Ealing's website doesn't work.
The fix already exists.
Tell the council to get on with it.
Impossible to navigate. Fails when you need it most. Built by three different suppliers, at our expense. We all know it. So does the council.
We all know the website doesn't work.
So does the council.
Three platforms. Three suppliers. Three different looks. Here they are as they appeared on 3 November 2026. Nothing altered.
They want us online. We need to be online. The website just doesn't work well enough to do that.
The list is endless.
The fix already exists.
We used it to build GOV.UK.
Any council can build their own site with it.
Already paid for.
Ealing Council already agreed to do it.
Britain already has a website that works. Passports, driving licences, tax returns, Universal Credit: millions of people use GOV.UK every day without a second thought. Any council can build on it.
Eight years ago, Ealing agreed to this.
In 2018 Ealing signed the Local Digital Declaration: a promise to build its services to the national standard and to stop paying for clunky, locked-in technology.
They took £99,000 from the government to make it real.
December 2018. Ealing and two partner councils were awarded £99,000 from the fund set up to turn that promise into working services.
A year ago, the government offered even more.
November 2025. GDS Local was set up to bring the GOV.UK login to councils and to end what the government itself calls "ball and chain" supplier contracts.
Today.
Three separate platforms, built by three different providers. Forms that don't work. Services that don't work. Pages that fail. Help pages with no help. And we pay for ALL of it.
One login.
Forms that help you fill them in.
Help on every page.
Already paid for.
and doesn't even work.
And costs a fortune.
Give us a working website.
This is for them as much as for us. Every failed login becomes a phone call, a letter, a complaint, a summons that should never have been sent. That is our money and their time, spent on the wrong things, while the things that matter wait.
- Build the website, and every service behind it, to GOV.UK standards.
- Publish a dated plan within six months, naming the officers responsible.
- Fix the forms that fail without saying why, and the help pages with no help, now.
- One login for residents, not two.
- Report back to full council within a year.
Every signature forces the council to get on with it. 3,671 signatures means it is taken directly to full council to prioritise.
Who set this up?
Just me. Jonathan Trimble, a resident of Ealing since 2022. Nothing more.
I started looking into why the website doesn't work, and submitted a Freedom of Information request to get to the bottom of it. What I found shocked me. The fix already exists. Ealing promised to use it eight years ago, and took public money to do so.
Ealing has 24 wards, 70 councillors and five parties, and a website that simply doesn't work. It's an outrage for anyone with any responsibility to the Ealing community and council.
Who knows, maybe that's the way to get the next thing done, and the one after that.