Town websites and directories are a good thing.
Councils, BIDs, and place partnerships invest in them because supporting local business matters. Visibility matters. Helping residents and visitors discover what is on their doorstep matters.
In many places, small teams work extremely hard, often with limited budgets and competing pressures, to promote local enterprise and strengthen their town’s economy. That effort should be acknowledged, applauded and encouraged.
The money being spent on local digital platforms is not careless or misguided. It reflects genuine commitment to place. But if we pause for a moment and step back from the individual town perspective, a larger question emerges. At what cost?
A simple test of scale
I want to test a straightforward assumption.
For argument’s sake, let us assume there are around 16,000 recognised towns in the UK. Now assume that each town commissions a competent, mid-tier directory website. Not a digital transformation programme. Not an enterprise platform. Just a professionally delivered site with search, filtering, business listings, events, and reasonable accessibility compliance.
In today’s market, the build cost for something of that scope typically sits somewhere between £8,000 and £25,000. If we take a midpoint of £16,500, we are not describing a premium solution. We are describing a standard, mid-market build with proper discovery, information architecture, UX design, CMS configuration, testing, and deployment.
On that basis:
16,000 towns multiplied by £16,500 results in £264 million of capital investment.
That figure is not presented as definitive. It is a working assumption. If your experience suggests a different midpoint, adjust the number. Even if the average build were lower, the national total remains substantial.
The precise number can be debated. The order of magnitude is harder to dismiss.
It is also worth being clear about what this scenario includes and what it does not. This is one cost, for one website per town. It does not include tourism sites, BID sites, parish-level sites, or parallel delivery platforms. It does not include hosting, maintenance, compliance updates, redesign cycles, or integration work. It is a single capital build assumption.
The total is less important than what it produces.
It produces thousands of separate procurements. Thousands of separate codebases. Thousands of directory structures, hosting environments, and accessibility liabilities. Each locally defensible. Collectively fragmented.
From the perspective of any individual place, commissioning a separate system is understandable. It preserves local control. It fits within existing budget structures. It feels safer than relying on something shared.
Nationally, however, the pattern raises a structural question. If we are rebuilding substantially similar digital foundations thousands of times, are we generating new capability, or repeating cost?
A reasonable counterargument
It is fair to argue that shared platforms introduce their own risks. They can centralise control, reduce flexibility, or fail to reflect local identity. Those concerns are legitimate and should be addressed directly, not dismissed.
The purpose of this scenario is not to argue for a single mandated national platform. That would undermine the principle of local autonomy that towns rightly protect.
The calculation is simply intended to make visible the structural duplication effect at scale. Whether 16,000 towns collaborate or 1,000 towns collaborate, or 100 towns collaborate, the economic logic remains the same.
Strategic clarity
You do not need every town to collaborate for the duplication effect to matter.
If even a fraction of towns chose to build shared digital foundations rather than commissioning separate directory systems, the avoided duplication would already be meaningful.
The real question is not whether every town will share. It is whether enough towns are willing to explore a different approach.
What if 100 towns chose to collaborate?
Let us take the same midpoint assumption of £16,500 per town.
100 towns multiplied by £16,500 equals £1.65 million.
That is £1.65 million currently spent on separate, parallel builds.
If instead those 100 towns pooled investment into a shared core platform, the capital required to design, build, and govern that platform would not need to match 100 separate builds. Even allowing for more robust architecture, shared governance design, and a consistent data model, the required investment would be materially lower than £1.65 million in duplicated effort.
This is the aspiration for the next phase. One hundred towns is large enough to prove that shared capability works in practice, yet small enough to remain voluntary and locally accountable.
At 100 towns, the question stops being theoretical. It becomes operational.
And what if 10 towns begin?
Founding Stewardship does not begin with 100 towns.
It begins with 10.
Using the same midpoint assumption, 10 towns commissioning separate builds would represent £165,000 of capital investment in parallel systems.
That is sufficient to begin designing shared foundations properly. Not as a national programme, and not as a directive, but as a practical, stewarded collaboration between a small number of places willing to test a different approach.
The purpose of starting with 10 towns is not to reach scale immediately. It is to establish governance, stewardship, and delivery discipline before scale.
This is only the first cost
This post examines one number: capital build cost for one directory website per town.
It does not yet examine:
- Hosting and infrastructure costs over time
- Accessibility and compliance update cycles
- Redesign and rebuild patterns
- Supplier dependency and transition costs
- Data fragmentation across separate systems
Those layers materially increase the total duplication effect. They will be examined separately.
For now, the purpose of this scenario is simpler.
If the duplication effect is visible at build stage alone, it is reasonable to ask whether continuing to rebuild similar foundations in isolation represents the most efficient use of limited capital.
Founding Stewardship exists to test an alternative at a measured scale, beginning with 10 towns and designed to grow to 100, not through mandate, but through demonstrated value.
