Staff review where needed
Keep an officer involved when judgement, sensitivity or risk matters.
Trust and technology
Keep your service in control
Your council decides what LocalGovMail can do, what staff must review and which routine tasks can proceed automatically.
Start with staff assistance and introduce automation only when the service is ready.
Clear boundaries
People remain responsible for the service
Each service sets its rules
Agree how different messages should be handled, reviewed and escalated.
Decisions are recorded
Keep a record of AI actions and staff interventions to support review and assurance.
Council-controlled data
Keep council email within your environment
LocalGovMail can run as a separate internal application in your council's Azure environment. It can use your existing identity, access, monitoring and security controls.
This keeps the application that processes resident correspondence separate from your public-facing website.
Your Azure environment
Deploy within your existing Azure architecture and security controls.
Your data is not training public models
For models sold by Azure, Microsoft states that prompts and completions are not used to train generative AI foundation models without your permission or instruction.
Not shared with OpenAI
Microsoft states that prompts and completions are not made available to OpenAI or other providers of models sold through Azure.
Works with what you have
Use your existing systems
LocalGovMail adds specialist shared-mailbox triage alongside Outlook, case-management systems, Power Automate and existing Azure services.
Messages can remain in the original mailbox, while agreed actions can update the systems your teams already use.
Further assurance
Details for digital and governance teams
LocalGovMail is an open-source Drupal application. It is installed separately from the public website and operates as an internal application.
AI decisions can include a confidence level and explanation to support staff review. Protected characteristics are tokenised before AI processing, designed to reduce the risk of those characteristics influencing AI decisions.
Assess each use
The deployment, security and information-governance design should be assessed for each council environment and use case.
Get involved
Discuss control, security and governance
Talk to us about the requirements for a first shared mailbox and involve your digital, security and governance teams early.