with less,” Andrew said at the recent Local Government Technology Summit NSW 2026. “In the UK, they tried. Field workforces shrank, service expectations grew, and the gap was meant to close through productivity. But it didn’t.”
The warning is timely. Australian councils are now approaching the same crossroads — facing mounting financial pressure, growing infrastructure backlogs, workforce shortages, and rising expectations from residents who increasingly expect real-time, digital-first services. “Doing more with less” does not create long-term resilience. Eventually, it creates operational fatigue and rising financial pressure.
Now the question is no longer whether councils can keep pushing harder, but whether the entire operating model itself needs an overhaul.
The Pressures Facing Australian Local Government
The challenges facing Australian councils are well documented. More than half of councils failed to generate enough own-source revenue to cover operating costs in 2021-22. Financial Assistance Grants from the Commonwealth have fallen from around 1 per cent of taxation revenue in the 1990s to roughly 0.5 per cent today. At the same time, councils are having to manage a massive a growing portfolio of infrastructure footprints. According to ALGA’s National State of the Assets Report, Australian councils now manage more than $643 billion worth of community infrastructure, including roads, bridges, buildings, parks, stormwater systems, and water infrastructure. More than $11 billion of that infrastructure is already classified as being in poor condition.
At the same time, councils are managing a growing portfolio of infrastructure. According to ALGA’s National State of the Assets Report, Australian councils now manage more than $643 billion worth of community infrastructure — including roads, bridges, buildings, parks, stormwater systems, and water infrastructure. More than $11 billion of that infrastructure is already classified as being in poor condition.
Councils are also losing the people needed to maintain it. Nine in ten councils are experiencing skills shortages, particularly across engineering, planning, surveying, and environmental health. Apprenticeships in local government fell dramatically over the past decade, while an ageing workforce continues to put pressure on institutional knowledge and service delivery.
“Read those numbers as a system, not as separate problems,” Andrew explained. “A growing asset base, a shrinking workforce qualified to look after it, and a shrinking share of national revenue to fund it. That’s a massive snowball and it exhausts the people pushing back against it.”
The challenge, he argued, is not just financial. It is operational.
The UK Experience Is a Warning Sign
Throughout the presentation, Andrew drew a careful distinction between Australia and the UK, based on Totalmobile’s experience of working across more than 1,000 councils and public sector organisations in the UK and Ireland for over 20 years. The business supports hundreds of thousands of frontline workers globally, giving it visibility into how councils have responded to workforce shortages, funding pressure, and rising resident expectations over the last decade. Andrew described this as “a front-row seat” to the pressures reshaping local government operations.
The point was not that Australian councils should copy the UK model, but that Australia now has the advantage of learning from the UK’s mistakes. “The honest version is they didn’t see what was coming, but we do,” he said.
The UK entered its period of severe local government austerity much earlier. Central government funding cuts accelerated after 2010, eventually contributing to a wave of financial crises across councils. By 2024, multiple UK councils had effectively declared bankruptcy. According to Andrew, the common thread was rarely a single failed technology project or isolated financial event — rather, it was a field service operation that had been quietly breaking for a decade.
The comparison resonated with the audience, because many of the same conditions now exist in Australia — rising service expectations, legacy systems, shifting costs, fragmented operational data, workforce shortages, and increasing pressure to modernise while budgets tighten.
The lesson from the UK was not that councils lacked technology investment. In many cases, they invested heavily. The problem was how that investment was utilised.
The Missing Layer in Council Technology
Over the past decade, many councils modernised their digital front doors by creating resident portals, websites, apps, CRMs, and customer engagement platforms. At the same time, councils also upgraded core back-office systems such as finance, payroll, HR, and procurement platforms. But according to Andrew, they overlooked upgrading one critical layer:
“We invested in the engagement layer. We invested in the ERP layer. But we didn’t invest in the layer in between, where the work actually happens.”
That middle layer is field service.
It is the operational engine connecting a resident’s request to the crew tasked with resolving it. It includes scheduling, mobile workforce management, asset inspections, work order management, and real-time operational visibility. Without that layer, councils are often relying on disconnected processes, spreadsheets, whiteboards, paper forms, phone calls, and manual data entry.
The result is a system where operational visibility breaks down between the request and the resolution. Residents experience delays. Crews waste time. Data becomes fragmented. Asset records fall behind reality. And leadership lacks the visibility needed to prioritise work effectively.
Why the Request-to-Resolution Journey Matters
What Success Looked Like in the UK
The presentation highlighted several UK councils that shifted away from the “do more with less” mindset and instead rebuilt their operational backbone.
At Fife Council, leadership faced a £20 million savings target. Rather than relying purely on workforce reductions, the council focused on redesigning its field operations through Totalmobile’s dynamic scheduling and mobile workforce management. The result was more than 15% productivity growth across field teams and savings that could be redirected back into frontline services.
Kirklees Council faced a different challenge. More than 240 field operatives across multiple service areas were operating on disconnected systems and processes. By consolidating those operations onto a single workforce platform, the council created one operational picture instead of multiple disconnected workflows.
“No AI involved,” Andrew noted. “Just the request-to-resolution journey working properly for the first time.”
The Opportunity in Front of Australian Councils
Despite the warnings, the tone of the presentation was ultimately optimistic. Australia is not yet where the UK is today and that matters since Australian councils still have the opportunity to act before financial and operational pressures deepen further.
The message from Andrew was not to replicate the UK’s approach but it was to learn from their mistakes and to move proactively:
“Doing more with less is the slogan that broke local government in the UK,” Andrew concluded. “It’s starting to break ours.”
The alternative, he argued, is not another efficiency drive or another standalone technology project. It is redesigning the journey from request to resolution so councils can finally operate with visibility, coordination, and clean operational data.
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