How to Sell to Local Councils in England Using Spend Data

To sell to local councils in England, treat them as a market you can count. There are 317 of them, split across five types, and each type runs a different set of services.

Find the councils already paying for what you sell in their published spending. Write to the head of the service that owns the problem, and bring procurement in later. Then time your first message around the moments councils actually buy: smaller contracts under the Procurement Act 2023, competitions reserved for local or UK suppliers, and the setup of new unitary councils.

This article is for sellers of non-construction services: software, consultancy, care support, facilities, fleet, waste technology and training. Construction and works contracts are left out on purpose.

Most advice on public sector sales treats "government" as one customer with one process. A district council buying bin-round software and a county council commissioning home care support share very little apart from the word council.

What counts as a local council buyer in England?

GOV.UK's guide to local government structure states the total: 317 local authorities in England, in 5 types. Most of England has two tiers, a county council with district councils underneath it. Some areas have a single tier that does both jobs.

The tiers split the work. The 21 county councils handle schools, social care and the disposal of waste. The 164 district councils look after rubbish collection, housing and planning applications. The remaining 132 run as single-tier councils, mostly unitary authorities, London boroughs and metropolitan districts, which cover both sets of services in their area.

So 317 is the ceiling. Your market is the set of councils that run the service you sell. Here is that arithmetic for five kinds of seller:

Joint arrangements and reorganization move a few councils between columns, so treat each count as a starting ceiling and confirm it account by account.

Now add people. If each council has 3 people worth reaching for your service, a care support seller has 153 x 3 = 459 names in the whole of England. That is a small market, and it changes the plan before a word gets written. Use the same sum before any campaign, laid out in the market-sizing sum.

I skip intent data when only a few hundred accounts are in play, because a handful of signals tells you little, and I put the work into an offer every council on the list would recognize as its own problem. A small market also asks for depth: more than one person per council, longer sequences and more patience.

Where does council money actually go?

The 2026-27 revenue budget statistics show English local authorities planning £148.8 billion of net current spending on services, inside £151.3 billion of total revenue expenditure. The release is built from the budget returns of 406 of 415 local authorities, a wider group than the 317 councils above. Read it as the size of the pool. Dividing it per council tells you nothing.

Revenue spending is where the sellers in this article get paid. Software subscriptions, support contracts, care packages, training days and outsourced services come out of service budgets year by year. Capital budgets pay for buildings and roads, which belong to a different article.

Three lines in the release deserve a seller's attention.

Where the money comes from. Central government grants are expected to cover 53.9% of revenue expenditure and council tax 30.9%. More than half of the money is decided outside the council, so one national funding decision reaches every council's budget at the same time.

Where it is growing. Housing services net spending is budgeted at £3.7 billion, and spending to tackle homelessness rises by £302 million, or 14.7%, in one year. If you sell temporary accommodation management, tenancy support or case management software, that is a growing budget line with a clear reason to exist.

Who is under strain. For 2026-27, government agreed Exceptional Financial Support of £1.5 billion for 35 councils. Expect those accounts to cut before they buy, and move them down your first wave.

So match your offer to a service line, never to "the council" as a whole. Write to the team that owns the budget line, such as homelessness, because that is the person who has to spend it.

How do you use spend over £500 data to build a target list?

The Local Government Transparency Code is the reason this works. Councils are expected to publish expenditure over £500, purchase card spending, procurement information, grants to voluntary and community groups, and an organization chart, among other datasets.

Under the same Code, details of contracts, purchase orders and framework agreements worth more than £5,000 are published as well, as the government's guidance on the Code and the Procurement Act sets out.

That is a free, public record of who each council pays, how often and for roughly what.

I build every new list from accounts that look like the clients already paying. For a council seller, the councils already paying your competitors are the closest match. The method, worked for a care support seller with 153 accounts:

1. Write your search terms. The names of the 5 to 10 suppliers you lose deals to, plus the words your category uses in practice. Competitor names are the sharpest filter, because they appear as payees.
2. Pull 12 months of spend files for every council in your row of the table above. Formats differ from one council to the next, so plan the work region by region and budget time to clean the files before you search them.
3. Mark every council where a competitor or your category appears. That council already has a budget line, a team and a problem it pays to solve.
4. Read the rhythm of payments. A supplier paid in most months points to a running contract. A single payment on its own is more often a one-off, a trial or a small project.
5. Note which part of the council paid, where the file shows it. That service area tells you which team to look up in the organization chart.
6. Group what you find by region and by tier, so the list can be split cleanly between people later.

A planning example. Say the search marks 40 of the 153 councils as already buying your category. At 3 people each, those 40 accounts give a first wave of 120 names who know what your service is and already spend money on it.

The other 113 councils become the second wave. There, the message has to establish the problem before it can sell anything.

Before a single message goes out, audit the finished council list like any other lead list: titles, duplicates and verified addresses.

Who actually buys at a local council?

Procurement runs the process. The need starts in the service. So the decision order usually looks like this:

Write to row 1 first. Bring in row 2 at the same council once the conversation is real, and row 4 when what you sell is software. Meet row 3 properly once there is something to buy.

When I build a list for a niche, I go back to the projects already won and check who really signed off. If you have sold to even one council, start there. Was it the head of service, the commissioner or the IT lead who said yes?

I use the titles a niche really uses, and council titles are unusually specific, so take them from the organization chart rather than guessing. A title search for "manager" across 317 councils returns far too many people who will never sign anything.

I take assistant and associate titles off every list, along with vague administrative ones. Councils need one extra rule: keep "Manager" when a function is attached to it, as in Commissioning Manager, and drop it when it stands alone.

What changes under the Procurement Act below £30,000?

This set of rules decides how a first, smaller council contract gets bought. This is not legal advice.

The line to remember is £30,000 including VAT. The guidance on the Code and the Act confirms that local authorities keep this threshold under the new Act. Because the figure includes VAT, the net price that fits under it is lower than £30,000.

Under that line, councils can post new tenders and contracts above £5,000 to the Central Digital Platform rather than Contracts Finder and their own website. Government recommends this, but councils are not required to do it. In practice, a small opportunity can show up in any of the three places, so check all of them.

At £30,000 including VAT and above, a contract below the main procurement thresholds becomes a "notifiable below-threshold contract". The Cabinet Office guidance on below-threshold contracts says a council that advertises one must publish a notice on the platform beforehand. It also cannot restrict who may tender by first judging suppliers' suitability, so a small supplier is not filtered out before its bid is read.

Two more points from the same guidance. Councils outside central government should usually publish contract details within 90 days, which tells you who won and gives you a date to note. And before inviting tenders, authorities must "consider the barriers SMEs may face", although that duty does not cover contracts awarded under a framework.

Then there are reserved competitions. The guidance on reserving below-threshold competitions applies in England and lets councils, on a voluntary basis, limit a below-threshold competition to suppliers based in the UK or in a local area. The local area has to be named in the advert.

"Based" means where you are based or run substantive business operations, regardless of who owns you. The same guidance covers reserving competitions for SMEs and voluntary organizations, with an SME defined as fewer than 250 staff and annual turnover of £44 million or less, or a balance sheet total of £38 million or less. On a notifiable contract, the reservation appears in the Conditions of Participation box of the tender notice.

A contract under £30,000 can look small to a software company. For a first council it is the right size: one service team, a clear scope, and a result the other councils on your list can check.

How do reorganization and new unitary councils create buying windows?

Government's note on social care partnership working for new unitary authorities was sent to areas invited to submit final proposals. New unitary councils take over statutory responsibility for delivering services and must keep them "safe and legal on vesting day", the day the new council legally starts.

The note asks these councils to put high quality, sustainable services first, and it names social care, children's services, special educational needs and homelessness. Government will not impose one partnership model. It encourages areas to build on joint work that already exists, such as Integrated Care Boards, and points out that commissioning together can improve value for money.

Look at that through the structure table. When a two-tier area becomes unitary, services that sat with the county (social care, waste disposal) and with the districts (housing, rubbish collection) end up in one organization. Several district teams doing the same job, often with different suppliers and systems, become one team. Every one of those choices lands on a service lead with a fixed date in the diary.

That creates three openings for non-construction sellers. If you already serve one of the predecessor councils, you have the strongest position: the new council has to keep services safe and legal on vesting day, and you are already part of a service that has to keep running. If you serve none of them, sell what makes vesting day easier: interim capacity, staff training on merged processes, data cleanup, or a service you can stand up quickly. And whoever you are, talk to the service leads on both sides of the merger, not just the one council you know.

Decisions in a reorganizing area move slowly, so expect a conversation opened during the proposal stage to turn into a contract only after vesting day, and keep the account in your sequence until then.

How do you reach council buyers with outbound without pitching too early?

The order holds for councils as for any B2B market: build the list, write to the people who decide, then sell a conversation. The council-specific part is the reason you write, which can come from a payment in the spend data, a below-threshold notice or a reorganization date.

Run LinkedIn and email as one sequence rather than two separate pushes. Here is how to build a follow-up sequence across LinkedIn and email, step by step.

The first message stays short and does four jobs. It says why it reached this person, using the trigger. It names the problem in the buyer's words. It carries one piece of proof. It makes one small ask.

For council buyers, the strongest proof is work done for another council of the same tier. The ask is a short meeting, because a council buyer cannot weigh scope, budget and risk from an inbox.

A made-up example for a route software company, written to a head of waste services in a district heading into reorganization:

"Your council is one of the areas moving to a unitary, so collection and disposal will sit in one service for the first time. Two district councils already run their rounds on our software and are preparing for the same move. Worth 20 minutes to see how they are planning it, before your plan is fixed?"

That is about 60 words, it is tied to something real in the buyer's diary, and it asks for a conversation. For the line-by-line version, see B2B cold email examples rewritten line by line.

Measure the right thing. With 120 names in a first wave, count conversations started before you count calls booked. If you publish anything for councils, a case write-up or a short guide to vesting day, treat it as support for the outreach, not a replacement for it.

What is the fastest way to structure the market before outreach?

Order the list before you split it: councils like the one you already serve first, then the councils in your spend data search that pay competitors.

Then split the territory. I never let two people on one team write to the same head of service, so every account gets one owner, by region or by tier. A team of two selling collection software would divide the 296 accounts into regions of about 148 each, and each person would start with the councils in their half already paying a competitor.

Where the offer allows it, I start local, because a supplier from the same city or county opens a conversation more easily than one writing from far away. Reserved competitions make that even more true for council work. When an advert names your area, only suppliers based there can bid.

The decision rule for a small team:

1. If the service can be delivered anywhere in England, such as software, remote training or consultancy, build a national list from your row of the structure table and split it by region. The first wave is the councils already buying your category.
2. If the service is delivered on the ground, such as care support, facilities or fleet maintenance, start with the councils you can serve from where you are. Watch the platform for notices that name your area, then widen the circle one county at a time.

Pick one council in your row tonight and open its spend file. If your category is in there, note the payee and the service area that paid, look up the head of that service in the organization chart, and add the council to your first wave.

If you sell to English councils and want to turn spend data into a first target list, book a call and we can work through it together.