According to Betteridge's Law of Headlines, the answer to this question is No!
Many people think the answer to this question is "No." But the answer is not "No." The answer is also not "Yes." This is simply the wrong question to ask.
The question should not be "Should councils have online accounts?" The question should be: "How can councils best let people easily get to information we already hold about them, for their own convenience?"
In discussing the matter of online citizen accounts and how useful citizens as a whole find them, I often refer to a specific episode of The Apprentice, in which the two teams had to set up a laundry business. In the boardroom at the task's completion Suralan took the mickey out of one of the teams for including a 24 hour progress hotline as part of their offer - "you're a laundry, I'm hardly going to be phoning up at 2am to get a progress update on my bleedin' Calvin Kleins", he snorted.
And thus for the majority of local government services, whilst I think most people want to know when a service request or problem report is finished. But comparatively few people want constant, detailed updates on something like a pothole report.
But that said…
The Council Already Has an Account for Its Citizens
Each household pays council tax, or gets a benefit for it. Many businesses pay business rates. Some businesses pay a fee to operate within a Business Improvement District. All council tenants pay rent. Many residents have library cards. Many residents belong to a council leisure centre, if the council still runs one. Some residents pay for a garden waste service, where this is a paid option rather than a free service for everyone. Some residents also book large waste pickups from time to time. The council also has a computer system, called a CRM system, to record queries and reports that citizens send by phone or through the internet.
When Is Bin Day?
You can compare online accounts with a different online service: letting a citizen find out when it is bin day. Councils have made different levels of effort to provide this over time.
In the early 2010s, when councils first added bin-day lookups to their websites, the systems holding the collection schedules were often on local computers, not on the internet. These systems rarely had an open connection, an API, that let other systems get data from them. Council website systems were also usually closed off in the same way.
So, to let citizens look up their bin day online, a council had to pay tens of thousands of pounds for custom connector software. This software had to force a connection into both the bin-collection system and the website system to make this work.
People did use this function when it was there. But is it clear that people valued it? It is possible that some citizens without a bin-day checker were unhappy about that. It is equally possible that when they didn't have an online checker they simply looked to see whether their neighbours had put their bins out that evening, or that a new neighbour simply told them which day was bin day when they moved in.
Today, many bin-collection systems already work over the internet, and many offer an open connection, an API, to other systems. Many website systems also make it easy to add new functions through small program modules called widgets, and some even include modules that connect directly to common bin-collection systems. Because of this, it is now easy and low-cost to let a citizen check their bin day online. Bin day is not sensitive or confidential information. So a council could even let a citizen store their address in the browser, and show their bin day directly on the website home page, instead of making them search for it every time.
Do Citizens Want an Account?
The council already keeps all of this information about citizens: what they ask of us, what they pay us, and what they tell us. Because of this, is there any reason not to give them access to it, if we can do this cheaply and easily?
We can ask citizens whether they want an online account. We can also look at what they actually do when an account is available.
My own access to analytics data and user research is limited. But I do have access to case data from the Birmingham City Council CRM system, Jadu Connect. Within the team, for each CRM workflow (called a Case Type in Jadu), I made sure we recorded whether a user was logged in when they raised a case — that is, when they sent in a form connected to Connect.
So I looked at some of that data. June 2026 seemed as good a month as any to pick for a simple overview:
In that one month, there were 50,608 cases created in the core Connect system:
- 31,840 were created by users who were logged in at the time
- 6,718 were created by users who were not logged in
- 12,050 had no record of whether the user was logged in
If we look at one specific type of case — core payments for business rates, council tax, and rent — 37,234 of those 50,608 cases were payment cases:
- 31,301 were made while the user was logged in
- 5,868 were made while the user was not logged in
A small number of forms require login, for good reason. Also, some forms do not appear in this data at all — mostly waste-related forms, since the user is sent to an external service for those.
We have heard, informally, that many users see the invitation to log in (for a better experience) on the Standard Contact Details page, which is usually the first page of the form. Some users may misread this friendly invitation as a sign that login is required. We should carry out proper user research to check this, so that we can improve the UX design.
In summary: roughly three-fifths of users are definitely logged in, just under one-fifth are definitely not logged in, and just over one-fifth may or may not be logged in. For payments specifically, 85 percent of users are logged in.
The User Needs
Earlier in this article, I said that "Should the council have an online account?" is the wrong question. The right question is: what do our users need or want to do, whether that is already possible through an online account, or not possible at all because no account currently has that function?
"Users" should not mean only citizens here. Staff in service areas are also users, with a stake in the whole set of functions that make up a council online account. Developers and support engineers in the council's digital team are also users, with their own user needs.
Citizens have the following needs, which we can safely assume without needing new user research to confirm them:
- An easy way to find a record of their interactions with the council, especially if there is a dispute.
- A way to give us information only once — for example, their contact details, their housing or rent account number, or details about themselves or the company they represent — instead of repeating it every time, since as far as they are concerned they have already told us once.
- A way to fill in a long, complicated form over more than one session, and save their progress along the way. Some forms genuinely need to be long and complicated — for example, a grant application form. We are not going to give someone a sum of money based only on the question "are you a nice person, and will you spend the money wisely?"
There are two further things citizens may want, though we would need some user research to confirm whether citizens actually care about them:
- The ability to come back and check progress updates on a case they raised before.
- Some kind of personalized experience of the online service.
On the first point: whatever system a service area uses to manage a query will normally send automatic updates already. But beyond that, do most citizens really want more frequent updates than this? One piece of user research we could carry out is to ask the Contact Centre whether citizens often call the council to ask for progress updates.
On the second point: I admit this has been something of a personal interest of mine for many years. I doubt users would directly ask for an online service that adapts to how they use it — for example, showing the flytipping form at the top of the home page for someone who reports flytipping often, or hiding school term dates and council tax information from someone who does not live in Birmingham. But I believe that if we built this, citizens would appreciate it.
As mentioned above, staff also have important user needs:
- Service area staff need to keep a user record of the citizen and their queries. We do not need to see every pothole report a specific citizen has made, but welfare-related queries, for example, must be logged against an individual user record.
- Service area staff need to be able to contact a citizen again, to ask for more information about a query, and log this against the original query record.
- Contact Centre agents need to find a user's details quickly and easily during a call, to make sure a citizen's query is correctly linked to their user record. Like citizens, they should not need to ask for and log the same details over and over again, if we already hold them.
- Contact Centre agents also need one single, consistent system to find the right form for each type of query, instead of needing several logins for several service area systems, or having to learn several different user interfaces.
- Audit staff need to search records in as few databases as possible, to help detect crime. One regular task an audit colleague asks me to do is search for unauthorized payments made by citizens. It may surprise you how many people pay for council services with stolen card details linked back to them.
- IT staff need to be able to quickly and easily build forms and connector software (middleware) that send the data a user submits on a web form to the system that service area staff use to deliver their service.
These are, of course, only the user needs I have identified while writing this article. A full user-research and requirements-gathering exercise would find many more.
Does the Council Need an Online Account to Meet These Needs?
For most of these needs, the answer is no. Also, unless there is a clear, justified business reason, a citizen should not need to log in to an account to routinely contact us. A citizen should never feel that login is required, even when it is actually optional.
So the question now is: is an online account still the best way to meet these needs, for both the citizen and the council? Or are there better ways to do this?
