Council moves to share services in drive to reduce costs

As part of planned changes in the way it works, Shropshire Council is exploring how its services can be provided differently to cut costs while protecting quality. 

One way of doing this is through adopting shared ways of working, and the council’s planned approach to this is outlined in a Cabinet paper on Shared Services, which will be considered on Wednesday 20 July 2011.

In essence, this means sharing service delivery with other organisations, to reduce costs and provide economies of scale, initially in relation to the council’s ‘back office’ corporate support services, such as Finance, IT, Personnel Administration, Legal, Printing and Property Services.

As well as creating more affordable services, this will ensure that they remain available to service users in the future and, in turn, will create more secure employment prospects for those staff who continue to deliver them.

Taking this approach is seen by the council as essential in a new financial climate, where it is simply not sustainable for public sector organisations to continue to work in isolation, doing everything exclusively for themselves.  By working more closely with other partners, the council can both save money and protect service delivery.

This is a new way of working for the council; so the proposed changes will take around 12 months to carefully design and put in place, meaning that the new shared services arrangements will not be working fully until 2013.

If approved by the council’s Cabinet next week (Wednesday 20 July 2011) work will start quickly to create this new way of working, and to obtain the benefits it will provide.

Councillor Martin Taylor-Smith, Shropshire Council’s Cabinet member for service transformation and organisational development, said:

“The days when every local authority did everything for itself on a stand alone basis have gone. In moving to deliver back office services in collaboration with other partners we can still ensure a local flavour to the way services are delivered.

“This is not about making large scale redundancies, nor is it about the privatisation of services.  The changes will give us a new platform to create greater efficiency by working in partnership, and to offer more secure employment to our staff in these service areas in future.”

The shared service approach will be broken down into two distinct phases.  Phase one will be an internal process to merge some services, and will include the creation of a business plan to identify the best way of undertaking the necessary changes.

Phase two will include the creation of a new platform that allows the council to explore wider partnerships.  These could be with other local authorities, other public services such as fire and rescue, voluntary organisations, and the private sector.

This approach is similar to that being taken by other local councils and police forces around the country, to provide better value for local people and to protect resources for essential services.

In preparation for these changes, over the summer the council will start to explore with neighbouring councils and other possible partners the level of interest in this form of collaboration. 

When it is in place fully, the new shared services platform will enable a wide range of services to be provided this way in future, including essential frontline services to local people, as part of wider changes being planned by the council.