By Jonathan Prew, Managing Director, Serco Local Government BPO
As new strategic partnerships between the public and private sector continue to gather momentum, Jonathan Prew, Managing Director of Serco Local Government BPO, says the changing dynamics of public service delivery are fuelling a new spirit of innovation and creativity.
Keeping every plate spinning as the ground shifts underfoot is a challenge that local authorities will recognise as they pursue sustainable models for continuous service improvement while cutting costs. The practicalities are complex and the fragility of conventional wisdom is becoming increasingly obvious.
Authorities may share a core objective, but each is at a different stage of development with a unique set of circumstances and priorities. Something that many share, however, is how this objective can be a catalyst for service innovation requiring the complementary skills and resources of like-minded partners.
Indeed, evidence is mounting of the success of strategic partnerships between the sectors as truly collaborative ventures give local authorities the capabilities and flexibility to respond effectively to their precise service transformation challenges and opportunities.
Understanding
Setting and delivering against increasingly ambitious targets often requires a huge leap of faith for even the most progressive local authority. But working with the right partner helps to provide the foundations and framework to embrace new challenges with real confidence.
What’s more, such strategic partnerships are focused on the principle of sharing, in terms of both service delivery values and the costs and risks associated with change, thanks to the vision of pioneering local authorities whose relationships with external partners are founded on a clear commitment to drive up service standards by involving and enthusing those who deliver the service as much as those who receive it.
This is a far cry from the old style of service delivery contract – increasingly, in fact, no authority should select a partner that is unwilling to share risks and costs and be flexible as to how those risks will alter over the life of the contract.
Ground-breaking
It’s several years since Glasgow City Council set up a ground-breaking Limited Liability Partnership as part of its ‘Tomorrow’s Council’ strategy, and huge strides have already been achieved in improving working conditions for staff, improving accessibility for all service users and delivering substantial cost savings. Called ACCESS, this ten-year partnership with Serco was one of the first of its kind between a public body and a private sector organisation and is well on plan to deliver savings in excess of £70 million. And by adopting ‘best practices’ from both the public and private sector and re-engineering the council’s supply chain, the dedicated Procurement and Supply Chain team within ACCESS is on course to achieve guaranteed savings 27 per cent higher than originally targeted.
ACCESS is also improving the use, quality and management of the council’s property portfolio featuring over 600 properties. This will see office overheads halved, despite huge improvements to the standard of office accommodation for more than 3500 employees – with modern office space planning, agile working and electronic data and document management to maximise service performance and delivery for the city’s 580,000 residents.
As a result of an overhaul of the council’s property portfolio, the ‘Tomorrow’s Office’ programme has shown that accommodation requirements could be reduced by 65 per cent – delivering annual cost savings of over £6 million. In the city centre alone, the council is now reducing its office accommodation from 19 buildings to just six.
Performance-based
It’s a similar story in Hertfordshire, where well in excess of 1.2 million service users elevate the strategic partnership between the public and private sector onto an even larger stage. Serco’s performance-based shared managed services contract with Hertfordshire County Council started in April 2011 and will transform the council’s internal business processes, significantly develop customer services and achieve guaranteed efficiency savings of at least £25 million. Here, Serco will provide a range of front and back office operations including information, communications and technology services, wider business processes such as finance, payroll and HR as well as frontline services such as customer contact services, facilities management and occupational health.
Adopting a principle of evolution and revolution, this partnership is now introducing an inspirational approach to customer services across many service areas with a central contact centre that is resolving many customer enquiries at the first point of contact. By integrating front, middle and back office functions across web, telephony and face to face channels, with professional staff from a range of disciplines working alongside administration staff, citizens will find it easier and quicker to access their local services.
This level of integration – even in high-value and sensitive customer service areas – is a major step forward that builds on success in other areas; and because the focus is purely on the real needs and outcomes of the service users, the scope for service innovation and improvement is considerable.
Moving on to the next level
Such principles are also an implicit feature of the strategic partnership with Peterborough City Council, which is transforming the council’s existing internal business processes. As Councillor Matthew Lee, Deputy Leader of the City Council, has said: “This new partnership is an important step in delivering better, more efficient services to the residents of Peterborough. Significantly, the experience and expertise of our new partner will enable us to take what we have already achieved on to the next level.”
Such a comment is, I believe, a clear indication of the way the provision of public services will continue to evolve and develop in the years ahead. With like-minded partners that offer complementary skills, resources and capabilities, individual councils do not have to contemplate a leap into the unknown and can move forward more quickly, more decisively and more effectively from a position of reassurance and confidence.
In effect, the right partner will share the risk and investment and help them to deliver what they want to deliver, in clear service improvements at the same time as hard financial savings that together mean unquestionably better value for the taxpayer.
