Netherlands

Dutch municipalities run a great deal, but under national law and largely on national money. The split below shows where a city can act alone and where it waits for someone else.

• Broadband: private builders lay the lines and the competition authority ACM regulates them. A city coordinates street works; it neither builds nor subsidises networks.
• Public transport: the provinces award most bus concessions, a few metropolitan transport regions award their own, and the minister awards rail. Most cities negotiate with their province.
• Policing and cameras: there is one national police force. The mayor directs it on public order and may place public-order cameras if the council allows it by bylaw. Experiments with analysis are the police’s own: in Roermond the police scored every car entering the town.
• Welfare and its algorithms: municipalities pay social assistance and police its fraud themselves, under the Participation Act. That is why the welfare-fraud models of Rotterdam and Amsterdam were the councils’ own.
• Electricity grids: the regional operators are publicly owned, with provinces and municipalities as shareholders, and the ACM sets the order in which spare capacity is handed out. A city owns a stake but cannot buy capacity.
• Heat: under the Collective Heat Act, passed in December 2025, municipalities lead the switch to heat networks, and heat companies must come under majority public ownership.
• Planning: the municipality writes its own omgevingsplan, the single local plan, but applications are meant to arrive through the state’s online counter.
• Open data and algorithms: the Open Government Act, in force since May 2022, sets the same transparency duties for every authority. Publishing algorithms in the Algoritmeregister, the national algorithm register, is voluntary.
• Online services and the e-ID: the state builds DigiD and the citizen portal MijnOverheid through Logius, its digital-infrastructure agency; each municipality builds its own front end. Since July 2023 the Digital Government Act has required every authority to accept approved logins and secure its websites to set standards.
• Procurement, open source and skills: listed open standards are mandatory unless an authority explains why not, publishing source code is a request rather than a duty, and the state funds digital help desks in public libraries.

The split explains a pattern. Dutch cities are strong where a national law hands them a duty and a common standard. Every council must accept the national logins, so a shared component can reach dozens of them, and the heat law gives them control of district heating. They are weak where the decisive asset is national or private: fibre, grid capacity, police analytics, the planning system.

In 2024 VNG warned of a structural shortfall of about €2.4bn a year from 2026, the year councils call the ravijnjaar, the cliff-edge year. Around the councils sit a handful of national bodies. The Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens, the data-protection authority, is also the coordinating supervisor of algorithms. VNG runs Common Ground, a programme for councils to build software once and share it. Research comes from TNO, the national applied-research organisation, the universities and institutes such as the AMS Institute in Amsterdam.

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AMS Institute

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Civil society holds the other end. A coalition of rights groups brought the case against SyRI, the national welfare risk-profiling system. Investigative newsrooms, Lighthouse Reports, Argos, Vers Beton and Follow the Money, obtained Rotterdam’s welfare-fraud model in full.

Rob Jetten’s cabinet of D66 (social liberals), the VVD (conservative liberals) and the CDA (Christian Democrats) took office in February 2026 after an early election in October 2025. It holds 66 of the 150 seats in the lower house, a minority. There is no digital ministry: Eric van der Burg, a state secretary at the Interior, runs digital government, while Willemijn Aerdts, at Economic Affairs, holds the digital economy and sovereignty.

Two scandals still frame the Dutch argument about public algorithms. In February 2020 a court in The Hague struck down the law behind SyRI, a system that linked welfare and tax data to flag possible fraud. It found the law too opaque to check and in breach of the right to private life. In December 2020 a parliamentary inquiry, Unprecedented Injustice, found that the tax office’s fraud hunt in childcare benefits had violated the basic principles of the rule of law. By June 2026, 44,045 parents had been confirmed as victims, and the repair budget stood at €11.8bn.

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Voortgangsrapportage hersteloperatie toeslagen, januari–juni 2026 (23e VGR)

Public report reveals 44,045 algorithmic‑trust victims, €11.8 bn recovery budget, municipal support details.

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The national register began in a city. Amsterdam’s 2020 algorithm register now redirects to the Algoritmeregister, which grew from 1,224 descriptions in November 2025 to 1,573 from 353 public bodies on 2 October 2026. Of the 342 municipalities, 208 have published at least one; 86 have joined without publishing and 48 have not joined. In July 2025 the data-protection authority found a fundamental-rights assessment for only 5% of registered algorithms and asked for a legal duty to register.

Sovereignty has become the second theme. In July 2025 the state, provinces, municipalities and water boards adopted one digitalisation strategy, with a government cloud among its six priorities. When a US company agreed to buy Solvinity, the firm whose servers run DigiD, the opposition MP Barbara Kathmann of GroenLinks-PvdA, the Green–Labour alliance, warned that Trump could soon switch off the digital government at the push of a button. In May 2026 the government prohibited the takeover on national-security grounds; Solvinity is appealing, and its DigiD contract runs to August 2028.

In July 2026 the cabinet chose to build an open-source cloud in its own data centres. It is a decision, not yet a build: no budget has been set, and a proof of concept runs in the government’s Digilab.

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Kamerbrief stand van zaken verkenning soevereine overheidscloud (Kamerstuk 26643 nr. 1537, 1 juli 2026)

The cabinet’s decision for a sovereign, open-source government cloud.

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The Dutch recovery plan has €5.44bn in EU grants, 25.6% of it for digital aims; the fourth payment, approved in September 2026, will bring the total paid to €3.73bn. Six Dutch entries, covering seven municipalities, are in the EU mission for climate-neutral and smart cities: Amsterdam, Eindhoven with Helmond, Groningen, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht. All but Utrecht held the mission label for their plans by July 2026.

In Rotterdam, SyRI flagged 1,263 addresses in Hillesluis and Bloemhof, two of the city’s poorest neighbourhoods, in 2018. The national steering group kept rejecting the project plan over doubts about data-protection law, and in July 2019 Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb stopped it. The city’s own welfare-fraud model scored about 30,000 recipients a year on 315 variables, and young mothers and people with poor Dutch scored highest. The city’s audit office warned in 2021, and the model was stopped that year.

The model spread faster than the lesson. Two years later Amsterdam built its own welfare model, the Slimme Check, and stopped it in November 2023 when bias persisted.

Enschede tested where counting ends and tracking begins. From May 2018 to April 2020 the city counted pedestrians in its centre by picking up the wi-fi signals of their phones. The data-protection authority fined it €600,000 for tracking people. A court annulled the fine in February 2024 because the authority had not shown that anyone could be identified, and in July 2026 the Council of State upheld that ruling.

Helmond’s Brainport Smart District was planned from 2016 as a testbed of about 1,500 “smart” homes in Brandevoort. In October 2023 the city put it on hold and chose a new course: the deficit on its land development was heading from €35m towards €67m, and the National Growth Fund offered €7.5m of the €20m in innovation money the city had counted on. “It is financially irresponsible to carry on the old way,” said alderman Arno Bonte.

Groningen chose early what the law now requires. The city and its water company founded WarmteStad as a public heat company; by December 2025 it supplied 9,000 households and buildings, using waste heat from a data centre and a solar-heat park. Under the Collective Heat Act, heat companies must now come under majority public ownership, so that councils can steer the switch.

Signalen shows what keeps a shared tool alive. Built in Amsterdam as an open-source app for reporting problems in public space, it was taken up through VNG’s Common Ground programme and ran in 39 municipalities by 2024. Amsterdam still funds the core team, councils pool about €400,000 a year scaled by population, and a partnership with Denmark’s OS2 network has begun.

Utrecht is testing the grid’s side of the story. Utrecht Energized started in June 2025 with 50 shared electric cars that can feed power back, and aims for 500, which together could lend the grid up to 5 MW. No result has been published yet.

Residents are split on transparency. In the IMD Smart City Index, a survey of how residents experience their city, Amsterdam ranks 17th of 148, Rotterdam 52nd and The Hague 54th. Asked whether online information has increased their trust in the authorities, Amsterdam ties for second among 17 cities in Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium and Rotterdam comes fourth. The Hague, seat of the national government, comes twelfth.

The limits so far have been drawn case by case: by a mayor and a city audit office in Rotterdam, by a court in The Hague, and by the courts again when the regulator fined Enschede and lost. The lesson travelled more slowly than the models did. What spread between councils was a tool they own and pay for together, such as Signalen. Registering an algorithm is still voluntary, and 134 councils have published none.