Local councils take a shared approach

Four councils - Cotswold District Council, Forest of Dean District Council, West Oxfordshire District Council, and Cheltenham Borough Council - have linked up to set up a Shared Services programme they have dubbed GO.

The quartet have been joined by Cheltenham Borough Homes in the initiative, which is based on a shared services platform from supplier UNIT 4 and which they say will help them align with the Total Place agenda as well as achieve cost reduction and boost efficiency in the face of tighter budgets. 

"We expect to benefit from the economies of scale one council could not achieve alone and in doing so provide better value for money to our taxpayers," said Pat Pratley, Senior Responsible Owner for the GO Programme. 

Access to up-to-date accurate data online will allow councillors and officers to make faster and better informed decisions, as well as hopefully lead to lower administration costs by offering self-service functions for day-to-day tasks such as ordering goods, expenses processing and annual leave requests. 

Meanwhile, manager self-service capabilities will also allow departmental heads to take ownership of their service costs, removing reliance on centralised corporate control, while it is anticipated that co-ordinated procurement can be inaugurated to ensure goods and services are sourced at optimal cost.

The supplier was selected after a competitive procurement process using the OGC SPRINTii Framework, which is available to all public sector bodies via the framework operator, Specialist Computer Centres (SCC), to make sure that they had the right technology solution to support the authorities' long-term objectives. Using the OGC SPRINTii Framework and SCC enabled GO to reduce both the cost and time associated with the procurement process, claims the GO partnership.

Once the project has been successfully implemented, the GO partnership would like other public sector bodies in the region to benefit from sharing services as well, it says.

A figure of £634,000 has been released by the supplier as the cost of the software and related services it will supply to set up the GO platform.