The blank-page communications blueprint for local government
Local government reorganisation (LGR) is one of the rare moments when you get a genuine blank page.
Not a tidy-up. Not a “lift and shift”. A chance to redesign how the council listens, communicates, earns trust and how your comms function actually runs day to day.
And with bigger unitary councils often comes the opportunity (dare we say it) for bigger investment in communications. The key question is simple: how do you build a modern, joined-up comms function that can operate at scale?
The biggest challenge isn’t talent, it’s teamwork
Trying to get everyone in your communication team to work as one team is usually the hardest part of the job for any Director or Head of Communications.
What stops it is rarely “poor performance”. It’s usually culture and working practices: unclear priorities, weak planning rhythms, and teams that default into lanes (“media do media, campaigns do campaigns, digital do digital”).
In larger teams, the risk is predictable: silos. Teams are working hard, but not together. An activity that looks busy, but isn’t joined up. Residents are receiving mixed signals because internally, we’re not aligned.
I often think of a comms team like an orchestra. When it works, everyone is on the same sheet of music. When it doesn’t, sections play a different tune, not because they don’t care, but because they don’t really know what the others are doing or where the organisation is heading next.
The Head of Comms has to conduct the orchestra: set the tempo, create shared standards, and build a culture where people think beyond boundaries, especially when it comes to ideas, planning, and evaluation.
Principle 1: organise around audiences and outcomes - not “competencies.”
There isn’t one perfect comms structure. But there is a reliable rule:
If you organise around internal competencies (media/campaigns / digital), you’ll often get competency-led outputs.
If you organise around audiences and outcomes, you get communications that actually land.
As a rule, I advocate for maximum integration of skills across external communications so the team is audience-focused, not silo-focused.
Where separation does make sense, the best divide is usually not media vs campaigns. It is:
- Always-on reputation and channel delivery (news, reactive comms, social, email, BAU, web updates, member briefings, internal updates)
- Planned campaigns and marketing projects (behaviour change, service campaigns, consultations, brand/place work)
The least efficient split I see is media on one side and campaigns on the other. It creates gaps:
- campaigns become content-heavy but news-light
- media becomes reactive but insight-poor
- and the organisation loses the golden thread between what it’s doing, why it’s doing it, and what it wants people to think/feel/do
If you want an integrated model to work, you need a laser focus on professional development, shared ways of working, and a single planning rhythm.
Principle 2: Use LGR to redesign the interfaces — not just the comms team
This is the big LGR opportunity that gets missed.
Reorganisation isn’t just about your comms structure. It’s about building the joins so communications is connected to the functions it depends on.
The comms function must be designed with three critical interfaces:
1) Policy & strategy
Comms shouldn’t be the final polish at the end of the process. In a reorganised council, comms needs to be involved early enough to:
- shape narrative and stakeholder handling
- spot reputational risk and opportunity
- pressure-test clarity (“what are we actually trying to change?”)
- ensure messages align to organisational priorities, not just the loudest request
- Align influencing (public affairs) with media and positioning
2) Insight & intelligence
You can’t be audience-led without audience insight. Larger councils can invest properly here, and comms should be one of the main beneficiaries with
- segmentation and channel preferences
- sentiment/issue tracking
- complaint themes and demand insight
- evaluation that goes beyond clicks to comprehension, trust and behaviour
If insight sits somewhere else and comms only gets a dashboard occasionally, you’ll never get consistent, audience-first delivery.
The big opportunity here is to go beyond reputation tracking (something that many councils have stopped doing) to really getting under the bonnet of what drives reputation and trust in our communities and to embed that insight into service design and policy. These days, with advances in AI, we can start to develop synthetic populations to continually test ideas without the need for focus groups and traditional surveys.
3) HR & internal communications and Organisational Development
In a reorganised council, internal comms isn’t “the newsletter”. It’s change communications, culture building and leadership clarity. The comms/HR/OD interface should ensure:
- internal and external messages don’t contradict each other
- change programmes have a narrative, cadence and listening loop
- leaders are supported to communicate with authenticity and pace
- staff insight feeds back into what the organisation says and does
Internal comms is often the difference between change that lands and change that fractures.
Principle 3: business partnering shouldn’t mean “captured by one directorate”
Business partner models (where comms staff are allocated to a service/directorate) are useful until they become a trap.
All too often, people become overly embedded and lose corporate focus. Flexibility disappears. And you start hearing the warning sign: “they’re our comms person.”
As a rule of thumb, I often recommend:
- a maximum of 70% of the time aligned to one area
- the rest is held centrally and deployed flexibly to priority needs
An even better slice, especially in larger councils, is to align partnering to cross-cutting outcomes, not services. For example:
- safer communities
- children and families
- health and wellbeing
- economy and skills
- place and environment
This forces corporate alignment, improves prioritisation, and makes it harder for resource to be quietly captured.
Principle 4: Decentralisation is usually less efficient, but a hybrid can work
We’re seeing more comms staff embedded in services outside the corporate structure. That’s often worrying because decentralisation tends to be:
- less efficient
- harder to manage for quality
- more duplicative
- weaker on professional development
Sometimes there’s a strong rationale, foster care recruitment is a classic example, where comms is deeply tied to delivery.
But even then, the best model is often hybrid: people embedded in service operationally, while still line-managed professionally through the central comms function. That protects standards, integration, workload balance, and helps reduce duplication.
Principle 5: Embed leadership in community engagement, stakeholder relations and consultation
When running communication reviews, I am struck by how many councils do not have a centralised understanding of who their stakeholders are. Consultation and engagement are often delivered disparately which leads to inconsistency and missed opportunities when it comes to bringing together all the intelligence that this should yield.
Effective place-based engagement to strengthen relationships with communities is even more important post-LGR to ensure that larger unitary councils do not come across as faceless bureaucracies. It is also important to ensure that consultation activity, particularly in key areas such as planning and regeneration, meets the Gunning Principles to ensure that communities are sufficiently involved while removing legal risks.
Therefore, Corporate Communications in the new operating model has to play a leadership role in quality assurance as well as routine community and stakeholder engagement.
Principle 6: Develop your communication strategy and plan from Day 1
Most local government communication teams do not have an effective strategy in place. Some aren’t working to an annual plan where priorities have been signed off. This leads to an overly reactive communication service that is working week-to-week, constantly chasing their tail against a never-ending wish list of service-based demands.
Getting organisational agreement on communication and engagement priorities is never easy, especially if the council works in silos. The role of effective communications leadership is to offer valued guidance at the Cabinet and SLT levels. Sometimes that means knocking heads together to distil priorities and shape a clear narrative around the delivery of those priorities.
Setting clear communications and engagement objectives and securing organisational delivery on priorities will get your team on the front foot while helping to manage demand.
Principle 7: Embed AI policy, process and “agents” into how comms runs
LGR is the moment to modernise your operating system. That includes AI done properly.
AI should be a managed capability, not random experimentation. That means:
- clear AI policy (data, privacy, transparency, bias, copyright/IP, record-keeping)
- agreed use cases (what we do/don’t use AI for)
- quality assurance and sign-off routes
- training (prompting, fact-checking, accessibility, brand voice)
- an audit trail for sensitive or high-risk outputs
Practical examples: AI agents that help a comms team work faster and more consistently
1) Content automation agent (draft → refine → publish pack)
Takes a service update and generates: web copy, intranet version, social copy variants, member briefing lines, FAQs, and alt-text suggestions, all aligned to house style and accessibility.
2) Channel personalisation agent (one message, channel-specific delivery)
Adapts the same core message for different platform behaviours: length, hooks, tone, CTA, without drifting off-message.
3) Insight + segmentation agent (audiences first, content second)
Uses your segmentation to recommend which groups this matters to, what barrier we’re addressing, what proof they need, and what action we want, plus suggested message maps per segment.
4) Reactive comms support agent (holding lines + Q&A under pressure)
Drafts holding statements, lines-to-take and Q&A from templates; flags likely media questions; helps structure “what we know / what we don’t / what we’re doing next” for clarity.
5) Evaluation agent (turn results into learning loops)
Summarises performance, prompts the team to capture learning (“repeat / stop / improve”), and standardises evaluation so insight survives restructure and staff turnover.
AI doesn’t replace judgment. It removes grind, speeds production, improves consistency, and helps a larger unitary run comms at scale.
6) Content development & creative production agent (video, translation, design-on-brand)
Speed up high-quality content production while keeping everything on-brand and accessible, including short-form video, translation with culturally sensitive variations and simple design of assets using house style.
- Westco has a wealth of benchmarking data on communication structures in local government. If you need support contact simon@westcocommunications.com
Author:
simon@westcocommunications.com
