In December 2004 the Welland Partnership gained support from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister for a £250,000 Capacity Building Grant.
On behalf of the Partners, Harborough District Council were to be the Lead Authority for a Project designed to develop a transferable methodology for the effective integration of a range of services currently undertaken by each Council individually to improve service delivery, customer satisfaction and cost efficiency.
Objectives
The Partners set some objectives for the Project around assessing the levels of service improvements, cost efficiencies and improvements to the customer or citizen that cannot be achieved by operating independently. They also wanted to assess the opportunity for building and maintaining financial and human resource capacity.
To do this they planned to map out and build upon the statement of shared services work carried out by Welland Partnership Authorities to date and undertake a robust evaluation; establish the business case for change, taking into account the financial and human resource implications of integration.
Once done they would develop a fully costed implementation plan, including change management, risk management and human resource management considerations that would lead to a procurement strategy and action plan based upon the chosen route.
The partners agreed that they would also be prepared to examine and test out the effect of involving a partner that was not adjacent to them geographically.
The Partners hoped this methodology would be of value not only to the Welland Partnership Authorities but also to any inter-authority service delivery grouping. This could be done using the franchising concept, where the Welland Partnership Authorities may be willing to support a small team to facilitate similar work in other councils if it could be shown that this would enhance and support the overall capacity of public service authorities.
In relation to the efficiency challenge, what potential barriers did they encounter?
- Risk aversion
- Partnerships
- Staffing issues
- IT systems