He added: "It's very authority specific. We have got a very IT-savvy chief exec who has been blogging from day one, but his predecessor was somebody who had his emails printed. So it very much depends how clued up your leader is, but that's also up to IT to evangelise."

Cambridgeshire launched its PSN in May of this year and will connect over 400 sites including school, libraries, offices and emergency services. It claims that the deal with Virgin Media Business will save more than £1 million a year and see IT costs reduced by 50 percent.

Andrew Curtois, senior category manager for strategic procurement at Westminster City Council, disagreed with Carey and said that the main problem with developing a PSN was more due to the inability to collect savings data.

"It's difficult to make sure people are aware and have a very good grasp of what they are going to save. If you talking about video conferencing, for example, does a local authority have a grasp of what it is going to save them? I think that's the issue," said Curtois.

He added: "It isn't that IT is being seen in isolation. Councils don't know where to pull all the data from that tells them where they are going to make savings, they don't know that the data is absolutely correct, and because of this, they don't know how much they are going to save.