On 16 April 2025, press coverage by BBC Berkshire and the Daily Telegraph highlighted Bracknell Forest Borough Council’s troubled rollout of the Arcus planning system, prompting a detailed online apology to Bracknell Forest residents.
This may be the first time that problems with local authority implementations of Arcus Global’s Built Environment ‘cloud solution’ have broken in the national press, but for regular readers of the Havant Civic Society website, the story looks depressingly familiar.
Our previous reports on Havant Borough Council’s own botched planning system upgrade uncovered a story all too familiar to seasoned professionals in the IT world – the predictable chaos that unfolds when an organisation attempts to bring IT system procurement back in‑house after years of outsourcing, only to discover that the essential skills needed to manage critical business change have long since evaporated.
Two councils, One Story
Six months ago Havant experienced almost identical failures when its own Arcus‑based planning system went live, with public complaints about missing planning histories and land‑charges work grinding to a halt. Those problems were highlighted in a series of posts on this website. Freedom of Information requests submitted by HCS were met with mostly evasive responses and Havant Borough Council successfully kept the mounting complaints out of the press.
In both cases, the local authorities were under pressure to act, with Capita outsourcing contracts that were due to expire. Both authorities apparently followed formal procurement exercises and selected the Arcus Global software solution as a replacement for their legacy Idox systems. The expectation was that Arcus would modernise planning operations, improve how the public engages with the service, and ensure a smooth transition following each authority’s departure from Capita.
When two structurally different councils experience uncannily-similar breakdowns, the idea of one‑off mishaps no longer holds. With Bracknell’s failure now publicly acknowledged, the evidence from two local authority strategic IT digital services procurement exercises suggests a pattern that could touch many more authorities.
How Havant ended up in this position
In January 2023, Havant’s Cabinet published its ‘Future ICT Infrastructure Options Paper’ . The council prepared a Full Business Case (FBC) using the Office of Government Commerce’s Five Case Model and In December 2023, Havant’s Cabinet approved the procurement of Arcus Global’s Built Environment platform.
Following the embarrassing failure of the production cutover of the new planning system in September 2025, Havant Civic Society began its own investigation, obtaining a redacted copy of the FBC under a Freedom of Information request which we appraised on this website on 12 November 2025.
It became increasingly clear that the supplier selection made by HBC in 2023 rested almost entirely on Arcus Global’s strikingly low tender price – a figure that appears to have gone unchallenged by either officers or the cabinet of the day. The Full Business Case openly showed that essential data cleansing and migration work had been excluded, yet no concerns were raised.
At the Overview and Scrutiny Committee on 18 February 2026, in response to detailed questioning from local councillors, the Strategic Commissioning Programme Manager disclosed that the programme had delivered only the ‘Minimum Viable Product’ (MVP) version of the Arcus Global solution. This leads to the likely conclusion that in April 2024, Havant Borough Council had knowingly signed a contract for a bare-bones solution with no data migration and no local customisation. Bracknell Forest Borough Council, it appears, may have fallen into the same trap.
The platform, as deployed, provides only restricted functionality and despite the data being cloud‑hosted, the operational burden of retrieving and reviewing documents has now been transferred to users’ devices. For residents and businesses requiring daily access to the planning archive, this represents a significant degradation of function. Documents that were previously accessible through in‑browser viewing must now be downloaded, and with only limited search and filtering tools available, the process is inefficient, susceptible to search errors, and generates avoidable local data clutter.
In Havant’s case, and seemingly in Bracknell’s, the database itself – the planning history – was missing completely at launch because the essential data migration, conversion and load had not been carried out prior to the production cutover.
Oversold by supplier, or underspecified by the local authorities?
Havant Borough Council has displayed a marked reluctance to provide timely disclosure, and confidence in the promised internal inquiry’s ability to reach a definitive explanation is limited. Pending its findings, our own assessment of the system’s operation, supported by the restricted information released so far, raises issues that are also probably relevant to Bracknell Forest Council. The most concerning is the delay in recognising the significant gap between the solution procured and the capabilities actually required.
A closer look at the redacted content of the FBC may provide the answer. We had been hoping to uncover the full set of business functional and non-functional requirements which we would have expected the council and its advisors to have documented as a base for tender specification and supplier selection. That turns out to have been a naïve assumption on our part. In all likelihood, no such business requirements specification ever existed. The single paragraph, quoted below from the FBC, may be as close as Havant Borough Council came to specifying its requirement:
“There is a desire to ensure that the new IT system (at the very least) ensures all the Planning and associated services systems remain together with a more flexible IT solution, maximising automation, digitation, data availability for customers and enabling greater mobile working to support steamlining [sic] processes and engagement with our customers.”
It is likely that Arcus bid to the minimum requirement – but that requirement was so vague that almost anything would have satisfied it. The councils’ weak specification and limited understanding of the full data and system migration made it far more likely that they mis‑bought than that Arcus mis‑sold.
Based on extensive practical experience in the IT industry, the author of this post adds a personal observation: a procurement exercise undertaken without a comprehensive business requirements specification – encompassing both functional and non‑functional elements – cannot be regarded as sound. In such cases, the purchaser is left exposed to commission‑driven sales approaches rather than being guided by clearly defined needs.
Havant’s decision to circulate its tender to ten suppliers resulted in markedly different pricing structures, indicating that some vendors possessed a more mature understanding of the genuine, albeit undocumented, business requirements.
Notably, one unsuccessful bidder demonstrated a strong appreciation of Havant’s local operational context and appears to have been the only supplier with demonstrable experience migrating from an Idox platform to its own. Although the FBC redactions conceal the name, the likely identity is apparent.
While all ten suppliers were drawn from Crown Commercial Service frameworks such as G‑Cloud, their actual depth of local‑authority business expertise was likely to vary significantly. The CCS frameworks function only as procurement directories: they confirm that a supplier has met baseline commercial requirements and agreed to standard terms, but they do not assess sector‑specific experience, capability, or suitability for a planning‑service implementation. It remains entirely the responsibility of the procuring authority to test each supplier’s track record, technical competence, and business‑fit rather than assume that framework inclusion offers any meaningful assurance.
Why National Exposure Matters
Havant’s experience went largely unnoticed outside the borough. Bracknell’s case, by contrast, has finally brought the issue into the national spotlight. That matters, because the implications could extend far beyond two councils.
Ultimately, this is a story about the Government’s digital strategy and the expectation that local authorities can procure and implement complex cloud‑based systems despite years of budget reductions and the erosion of in‑house technical expertise. With two councils already affected, the need for national scrutiny is clear.
The impact has been felt by planning officers, residents, agents and solicitors who rely on timely access to information to progress applications and complete property transactions. Restoring confidence will require more than patches. Councils need a clear review of what went wrong, a clear plan to restore lost functionality, and a commitment to ensuring future technology decisions are driven by service needs rather than sales narratives.
In Havant’s case, the public requires confidence that the integrity of the planning‑data archive has been fully reinstated prior to any subsequent migration that may arise from local government reorganisation. Public trust in the capability of HBC’s planning function was already limited, and the lack of demonstrable planning services business analysis or local operational understanding in the recent system deployment is disappointing, though not unexpected.
Havant Civic Society 