Clyde Valley Partnership: Sharing Support Services Across 8 Councils.
Published Tuesday, July 5, 2011 - 22:07
Clyde Valley Partnership is one of the most ambitious collaboration projects among local authorities that could shape the future of public service delivery. Here we find out how they share support services.
You can read the first article of this series here:
The Clyde Valley Partnership has been working on an ambitious range of shared services projects. The Partnership involves 8 Councils in the West of Scotland and covers 35% of Scotland’s population.
East Renfrewshire Council and Inverclyde Council, have been leading on a project to share support services across the Clyde Valley. With support from colleagues across the Clyde Valley, a detailed business plan has been prepared which recommends that Councils share support services.
Support services are crucial to any organisation but are also a considerable cost. Across our councils we estimate support service cost us around £150m per year. Given the pressure on public sector budgets, we need to do everything we can to make support services more efficient to ensure that we recycle any savings into protecting frontline services. We have developed a compelling business case to share our finance, payroll, revenues and benefits, human resources and IT. By year 5 we would expect cumulative savings of between £45m and £81m. However the real savings are in the longer term where we expect savings of £30m per annum by year 10.
So how will our shared services save money? Firstly we can review how we operate across our Councils and adopt the best processes. We will dedicate staff to continuously improving these processes and to get further efficiencies. Next we will look at economies of scale particularly in management and ICT and thirdly we will look at the use of new technology and new working practises to automate processes and encourage staff across the Councils to ‘self serve’.
This is a very ambitious project. The scale of the project and the number of staff involved will make this a challenging project and one which will be managed very carefully to ensure success.
However one of the particular strengths of the proposal is the ability of councils of different sizes to come together and gain equitably from their involvement in shared services.
There are many successful shared services projects across Scotland, both in the private and public sector. Indeed the West of Scotland is home to many world class shared services.
In East Renfrewshire we have operated a shared service with NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde for a number of years.
Our joint Community Health and Care Partnership, delivers health and social care services to the residents of East Renfrewshire. It delivers better quality joined up services at lower costs than when we operated separately so we are confident shared services can work.
The recently launched Christie report emphasised the need for new ways of working across the public sector and emphasised the importance of shared services.
Shared support services will allow each council to maximise efficiencies and take advantage of economies of scale whilst still working locally to achieve outcomes for residents.
