UK councils field millions of repeat phone calls a year for one reason: residents calling to ask "what's happening with my case?" Liverpool City Council decided that single question was worth automating — and the fix is projected to save £1.8 million a year.
Local government has a structural cost problem that has nothing to do with the service itself. A pothole report, a housing repair request, a benefits claim — each one spins up its own thread of follow-up calls, emails and in-person visits asking for a status update. Multiply that across a city of roughly 500,000 residents and the admin overhead becomes the job, not a side effect of it. The usual fix is hiring more contact-centre staff. There's a cheaper one.
In October 2024, Liverpool City Council signed a contract with govtech vendor Jadu (now part of Netcall, following a £25.3M acquisition in December 2025) to rebuild its case management around a single AI-powered "Digital Layer." The council's own business case projects £1.8 million in annual savings, driven mainly by residents no longer needing to call in just to check progress — work that used to consume meaningful contact-centre capacity now happens automatically, in the background.
Why Local Government Became AI's Quietest Testing Ground
The "Digital Layer" isn't a chatbot bolted onto a council website. It's a case-management platform — Jadu's Continuum suite — sitting between the resident-facing self-service portal and the council's internal systems, with Microsoft Power Platform handling the low-code workflow logic and Microsoft Teams as the interface case officers actually work in. Microsoft Copilot's generative AI layer reads and extracts data from uploaded documents (OCR), flags missing information, and surfaces a suggested next action directly inside Teams — turning a multi-system admin task into something closer to a single screen.
The people who feel this most aren't residents filing requests — they're the case officers processing them. A housing officer in a council the size of Liverpool's might handle hundreds of open cases at once, each needing a status check, a document review, or an escalation decision. Automating the "where is this at" layer doesn't replace that judgment; it removes everything around it that wasn't judgment in the first place.
How a Resident's Request Actually Moves Through the System
Liverpool's rollout is multi-year and multi-department, but the core flow is consistent across services:
- Self-service intake — a resident submits a request (repair, complaint, benefits query) through the council's portal instead of calling in.
- Automated triage — Jadu's case management engine routes the request to the right department and queue based on type and urgency.
- Document extraction — if the request includes uploaded files, Copilot's OCR layer reads and structures the data, flagging anything missing before a human ever opens the case.
- Case officer review in Teams — the officer sees a pre-structured case with a suggested next action, rather than a blank form and a stack of attachments.
- Automated status push — the resident gets a proactive update at each stage, which is the specific mechanism behind most of the projected £1.8M: it directly displaces the "just checking in" phone call.
This is the same underlying architecture Netcall and Jadu have rolled out — in different configurations — across roughly half of all UK councils, including Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in Europe.
The Results: What £1.8M in Projected Savings Actually Reflects
£1.8 million a year is the council's own business-case figure for the Liverpool deployment — it's a projection tied to the original contract, not yet an independently audited result, since the rollout is still phasing in through 2026.
It tracks with the wider pattern. A joint Heriot-Watt University and GoLLM study of 208 UK councils (2026) found that 95% are now using or actively exploring AI — up 10 percentage points since 2024 — and that 83% of those councils' AI use is specifically generative AI, the same category powering Liverpool's document-extraction layer.
The councils that aren't moving on this aren't avoiding a fad; they're sitting on the same repeat-call overhead Liverpool is now removing. With Netcall and Jadu alone already serving roughly half of UK councils, the operational gap between "automated case management" and "phone queue" is becoming the actual line between which councils can absorb rising service demand without proportionally growing headcount.
The Technology Stack Behind the Digital Layer
None of this runs on custom-built AI — it's a combination of an established govtech case-management platform and general-purpose Microsoft tools most public-sector IT teams already have some license footprint in.
| Tool | Role in This Workflow | Free Tier? | Paid From |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jadu Case Management (Netcall) | Front-office self-service portal + back-office case routing | No — public-sector procurement only | Quote-only, via framework agreement |
| Microsoft Power Platform | Low-code workflow layer connecting the portal to council systems | Limited per-app trial | From ~$5/user/month (Power Apps per-app plan) |
| Microsoft Copilot / Copilot Studio | Generative AI: OCR/document extraction, in-Teams next-action suggestions | No | Consumption-based, layered onto Microsoft 365 Copilot licensing |
| Microsoft Teams | Case officer workspace with embedded Copilot suggestions | Yes | Included in most Microsoft 365 plans |
The case-management layer itself is sold almost exclusively through public-sector procurement frameworks — there's no self-serve sign-up. [REQUIERE VERIFICACIÓN: exact current Jadu/Netcall framework pricing tiers, since these are typically negotiated per contract and not published.]
Who Should Be Watching This Case
This is most relevant to digital transformation leads and operations managers inside local or regional government, especially in departments with high repeat-contact volume — housing, planning, benefits, adult social care. It's also relevant to anyone evaluating Microsoft Copilot for document-heavy back-office work outside government, since the OCR/next-action pattern transfers directly. It is not a fit for organizations expecting a self-serve SaaS signup: this stack is procured, configured and rolled out over a period of months to years, not days.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this stack only available to governments?
The case-management layer (Jadu/Netcall) is sold almost exclusively to public-sector and higher-education customers. Microsoft Power Platform, Teams and Copilot, however, are general-purpose products any organization can license directly from Microsoft.
Has Liverpool's £1.8M saving actually been confirmed yet?
Not independently. It's the projected figure from the council's original 2024 business case, and the rollout is still phasing in through 2026. Treat it as a target the deployment is being measured against, not a closed-book result.
How long does a deployment like this take?
Liverpool's contract was signed in October 2024 and the rollout is still expanding across departments in 2026 — this is a multi-year programme, not a single implementation sprint.
AI in government is quietly moving past chatbots and into the case-management layer where the actual headcount costs sit. With Netcall and Jadu already inside roughly half of UK councils, the next 18 months will show whether projected savings like Liverpool's £1.8M turn into an audited number — or into a cautionary tale about over-promising in a council business case.