When head of Rotherham Council ICT Richard Copley recently called for a Local Government Digital Service, I immediately thought “that’s an ambitious idea and welcome thinking”.

We should always be open to bold new approaches that challenge the status quo and are driven by a genuine desire to deliver a better and more cost effective service for the public. After all, the central Government Digital Service (GDS) was such an idea and look how award-winningly successful that has been.

However, I’m also mindful of Mike Bracken’s comment at a 2013 SOCITM conference that “it was the devil’s own job to get 24 departments to agree to adopt Gov.uk”. As Richard Copley himself admits, it would be a serious challenge to scale that task up to 326 councils/local authorities and their digital departments spread right across the country.

So could there be a more pragmatic …