IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

HM Courts and Tribunals Service County Court Money Claims Centre is already the subject of complaints from thousands of solicitor firms which had been accustomed to dealing with local county courts.

The Department for Transport (DfT) has published a tender notice for a private operator to take over its shared service centre in Swansea.

The centre, which is currently run by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, provides back office services such as personnel, HR, IT and document management. It is available for use by the whole department and its agencies, but the tender is for a framework agreement that would transfer it to a private company and make it open for use around Whitehall.

The Department for Transport will spend up to £750 million on a contract for the management of it's Shared Services Centre (SSC) lasting up to ten years, according to a tender notice published on Thursday.

The notice updates the cost of the contract from the department's prior announcement in March, which capped the price at £500 million.

The Government Shared Services Strategic Vision, published just before the 31 July deadline set in the Cabinet Office business plan, proposes "establishing an equitable market of a small number (circa 2) of accredited independent shared service centres (ISSCs)" from which departments and their related bodies can buy back-office services.

The idea of generating competition through a duopoly is reminiscent of the splitting of England and Wales' electricity generators into two companies, PowerGen and National Power, by the Conservative government in the 1990s.

Compass Point Business Services was set up by East Lindsey and South Holland District Councils, and as the bigger shareholder, ELDC has saved £1.4m from the deal.

The council has needed to make savings of £5.7m in the past two financial years, with a further saving of at least £1.6m needed in 2013/14.

The councils have been discussing ways of how they can share services to help cut costs without affecting the quality of services for residents since 2009.

Their regeneration and economic development departments were identified as a potential for a shared service due to work that had already been undertaken in developing a Joint Economic Masterplan.

The figure has been revealed as Compass Point Business Services - the shared services company set up by South Holland and East Lindsey District Councils - looks set to have saved a combined £2.1million in its first year of operating.

The company was set up to provide IT, human resources, customer services, finance revenues and benefits services to the two local authorities.

Much has been made over the past few years regarding authorities' approach to shared services. At Hinckley and Bosworth borough council, we have been firmly in the proactive camp, developing and delivering shared services with neighbouring authorities over the past five years, with the aim of reducing cost and improving service quality and resilience.

We have achieved successes in legal services, IT services, waste management, financial services/internal audit and revenues and benefits.

The agreement, which is being put to a full council meeting 13 May, will see LGSS providing services including IT, HR, finance, procurement, legal and revenues and benefits.

David Mackintosh, leader of Northampton Borough Council, said: ‘We have already reduced management costs and will have to continue to do so. This agreement would ensure that we can continue to provide services of a high standard while reducing the cost to the public even further.

The partnership started on 1 April 2008 with a shared vision to support frontline and back office services and it has gone from strength to strength since then.

Four Essex councils have signed a shared service agreement with Capita which they claim will save £7m over the next five years, and cut their ICT costs by more than 45%.

Braintree, Castle Point, Colchester and Rochford councils will pay the company £8m to provide shared ICT support services. These will include a mix of service, asset, security and network infrastructure management, desktop support, server and data storage and consultancy.

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Martin Rayson is divisional director of human resources for the London borough of Barking and Dagenham:

Does sharing a chief executive work? From my experience this will only work long term if you go beyond that to bringing together strategies, services and systems.

Question the role local identity against the cost of being different: The choice may be between having no service and one that may be more standardised. It is possible to make a service feel local even if it is not managed locally. What we need are new perspectives on the way services are designed and delivered.

The study surveyed 106 senior managers and directors in the public sector in January 2011.

Of this 40 per cent, nine per cent said the coalition's programme of public sector cuts detailed in its Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) had spurred them to opt for shared services.

The sharing of services at four councils in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire will save £3.4 million and will secure HR’s role for the future, according to the HR executive lead on the project.

Cotswold District Council, West Oxfordshire District Council, Forest of Dean District Council and Cheltenham Borough Council are working towards sharing services in finance, procurement, HR and payroll in a project known as the “GO” programme.

Independent Shared Service Centre 2, due to launch in 2014, will deliver payroll, HR, finance and procurement services to government departments in an attempt to reduce costs.

"The Cabinet Office team is now actively and swiftly progressing work on a pan-government strategy to deliver shared back-office services across Whitehall," it said in its Structural Reform Plan Monthly Implementation Update.

The department has also failed to amend Freedom of Information guidance to extend "right to data" to public services. It said it was in the process of measuring how best to do this.

The first independently run centre of its kind, Independent Shared Service Centre One (ISSC1) will be managed by business process outsourcing partner arvato and created from the existing Department for Transport (DfT) shared service centre in Swansea.

The Cabinet Office is searching for a private sector partner to take up to a 75 percent stake in its second of two independent shared services centres, in a contract that is worth up to £2 billion and will see a range of business services delivered to various government departments and public sector bodies.

The Cabinet Office is seeking a £2bn partner to invest heavily in being the government's go-to provider for shared services for at least five years.

A tender document issued last week reveals that the government is looking for a "connected partner" to buy a majority shareholding of the newly created Shared Services Connected Ltd (SSCL).

Shared services schemes by five central government departments are £500 million over budget between them, according to a report from the National Audit Office.

The Department for Work and Pensions, the Ministry of Justice, the UK Research Councils (RCUK), the Department for Transport and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have collectively spent £1.4 billion on their respective shared services schemes. The expected combined cost was £900 million.