Oxford Council Services Face Delays
Oxford City Council has announced that essential system upgrades will cause temporary disruptions to several public services. Residents should expect potential delays when trying to access planning, regulatory, and licensing services while the work is being completed.
- The primary system outage, scheduled from February 24 to March 9, 2026, is for essential maintenance on the Civica OPEN Portal, which manages Council Tax, Business Rates, and Benefits services. This system will be unavailable for both public access and internal staff use during this period. - A separate, much shorter maintenance event will occur on Tuesday, February 24, 2026, for up to four hours from 9 am. This will involve security and software updates to the main council website servers, potentially making many online forms temporarily unavailable. - Online services for planning and licensing applications are managed by third-party providers and are not expected to be affected by these specific maintenance periods. - The upgrades are part of Oxford City Council's broader digital strategy, which aims to enhance customer self-service capabilities and increase automation in service delivery. The council entered a 10-year contract with Civica in 2020 to modernize its revenues and benefits platform. - This maintenance follows previous unrelated IT challenges, including a December 2021 outage caused by a hardware failure during a botched firewall upgrade at a data center managed by its IT partner, SCC. - In June 2025, the council also managed a cyber security incident where an unauthorized presence was detected on their network, which necessitated proactively taking systems offline for security checks and investigation. - The current maintenance on the Civica OPEN Portal is part of a planned migration of the revenues and benefits database from local servers to a cloud platform to improve data security and enable system enhancements.
