Why UK Councils Are Overpaying for Slow, Inaccessible Websites

There is a quiet scandal running through local government digital spending in the United Kingdom. Councils across England are paying legacy platform vendors — including Jadu and Firmstep — sums between £80,000 and £500,000 for websites that routinely fail Google's Core Web Vitals benchmarks, score poorly on accessibility audits, and cost taxpayers a disproportionate share of already strained technology budgets.

The Accessibility Gap

Under the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018 (implementing EU Directive 2016/2102), all UK public sector websites must meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA compliance. Enforcement has historically been weak, but the regulatory focus has sharpened considerably in 2025–26.

The uncomfortable data point: only 8% of UK council websites are estimated to be fully WCAG-compliant, versus 48% of commercial sector websites in comparable content categories. Public sector bodies are spending more and delivering less accessible outcomes than commercial competitors operating at a fraction of the budget.

The Legacy CMS Platform Trap

The roots of this dysfunction lie in the procurement frameworks that locked local government into legacy vendors during the 2005–2015 period. Platforms like Jadu and Firmstep were market-leading at the time. They are no longer. Both platforms carry significant technical debt — monolithic PHP architectures that are fundamentally incompatible with modern Core Web Vitals requirements — yet councils continue renewing contracts because migration costs appear prohibitive.

These vendors have significant leverage: they hold the data, the integrations with back-office systems, and the institutional knowledge. The result is that councils on five-year platform contracts effectively surrender control of their digital citizen experience to vendors with negligible commercial incentive to improve performance.

Core Web Vitals Failures at Scale

Analysis of a cross-section of UK council websites in early 2026 shows consistent failures on:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): The majority of council sites record LCP above 4 seconds on mobile networks — Google's threshold for "poor" is above 2.5 seconds
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Dynamic content injection, cookie banners, and embedded third-party widgets create significant layout instability
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Heavy JavaScript payloads from legacy CMSes create severe input delays on lower-end devices — exactly the devices most commonly used by elderly and low-income residents who rely most heavily on council services

The irony is brutal: the citizens who most need digital council services — those without car access, those with limited mobility, those dependent on benefits — are also most likely to use older, cheaper smartphones on congested local networks. They are the ones most harmed by the council's poor performance scores.

Somerset Council's Digital Transformation

Somerset Council — formed from the unitary authority merger in 2023 — has publicly committed to a digital transformation programme designed to unify citizen-facing services and reduce legacy platform dependency. The opportunity exists to deliver genuinely modern, fast, accessible digital infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of incumbent vendor renewals.

The economics of static site generators, CDN-first deployment, and handcrafted HTML/CSS have moved far enough in 2026 that lean engineering teams can deliver a council website that outperforms any legacy CMS product on every measurable metric — for dramatically less money.