The number of Wrexham Council services available online has almost doubled in a year, according to a report that also confirms the authority’s smart town/city programme stalled for seven months and that its digital team operates without a dedicated budget.
The year two update on the council’s ICT and Digital Strategy 2024-27 shows 378 processes are now available through the MyAccount platform, up from 210 at the end of 2024/25. The platform handled 99,144 service requests during the year, up from 95,909, and 83% of service requests now arrive through self-service rather than by telephone, ahead of the council’s 82% target.
Each process is an individual online form or service request, covering everything from reporting a pothole, an abandoned vehicle or a missed bin collection, to booking a bulky waste pickup, applying for a Blue Badge or requesting a land search.
The report says the shift to self-serve “continues to help free up telephone lines for vulnerable callers or those with complex enquiries”. Some 95% of council customers accessing services online said the process was easy, matching both the target and the previous year’s figure.
Services added during the year include school transport requests for children with additional learning needs, land searches, warm space grant applications, room bookings at the Old Library, reporting abuse or neglect of an adult at risk, and a set of housing processes covering homelessness enquiries, mutual exchanges and contract changes.
An online form for free National Eisteddfod tickets (promoted for free by Wrexham.com as the Eisteddfod went back on an agreement with us!) drew nearly 800 applications, which the report says “ensured wider access to families across the County Borough”. A promotional push on Council Tax e-billing added more than 200 electronic bill sign-ups.
Blue Badge waits more than halved
The stand-out service change is the Blue Badge application review process, rebuilt within the council’s customer management platform. Councillors are told in the report that processing times have been cut from 18 working days to seven.
The report says the redesign created “a more streamlined and efficient process for both the customer and the Council”, and the work won the Granicus Operational Excellence Award in 2026, described as the second national award the digital team has won.
Smart Town / City restarts after seven-month gap
The report also confirms that one of the council’s most publicised programmes went quiet. A new Smart Cities Officer was appointed in June 2026 “after a seven-month vacancy in the post”, and work “has recommenced to progress the Council’s Smart City ambitions”. On those dates, the post would have been empty from around November 2025 and explains why what had previously been quite a public story had vanished without an officer to drive it forward. The report contains no assessment of the impact of the vacancy on the programme, and the smart city section is the only part of the document to describe work as having “recommenced”.
Twenty locations across the county borough have been identified for a LoRaWAN sensor network, with installation scheduled to start in September 2026. LoRaWAN, or Long Range Wide Area Network, is a low-power wireless technology that lets sensors send small amounts of data over long distances. Remote assessments of schools and council buildings have been completed to check suitability for the equipment, and the council says it is investigating external funding and working with the Wrexham 2029 UK City of Culture bid team on how smart technology could support cultural events and visitor management.
The quiet period is notable given how energetically the programme was once promoted. The SMART Towns initiative launched in 2021/22 with Welsh Government funding, and in recent years the council credited moisture sensors in city centre flowerbeds with saving £32,000 over seven months, fitted flood sensors in the culvert behind St Giles’ Church, installed CO2 monitors at Plas Coch Primary School, and used sensors on bin lorries to map mobile signal blackspots. The authority won a national Royal Town Planning Institute award for its Digital Place Plan in 2024, hosted the first national smart town conference at Tŷ Pawb, and set out plans for 300 further sensors.
No public dashboard, datasets or API has emerged under the ‘Open Data’ that senior leaders appear to endorse as a general principle.
AI arrives on council desktops
Artificial intelligence tools reached council staff during the year. Microsoft Copilot Chat, an AI assistant, was introduced as part of the move from Windows 10 to Windows 11, completed in spring 2026, which also moved staff files from traditional home drives to OneDrive.
The council has now started assessing whether AI should record and transcribe its meetings. The report says work is beginning on “assessment of AI recording and transcription and ensuring we have the data governance, advice and meeting etiquette to support”. Further Copilot and AI pilot projects are planned for 2026/27, and an AI policy is being drawn up within the council’s cyber security work programme.
On cyber security more widely, the council says it undertakes annual health checks with third party specialists, runs cyber exercises and provides awareness training for staff and councillors. The report says the risk of a cyber incident “should not be underestimated and as the cyber threat climate evolves, so must our working practises”.
No corporate budget for digital development
The financial implications section contains a line that may draw scrutiny members’ attention. While the ICT service has a cash limited budget of £4.5m for 2026-27, plus an annual capital allocation for hardware, the report says: “There is no identified corporate budget for digital development. The digital team develop the majority of projects within MyAccount in-house. All projects that deliver the objectives of the strategy will be treated on a case by case basis with comprehensive business plans and return on investment highlighted.”
Three core systems being replaced at once
Behind the scenes, the council is replacing the computer systems behind its finances, social care and housing services in the same period. The systems listed as being in various stages of replacement are Masterpiece Financials, the Housing Orchard system, and the Welsh Community Care Information System, known as WCCIS, used in social care.
The Housing Orchard replacement is listed as ongoing with go-live “Now Scheduled Oct 2026”, the Masterpiece and WCCIS replacements are listed among projects coming online in 2026/27, alongside a replacement for corporate telephony and a new storage area network. Redesigned digital housing processes are already live and being used by housing contract holders and people at risk of homelessness, ahead of the wider housing system change.
More than 1,000 helped to get online
The report is direct about residents on the other side of the digital shift, saying a lack of basic digital skills or digital poverty, “not being able to afford kit or data costs, have been recognised as a national concern”.
In 2025/26 officers at Contact Wrexham, based in Wrexham Library, supported more than 1,000 council customers to get online. Free SIM cards with mobile data are available through the Good Things Foundation scheme for people over 18 from low income households, and support also runs through housing estate offices, which each now have a tablet for contract holders, and the Wellbeing Hub, which hosts a virtual Citizens Advice link on Wednesday mornings and a Tech Drop every Thursday between 1pm and 3pm run by voluntary group Wrexham SWS.
Feedback collected from people who received help includes one customer who said: “I was so worried about having to apply online, I can’t believe how easy it is. My family have been telling me to get an iPad and now I may just do that, I feel much more confident.”
Another said: “I have been so nervous to come in today, and now I’m leaving here with a spring in my step. I am so pleased I was able to complete the form myself with your support, I feel very proud of myself.”
The report will be considered by the council’s Customers, Performance, Resources and Governance Scrutiny Committee on Thursday.
Dashboard examples
The report pack also has screenshots – top image is of one – which gives sample views of the Power BI dashboards used by council officers. Each example has a different date range applied, and the council describes the dashboards as live tools where dates can be changed and information further analysed in real time. The data appears to be real, with no note that it is dummy or example data, and does fit eg. 9,945 form submissions in July 2026 sits plausibly against the 99,144 annual total, and the Q1 2026/27 date ranges on two of the dashboards fit a report prepared over the summer for a September committee
If real, the Blue Badge example covers 1 April to 30 June 2026 and shows 1,234 applications in the quarter. The largest single category is automatic applications through Personal Independence Payment, at 501 cases, with discretionary walking ability applications the next largest at 326. On those figures, roughly two in five applications in the quarter came through automatically via PIP rather than a discretionary assessment.
The bulky waste example covers a longer period, from January 2023 to January 2026, and shows 1,160 collection requests totalling 5,596 individual items. Furniture accounts for almost half of everything collected. The single most collected item is the sofa, at 681, followed by mattresses at 560 and chairs at 545. The list also includes 38 barbecues and 63 small lawnmowers.
Screenshot
A third example maps 153 abandoned vehicle reports made between April and June 2026, with reports spread across the city and villages including Brymbo, Coedpoeth, Southsea, New Broughton, Bersham and Rhostyllen. The map records where reports were made rather than a measure of where vehicles are most often left.
A fourth dashboard shows when people use the council’s online forms. In July 2026 there were 9,945 submissions. Wednesday was the busiest day and most forms were sent between 8am and 3pm, but submissions were recorded at every hour of the day and night, including 29 at midnight and 68 at 5am, when the council’s phone lines are closed – backing up the need for always-on digital services.
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