The problem
Local government reorganisation will abolish 134 councils and create 38 unitary authorities, with shadow elections in May 2027 and vesting day on 1 April 2028. Surrey has already gone first. Fourteen further areas were confirmed on 16 July 2026.
Every merger means combining social care records, council tax and business rates bases, planning histories, licensing registers, land charges, housing waiting lists, SEND caseloads and debt ledgers — held in different systems, with different schemas, different identifiers and different retention practices. There is no shared tooling for this. Each area is solving it alone, from scratch, with consultants.
The sector does not believe it will work. Only 13% of councils think reorganisation will improve their finances, and 76% of reorganising councils call reorganisation costs a fairly or very big problem — a higher share than any other pressure they report, including SEND.
The failure mode is not abstract. Birmingham’s Oracle implementation is the canonical example of what a botched local government data migration costs, and it is the case senior officers cite when justifying spend on migration assurance.
The system
Transit is a reorganisation data platform: a shared, reusable toolkit that every merging area runs instead of inventing its own. It profiles the data estates of the predecessor councils, maps them to a common target schema, and tracks reconciliation to vesting day.
It begins with discovery — automatically inventorying what data exists across predecessor authorities, in which systems, under which retention rules, and where identifiers collide. Two councils will both have a "Property 1042". Somebody has to resolve that before day one, and today nobody knows how many collisions exist until migration begins.
It then provides golden-record reconciliation against national identifiers — UPRN for property, canonical person matching for caseloads — plus a continuity dashboard showing, service by service, whether the successor authority can lawfully deliver on 1 April 2028.
Crucially it is built once and reused 38 times. That is the entire economic argument, and it is precisely the reuse-and-de-risking mission GDS Local was created to pursue.
Data foundation
Every dataset below is open, or its access constraint is stated
| Dataset | Publisher | What it provides |
|---|---|---|
| UPRN / AddressBase | Ordnance Survey / GeoPlace | Unique Property Reference Numbers — the canonical key for reconciling property records across predecessor systems. |
| Local Land Charges register | HM Land Registry | Now digital and centralised, with 127 local authorities live — a working precedent for exactly this kind of consolidation. |
| ONS geography portal | ONS | Boundary changes, ward and output area lookups, successor authority geographies. |
| Council tax and NDR base returns | MHCLG | Taxbase and rating data by authority, used to reconcile revenue records. |
| Local authority spend over £500 | Predecessor councils | Supplier and contract continuity — which contracts transfer, which duplicate, which lapse. |
| Structural Changes Orders | legislation.gov.uk | The statutory instrument for each area, defining precisely what transfers and when. |
Capabilities
Benefits
For government
- Converts 38 separate, consultant-led migrations into one funded national programme with reusable components — exactly the model GDS Local was set up to champion.
- Reduces the risk of a statutory service failure on 1 April 2028, which would be politically severe and legally exposed.
- Produces, as a by-product, the first accurate national picture of what data local government actually holds.
- Directly attacks the supplier lock-in that central government has named as the core problem in council technology.
For the public
- Care packages, housing applications, school transport and benefits continue uninterrupted through reorganisation.
- Fewer public pounds spent on duplicated consultancy — the six section 114 councils alone spent £207m on external consultants since 2020-21.
- A cleaner, better-documented public record in the successor authority than in any of its predecessors.
Delivery
Phasing
Risks & mitigations
Vesting day is fixed. A platform arriving late is worthless. Scope is deliberately narrowed to discovery and reconciliation rather than replacing line-of-business systems.
Existing suppliers benefit from bespoke migration work. Mitigated by positioning Transit as assurance over migrations rather than a replacement for them.
Social care and housing records are highly sensitive. Transit operates on schemas, metadata and reconciliation reports by default, with record-level processing only under the authority’s own controllership.
Sources
All sources checked in August 2026. Figures carry the reference period of their source, which may differ from publication date. Where a figure could not be verified against a primary source it is not used.